“I like to live as much of what I’m going to paint as possible, so I do a wagon train every year,” says Sandpoint, Idaho-based oil painter Julie Jeppsen. She doesn’t mean that she paints a wagon train every year; she means that she organizes and directs an entire real live wagon train—and then she paints it.
“We live out in the wagon, with a team of horses pulling it,” she says. “My kids are all involved in it, and so are my grandkids. It’s an experience I can have with them. Last year, on our wagon trip, we had a moose come into camp, and the sun was setting, and there are all my kids, taking photos and showing them to me, saying, ‘There’s a painting right there.’”
That’s Jeppsen in a nutshell: accomplished, ambitious, visionary, and attentive to detail and authenticity. It also brings together her three great loves: horses, art, and family.
Read the full article in the September/October 2024 issue.
Country Music
Oil
24″ by 18″
Highland Flush
Oil
24″ by 36″
