A couple of Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes really speak to oil painter Ron Rencher. One of his favorites is this: “Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.”

Rencher currently is in hot pursuit of the beautiful; he’s in the middle of a move to Taos, New Mexico, a place he once lived and still considers his artistic home. During a visit with him in early May, Rencher said he and his wife Carlene were in the thick of moving-related business: renting the U-Haul, closing on the old house and preparing to buy a new one, and ferrying loads of household goods to Taos from Canyon Lake, Texas, where they have been living for the past 17 years. “There is an abundance of inspiration in Taos, and so I am really excited,” he says.

In the midst of the chaos, Rencher finds a few minutes to talk about the life of an artist. It’s a subject he knows well; painting has been his life and his livelihood for going on four decades now. His interest in art goes back even further than that, all the way to his teenage years.

Ron Rencher (Texas)

Son of the West
Oil
25″x30″

“Plein air sourced, this painting is set among the cottonwood trees along the Virgin River in the vicinity of Zion National Park, whose peaks rise up in the distant right. Being a native of Utah, I consider myself a son of the West. It is where my identity and character evolved out of the natural world.”

Ron Rencher (Texas)

The Evolution of Sand
Oil
30″x20″

“The location for this painting is the Lake Powell National Recreation Area in southern Utah. This painting and Son of the West were two of the group of four paintings chosen by my fellow artists as the Best Group of Paintings at the 2015 Maynard Dixon Country Show at the Bingham Gallery in Mt. Carmel, Utah, resulting in the Golden Thunderbird Award, the highest tribute bestowed by my fellow artists.”