Posts by Joe Tougas

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
Read More

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
Read More

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
Read More

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
Read More

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
Read More

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
Read More

‘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
Read More

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.
Read More

Simplicity and Complexity

Simplicity and Complexity

December 11, 2023 | by

Rick Kennington grew up in environments much like those he paints: seemingly endless spaces, mountain backdrops, blue skies, and the steady resolve of cowboys and others whose lives are quietly, solidly entwined with the West. A lifelong resident of Utah, living near the Wasatch Mountains, Kennington’s parents were both from Star Valley, Wyoming, and he spent much of his childhood visiting his grandfather in that area. That’s when the painting began. From his first painting, when he was 18, of his grandfather on a horse, it’s been an ongoing pull toward portraying that life and lifestyle that has kept Kennington
Read More

The Studio of Michael Blessing

The Studio of Michael Blessing

October 12, 2023 | by

Michael Blessing is working on a big project that he expects to complete next year. When it’s done, his evolution as an artist will hit a new level. Actually, it will hit two levels. Currently, it’s still in the blueprint stage—a two-level home studio with a view of the Alaska Mountain Range near Anchorage. By the fall of 2024, Blessing will be creating works in a space where Alaska is on permanent display through picture windows revealing a breathtaking panorama that includes both the mountains and the ocean. Read the full article in the November/December 2023 issue. Sentinel Oil 30″
Read More