Archives for 2023 May-June Issue

The Eddie Basha Collection: He Bought What He Loved

The Eddie Basha Collection: He Bought What He Loved

May 4, 2023 | by

The Eddie Basha collection is one of the largest, privately owned collections of contemporary Western American and American Indian art in the world. Housed in the 11,000-square-foot Zelma Basha Salmeri Gallery in Chandler, Arizona, it includes more than 3,000 pieces of art in a variety of mediums and attracts visitors from around the world. That collection had its start in 1971 when Basha made his first acquisition and continued to add to it until he passed away in 2013. He opened the gallery in 1992. Two years later, he doubled the gallery’s size and followed that with a second expansion
Read More

‘The Harder You Work, the Luckier You Get’

‘The Harder You Work, the Luckier You Get’

May 4, 2023 | by

“It’s another day in paradise,” says sculptor and gallery owner Ken Rowe, savoring his view of Sedona, Arizona’s, snowcapped mountains. “We’ve been here 28 years now, and I never tire of it.” A self-described Arizona boy through and through, Rowe was born in Phoenix to an electrical engineer and an amateur painter—a combination Rowe credits as foundational to his art. “Growing up, without even knowing it, I had this wonderful influence of the mechanical aspect of life through my dad’s career and the artistic pursuits from my mother’s side.” Although his mother never made a career of her painting, she
Read More

The Studio of Roseta Santiago

The Studio of Roseta Santiago

May 4, 2023 | by

New Mexico artist Roseta Santiago is a storyteller. She has a seemingly infinite intellectual storehouse of anecdotes and people swirling around in her head that spill out in even the most mundane conversation. The same way that Santiago cultivates emotional connections with people and objects and infuses them into her art, she has also done so in her studio. In January, Santiago was hard at work preparing for a retrospective at the Woolaroc Museum & Wildlife Preserve in Osage County, Oklahoma. One of only 11 artists who will be featured at the show in October, she is thrilled to be
Read More

The Beauty of Batik

The Beauty of Batik

May 4, 2023 | by

Echo Ukrainetz starts each new batik piece with a black and white vintage photo, usually a portrait of a person with an expressive, interesting but not necessarily attractive, face. She sketches the photo, then traces her sketch onto high-grade cotton stretched on a frame and draws in the details of the face. Then Ukrainetz works, sometimes for more than a month, dying and waxing each section—the shirt, the pants, the boots, then the face, and finally the background—until her stretched cotton is as stiff as a piece of cardboard. She freezes it and breaks specific segments of wax before rubbing
Read More

Art and Authenticity

Art and Authenticity

May 4, 2023 | by

In the action, beauty, frailty, or majesty, Jim Bortz infuses into his oil paintings a quality that results in sunlight landing perfectly, flowing river waters the viewer can almost hear, and animals that are more than reproductions. That quality stems from his immersion into the wild outside his home in Cody, Wyoming. Bortz spends countless hours hunting, hiking, and taking photos that provide critical references for his work. “I spend a ton of time in the field,” he says. “I study the animals I put in my paintings. I want to know their biology; I want to know their habits,
Read More

Cowboy Storyteller

Cowboy Storyteller

May 4, 2023 | by

“When I was 14 or 15, my school offered an on-location drawing class in the summer,” says Arizona-based artist Steve Atkinson. “I’d get up early in the morning and go down to Yellow Creek with my little sketch pad and transistor radio, and I can remember just thinking to myself, ‘If I could do this for a living, it would be Heaven,'” he recalls of that class. If the teenage Atkinson could see himself now, he would likely agree that his life has been Heaven. His paintings have earned him many honors, the latest being the People’s Choice Award at
Read More

The Challenge of Watercolors

The Challenge of Watercolors

May 4, 2023 | by

Joel R. Johnson candidly admits that painting with watercolors is a constant challenge. “Transparent watercolor is so different from all the other mediums,” he says. “At first, I was trying to paint in watercolors the way I did in oils, and that just didn’t work. It took me years to understand the technique of painting in watercolor and, especially, the properties of the paint itself.” Understanding the nuances of watercolors is critical to Johnson as he works. “The quality I am after in my paintings is that they glow, so I had to learn the differences between transparent, staining, or
Read More

The Magic Continues

The Magic Continues

May 4, 2023 | by

Most people probably know Arturo Chávez as an award-winning painter who masterfully captures the colors and shapes of Western landscapes. But there is more to this talented man—so much more. He is also a classical guitarist, a former pilot, a championship tango dancer, and a licensed commercial drone flyer. It is his love of painting, however, that drives him. “I’ve been pushing paint for 40 years,” Chávez says. “My landscapes come from my heart. It’s my creativity. I’ve created more than 6,000 paintings. There’s a chain from my ankle to my easel.” Of course, he’s speaking metaphorically; he is as
Read More