Archives for Oil

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.’
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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
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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
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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
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Pushing the Color

Pushing the Color

November 3, 2022 | by

“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
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Flying Free

Flying Free

November 3, 2022 | by

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
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‘I Paint What Excites Me’

‘I Paint What Excites Me’

November 3, 2022 | by

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
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Patterns of Light

Patterns of Light

November 3, 2022 | by

On a hot July day in Livingston, Montana, landscape artist Aaron Schuerr took a much needed break. Work during the past month and a half—well, really the past year—had found him scrambling to keep up with his projects. A major one was a painting for the grand opening of the Illume Gallery West in Phillipsburg, Montana. Schuerr did, however, make time to join other grand opening artists in painting at the ranch that gallery owners, Jane Lundgren and her husband Mark, own. Schuerr does what he loves and loves what he does. But there’s more to the man than creating
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Capturing the Cowboy Culture

Capturing the Cowboy Culture

November 3, 2022 | by

It’s not often you find common qualities with oil painting and bull riding—but you do when you meet Western painter Brandon Bailey. “It’s a lot of self-doubt and fear,” he says of bull riding. “There’s no one there to make you get on that bull. With art, it’s the same type of thing, whether you’re sitting at the canvas or walking into a gallery; it’s the same type of feelings and the same type of emotions you come across.” In the decade-plus since he left rodeo riding, Bailey has made a full-time living working as an artist, with things progressing
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‘Light is Everything’

‘Light is Everything’

November 3, 2022 | by

When Sue Krzyston and her husband Mike moved into their new house in Phoenix, Arizona, the bare walls were begging to be filled. Having taken a six-month painting class, and at Mike’s suggestion that she replace the starkness of those walls with her own paintings, Krzyston got to work. Soon their new home was filled with colorful creations. And so it began. Those paintings led to a passionate pursuit of painting, of creating vibrant still lifes that, combined with her love of Native American artifacts, have become a driving force in Krzyston’s life. Her paintings quickly attracted the attention and
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