Archives for Oil

The Cycle of Life

January 5, 2023 | by Vicki Stavig

“It’s been a busy 12 years.” That’s how Elizabeth Robbins describes her life since the last time we visited with her. Since then, she’s continued to create masterful paintings that find homes with enthusiastic and appreciative collectors. She’s also added to her repertoire, has started a successful online instructional program and a production company, and has moved to Ogden, Utah. She made that move in late 2013, six years after her husband Jim Pruitt passed away unexpectedly from a heart attack while mowing the lawn at their home in Kansas. “We had a beautiful marriage,” she says. “He was the
Read More

The Studio of Logan Maxwell Hagege

January 5, 2023 | by Vicki Stavig

Working in his studio—a 2,000-square-foot space located about 100 feet from his home in Ojai, California, Logan Maxwell Hagege creates award-winning paintings that vibrate with color. Through his use of limited detail, he invites viewers to interact with his images, to become actively engaged as they fill in spaces that he has purposely left unfilled. “I’m trying to see how little I can put in and still get the point across,” Hagege says. “My paintings are interactive; viewers use their imaginations. They play a role in how the painting is seen.” Hagege was born and raised in California and studied
Read More

New Man, New Artist

January 5, 2023 | by Joe Tougas

With colors that swerve up, literally, from the canvas in thick swooshes and splatches of oil paints, Mateo Romero knows full well his paintings aren’t everyone’s cup of gallery cappucino. “I had a dealer in Arizona, and the person who worked in the gallery told me, ‘I think you’re wasting a lot of paint,'” Romero recalls with a slight laugh. For the past six years, the Santa Fe, New Mexico, artist has been working in a unique method of portraying Southwestern landscapes and forms. His primary tools are oils, applied thickly on canvas with palette knives rather than brushes. The
Read More

Renaissance Man of the West

January 5, 2023 | by Clover Cameron

Western artist Charles Dayton clearly recalls the exact moment art went from part-time hobby to potential vocation. “[Utah landscape painter] Karl Thomas came over to my house,” he says, referring to an event that took place more than 20 years ago. “He’d found out that I was doing some painting—just starting, just some basic things. “I brought out a couple pieces to show him what I was working on—I think it was a mule deer and something else—and he just got kind of quiet. I thought, ‘He’s figuring out how to let me know I shouldn’t quit my day job.’
Read More

Inspiring and Uplifting

January 5, 2023 | by Myrna Zanetell

Echoing the wisdom in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” “To thine own self be true,” Arizona-based painter Mitch Baird emphasizes, “As an artist, I don’t want to be pigeonholed. I simply want to be open and free to paint whatever I see—landscapes, figurative works, still life or whatever else motivates me.” He says, “Paintings are a communication between artist and viewer, and great artistic communication depends on solid draftsmanship, design, and vision. What I strive for in each painting is to create a positive visual statement, and hope that the viewer will experience what I see and be inspired, uplifted, and moved in
Read More

A Dream Realized

January 5, 2023 | by Mary Nelson

Dial back 60 years; it’s 1962, and 6-year old Patricia McGeeney is settling into a small studio at the back of Mittel’s Art Supply Store in Santa Monica, California. She is about to take the first steps toward her dream of becoming an artist. Already a prolific drawer of horses, McGeeney has impressed her mother with her artistic skills, so much so that she has signed her daughter up for art lessons in the store’s studio. “The high ceilings, dingy atmosphere, and smell of turpentine had a profound effect on me,” McGeeney says. “I never wanted to do anything else
Read More

Poignant Moments

November 3, 2022 | by Brandon Rosas

Colorado-based low relief sculptor J.D. (Jeremiah) Welsh spent much of the past year working in secret. The award-winning member of the National Sculpture Society (NSS) is no stranger to producing complex works on tight deadlines, but he poured many months and 23 years’ worth of skill into one special, small object: the Brookgreen Medal. “I honestly never thought I’d have the chance to do it,” Welsh says of the medal, which honors the prestigious Brookgreen Gardens sculpture garden in South Carolina and is presented to artists who ear the Anna Huntington Hyatt Award at the NSS’ annual awards exhibition. It
Read More

Pushing the Color

November 3, 2022 | by Clover Neiberg

“I do a couple of shows a year,” says New Mexico-based oil painter Mejo Okon. “The rest of the time, I’m just trying to do cool stuff.” That statement is not a hollow boast. Okon has just wrapped up a courtroom sketching gig for a high-profile trial in Colorado and is now back home in Albuquerque painting. She recently dabbled in acting as well, playing a courtroom sketch artist in the upcoming “Coyote vs. Acme,” an animated/live action movie. “Today I’m working on colorizing some of my seventy-plus drawings from the trial,” Okon says, going on to offer some background
Read More

Flying Free

November 3, 2022 | by Natasha Isenhour

I was given a guitar when I was 5; it was my first creative outlet. As I got older, I would take my guitar into the acres of woods and creeks in my backyard, where I was transported to a place free of the cares I thought I had as a 13-year-old. When I vanished into the woods, emerging hours later, I felt like I had gotten to fly free for a while. Today, a couple of hours are hard to come by, and when I have it, there is not enough time to reset…to fly free. Quiet places—I’m seduced
Read More

‘I Paint What Excites Me’

November 3, 2022 | by Sara Gilbert Frederick

Getting to the Prix de West International Art Exhibition last June wasn’t easy for Ron Kingswood. His home near Sparta, Ontario, is almost 1,150 miles from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma—and travel between Canada and the United States had become more challenging since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. But it was worth the trip for Kingswood and his wife Linda. His painting, A Morning Walk, earned the Major General and Mrs. Don D. Pittman Wildlife Award for exceptional artistic merit for a wildlife painting or sculpture at the show. “I was
Read More