Posts by Clover Cameron

Plein Air Ambassador

Plein Air Ambassador

April 7, 2025 | by

Colorado Springs-based oil painter Kathleen Hudson’s hands are full. She has a thriving art career with a shelf of awards and a loyal following of collectors to show for it. She’s a mother of four children and takes joy in introducing them to the natural wonders that inspire her work. She’s also an avid traveler, continually on the lookout for new seas, skies, and mountains to depict in her epic landscape paintings. Hudson’s love for exploration is woven into both her personal life and her artistic vision. In college, she led backpacking trips through the White Mountains of New Hampshire,
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A Long and Winding Road

A Long and Winding Road

February 7, 2025 | by

“I’ve probably had a different journey to art than most artists,” says oil painter Lauri Ketchum, in what is actually a monumental understatement. “As a kid, I liked art and had an artistic brother, but I played basketball. I had nothing to do with art, didn’t pursue it whatsoever.” Ketchum’s decidedly uncreative path continued during her college years. “In college I thought, ‘I’ve got to do something that leads to a good job,’ so I went into accounting, which I always hated but which offered good career options,” she says. Three years after earning a degree in accounting from Oklahoma
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His Art Speaks for Itself

His Art Speaks for Itself

December 13, 2024 | by

Duke Beardsley doesn’t really have a name for what he creates. “People say things like the new West, contemporary West, all these things,” he says, while declining to offer his own alternative labels. “I never really think about what to call it.” Instead, Beardsley lets his art speak for itself—and it does, in repeating motifs, pop-art-reminiscent stylings and palettes, and other attributes that defy the conventions and expectations that surround Western art. As his eye-catching pieces find homes in ever-increasing shows and collections, he continues to push the boundaries. A few months ago, Beardsley was in his studio in Denver,
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A New Focus

A New Focus

October 9, 2024 | by

Many artists, when asked how they got started, will cite a parent or teacher who encouraged them, an artist they admired—someone who guided them to their vocation. For Western oil painter Jason Lee Tako, all of these influences played a role, and he is generous in giving credit to everyone who supported him on his journey. But, when he recounts his foundations, it’s clear that his first and best inspiration was nature itself and the simple act of sketching what he saw in the woods. “Growing up in rural Minnesota, I would get up at five in the morning and
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Born to Be an Artist

Born to Be an Artist

August 8, 2024 | by

“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
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A Testimony to Her Art and Her Story

A Testimony to Her Art and Her Story

June 6, 2024 | by

Kathryn Merrill has a lot going on right now, in both her life and her art. The accomplished Oklahoma artist, who brings ranch scenes to vivid life with colored pencils and oil paints, is in a particularly vivid period of her own existence. During the past year, she married Sid, who works in the oil and gas industry, and became a stepmother to his two children. “I’ve had a huge life change,” she says. “We have four children between us. We probably moved pretty fast [on marriage] because we just felt like we had to have things in place to
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Cowboy Storyteller

Cowboy Storyteller

April 10, 2024 | by

“I need a wife,” laments accomplished New Mexico oil painter JaNeil Anderson. She is mostly joking; she has been happily married to her husband Walt for many years, working side by side with him on their cattle ranch beside the Gila River. But, as she notes, it’s not uncommon for the wives of male artists to take on much of the ancillary work that surrounds making and selling art: marketing, framing, accounting, and other supportive and administrative tasks. “My men artist friends all have wives,” Anderson says. “The wife does all the show entries and all the paperwork; the men
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It’s Never Too Late

It’s Never Too Late

February 8, 2024 | by

Arkansas oil painter Brenda Morgan’s artistic life currently is a tale of two buffalo—or maybe three. “It’s a long, sad story,” she says with a sigh. “The painting I’m working on is actually a replacement for the Woolaroc/Women Artists of the West Invitational Exhibition in May. I had two buffalo that were going to be in it but now I’m basically repainting one of them, painting the same painting. I varnished it, the same way I varnish all my paintings; I’ve used the same varnish for years. I don’t know what happened.” The varnish, Morgan says, got “a little weird.”
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The Studio of Gladys Roldan-de-Moras

The Studio of Gladys Roldan-de-Moras

December 11, 2023 | by

Magic can occur anywhere. Take, for instance, a busy street in San Antonio, Texas, with five lanes of traffic rushing past a bustling neighborhood of restaurants, doctors’ offices, and an upscale grocery store—where the businesses give way to residential blocks with a sleek, white, modern house that sits behind a cinderblock wall. Unlike the surrounding houses, this one doesn’t sit neatly parallel to the street; it’s at a noticeable slant, facing squarely north. To step through the gates and into the foyer is to step into another world. The rear wall, composed of 15 five-by-seven-foot windowpanes, stretches up, embracing the
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Striking Gold

Striking Gold

October 12, 2023 | by

Harper Henry sees gold in everyday things, both figuratively and literally. Her stylized and visually rich depictions of animals and other Western subjects, some of them set against backdrops that incorporate materials such as gold leaf, represent the creative product of someone who is continually collecting and sifting through the things of day-to-day life, as she searches for a telltale glint of something precious. She’s always on the hunt for the proverbial flash in the pan—an expression that had its origin during the Gold Rush, a formative period in the very landscapes that inspire her art. “When an artist is
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