04 Sep Artist Spotlights: Reen Axtell

Reen Axtell aims to “explore the Old West in a new, contemporary way” through vibrantly toned mixed-media pieces that combine transfers of archival photos and other images; patterns and shapes she applies with the aid of tools and objects as diverse as drafting compasses and inverted yogurt containers; and lively brushwork. The result, she says, offers “a different twist on how the world thinks of or sees the West.”

Growing up in Broomfield, Colorado, not far from her current home in the Denver suburb of Westminster, Axtell always had a knack for art. During her high-school years, her parents fostered that talent with private lessons from a professional painter. At Colorado State University in Fort Collins, she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts with an emphasis on graphic design. Axtell established a successful four-decade-long career in that field, working as a graphic designer, art director, and creative director with a wide range of local and national clients.

Sister Suffragette | Acrylic and Mixed Media on Cradled Board | 26 x 26 inches

About a decade ago, “having always secretly wanted to see if I could really become a fine artist,” she says, Axtell retired from the advertising world and began taking classes — oil painting, pastels, watercolors, and photography — to refresh her skills. Finally, she took a workshop from Montana-based mixed-media artist Amy Brakeman Livezey that helped her “combine my graphic design and fine art skills, and everything just kind of came together.”

That fortuitous coalescence ultimately led to a piece by Axtell being selected by independent curator (and WA&A contributor) Rose Fredrick for a late-2022 show entitled Transcending the West, at Artworks Center for Contemporary Art in Loveland, Colorado, “and things kind of took off from there.” She’s gone on to participate in nine shows since then, with more on the near horizon.

Postcards from Home | Acrylic and Mixed Media on Cradled Board | 25.5 x 19.5 inches

Meanwhile, Axtell has achieved a creative technical process to produce her multilayered images. In her recent Sister Suffragette, for example, she began by applying an acrylic underpainting of overlapping “crazy colors and shapes” to a wooden cradled board before she “literally took a sander to it and sanded off spots, so the different layers of paint show through.” Next, she laid down a transparent photo transfer of a cowgirl she found online from the archives of the Denver Public Library, along with another image of an old sheet music cover she found from another source. “Then, I applied more paint to it, along with some collage, like a cutout from vintage wallpaper that became the cowgirl’s shirt.” A painted landscape in pastel hues, featuring grazing cattle and arranged colorful circles, completes the engaging composition that Axtell hopes will pleasingly provoke viewers’ minds. “In my head, she had her own ranch and was an independent woman,” the artist muses. “Did she think about women’s suffrage? I’m putting a twist on our contrived collective notion of what the Old West was all about.”

Axtell’s artwork appears in the Rose Fredrick Project Space at Gallery 1261 in Denver, Colorado, where she’ll participate in Icons for a New West throughout January 2026.

Based in Marin County, California, Norman Kolpas is the author of more than 40 books and hundreds of articles. He also teaches nonfiction writing in The Writers’ Program at UCLA Extension.