Posts by Joe Tougas

The Beauty of Birds

The Beauty of Birds

August 7, 2025 | by

  As long as there are birds in the skies, Bill Rice will sculpt them. That’s essentially the work ethic, the focus, and the passion with which he has been operating for more than 40 years as an artist who specializes in avian wood carvings. The winner of several awards, including the 2024 People’s Choice Award at the Adirondack Experience Museum in Blue Mountain, New York, Rice’s home is in an area of Connecticut where he can walk outside and see different types of birds every day. Summer walks with his wife, photographer Brooke Rice, present endless subject matter. “This
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Art and Conservation

Art and Conservation

June 5, 2025 | by

For 20 years, Anne Peyton was immersed in professional car racing. She had a fast and furious career shooting photos and painting race cars for several automotive magazines, ultimately working for several hot rod publications as photographer, painter, and art director while living in California. Working for publications that included Motor Trend and Road & Track, Peyton’s artwork was considered top-tier in the racing industry, praised by the likes of Automobile magazine as one of the best racing painters in the nation. That was all before the year 2000, which is when her art changed—drastically. Read the full article in
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A Moment of Movement

A Moment of Movement

April 7, 2025 | by

For three summers in the 1980s, Ott Jones worked as a fishing guide at the Rainbow King Lodge in Lake Iliamna on the Alaskan Peninsula. He led fishing excursions during the days and worked on his art at night. “If I was stationed at the lodge I’d sculpt at the lodge; if I was living in the bush I’d sculpt at camp by candlelight,” he says. It was one of the last jobs he had before becoming a full-time artist. During those three years, Jones lived in Castle Rock, Colorado, where he was under the artistic mentorship of accomplished Colorado
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A Sense of Intimacy

A Sense of Intimacy

February 7, 2025 | by

Since she started exhibiting her work 15 years ago, Naomi Shachar’s emotive oil paintings of Western scenes and personalities have been celebrated and honored in competitions and exhibitions across the country. But, when she was just starting out as an artist, she aimed to please only one critic: her mother, Esther Katz. Seeking her mother’s input wasn’t solely about familiarity or honesty, but more about the respect she had for her mother’s appreciation of good art—her eye for it, her sensibilities. “She had a keen eye for art and could discern quality workmanship of form and color,” says Shachar, who
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Putting Scratchboard on the Map

Putting Scratchboard on the Map

December 13, 2024 | by

Like most people in their 20s, Colorado wildlife artist Nelson Tucker spent many of those years carving out his own identity. Today, carving is vital to his art. “I’m going to stick with scratchboard for a while,” he says. “I’ve always had a love for black and white and love the different values and shapes that you can get out of it.” Though he also does pen-and-ink drawings, as well as pencil-on-paper, Tucker’s passion is for scratchboard. Tucker discovered scratchboard art when he was 10 and fell in love with the process of carving into an inked, black surface to
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A Walk on the Wild Side

A Walk on the Wild Side

October 9, 2024 | by

The influence of one artist on another can be gradual, something that develops and reveals itself over years. In the case of Kathryn Ashcroft, it happened much more abruptly. That came about in 2015, when David Koch, a painter living in Utah, asked her to help him with a mural project that was going to be displayed at a church building in Montreal, Canada. During the 10 years before she got that request, Ashcroft was creating realistic oil paintings of wildlife that were exercises in precision, with every hair and feather in place. Koch wanted her to paint some animals
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The Power of Paint

The Power of Paint

August 8, 2024 | by

Before Brad Teare was a professional illustrator, before he was an abstract artist, and before he became the revered Western landscape painter he is today, he was the drummer in a rock band that had one particular revelatory night. Gigging in and around Oklahoma and Kansas with a lot of original music in their repertoire, the band, Frostfire, was playing one of its own songs in a rowdy, rough, and noisy bar. As their song continued, the noisy patrons grew less so, paying more attention to the band. When the song ended, the house erupted in applause. While most of
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The Studio of Joseph McGurl

The Studio of Joseph McGurl

June 6, 2024 | by

Just off Upper Cape Cod, Massachusetts, is a small stretch of land called Amrita Island, where Joseph McGurl has lived for almost 30 years. It’s also where he has his studio and paints landscapes of both the East Coast and the West Coast. That stretch of land has a history as colorful as McGurl’s paintings. In 1867, British immigrant Thomas Baxendale and his wife Esther purchased the land and built a mansion and several “cottages.” Those structures housed visiting scholars from Harvard University, who would present seminars on world peace, children’s issues, animal welfare, and other concerning topics. Today the
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‘I Like Variety’

‘I Like Variety’

April 10, 2024 | by

Dana Lombardo has a 9 to 5 job, but it doesn’t take her far from her art projects. Both, in fact, are usually in the same room. Lombardo is a contract specialist for a hospital and lives in Grand Lake, at the foothills of the Ozark Mountains in the northeast corner of Oklahoma. Since the pandemic, she’s been able to work from home, setting up her office in her art studio. “It’s great because I can sit across the room and stare at [one of my paintings], and say it needs this or it needs that,” Lombardo says. “I can
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Talent and Tradition

Talent and Tradition

February 8, 2024 | by

Ed Natiya’s Indigenous and Native American sculptures and monuments have earned him a reputation as one of the best sculptors of his kind. In 2016, for instance, he won the top prize in sculpture at the Southwestern Association for Indian Art (SWAIA) Indian Market—the largest Native American art show in the world, attended by 100,000 at its annual gathering in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In March, he’ll have one of his larger-than-life monuments on display at the Briscoe Western Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas. The Briscoe doesn’t ordinarily take large pieces but, in Natiya’s case, it made an exception.
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