Archives for Oil

The Studio of Mark Maggiori

The Studio of Mark Maggiori

March 3, 2023 | by

During the past two years, Mark Maggiori has found himself setting up his studio in two different garages. One is the studio of his dreams, located in Taos, New Mexico, and renovated to meet his exact specifications. The other is a more temporary arrangement, with his workspace nestled into a garage in Los Angeles, California. While both have been productive places for Maggiori to work on paintings for his upcoming one-man show at Legacy Gallery, it’s the Taos studio he wants to talk about. He, his wife Petecia, and his daughter Wilderness moved to Taos in 2020. They had found
Read More

‘A Renaissance Woman’

‘A Renaissance Woman’

March 3, 2023 | by

Laurie Lee’s art career took root while she and her husband Bryan lived for more than 45 years in Frannie, Wyoming, a small town—population 150—on the Montana border. They raised three children there, while also running the family’s natural gas business. Today, she and Bryan live in Powell, Montana, not far from Frannie. Lee has not moved far geographically but, artistically, she has come a long way as she creates paintings that tell stories, ask questions, and are beautifully crafted. A solid career in oil paintings that depict a range of visual moods—from pensive portraits to moody nightscapes to vivid
Read More

Glory of the Skies

Glory of the Skies

March 3, 2023 | by

Two days after Thanksgiving 2022, Arizona artist Linda Glover Gooch was up to her neck in details: finishing a large commission for a local patron, starting another large commission, preparing her online classes, and managing her Black Friday sale. “It’s been such a whirlwind, I just haven’t had time to stop and think,” she says. “But it’s a good kind of busy.” Gooch took time to reflect on the many changes in her life and art, and she’s thankful for all of it—the good and the not so good. Her art career started with an epiphany when she was 13
Read More

The Cycle of Life

The Cycle of Life

January 5, 2023 | by

“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

The Studio of Logan Maxwell Hagege

January 5, 2023 | by

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

New Man, New Artist

January 5, 2023 | by

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

Renaissance Man of the West

January 5, 2023 | by

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

Inspiring and Uplifting

January 5, 2023 | by

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

A Dream Realized

January 5, 2023 | by

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

Poignant Moments

November 3, 2022 | by

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