Archives for Pastel

Full Steam Ahead

During the past six months, J.R. Hess has been living his dream life. He moved to Colorado with his wife Molly and their two teenage sons, Cass and River, he’s got studio space in his new home in Loveland, and his photorealistic wildlife drawings hang in galleries in Montana, New Mexico, and Wyoming. “I’ve been waiting my whole life to get to this point,” Hess says. “I am so thankful, so happy to be doing what I’m doing. I’m still new at this but I know that I’m so fortunate to be able to do what I love to do.”
Read More

A Magnificent Obsession

When Heidi Marshall was a young girl, she said to her mother, “Show me something I haven’t seen before.” Her mother replied, “Oh, my—another artist!” In recalling that moment, Marshall says, “I come from a family of artists, and she recognized what we were like.” Marshall’s father, William Amenda, was chief editorial portrait and courtroom illustrator for “The Detroit News” and also painted and sculpted in his spare time. Her paternal grandfather was an artist in Germany who painted religious scenes in churches. And her mother was a writer and fine arts appraiser. Read the full article in the September/October
Read More

A Compelling Medium

With its mix of pigments and powders, pastel preceded all other mediums. The proof is on the walls of caves painted with mineral oxide pigments. Pastel is the only medium for painter and mountaineer Nori Thorne, a longtime collaborator with nature and paint. From the gritty, finger-staining application to its flexibility and even its fragility, pastel is the mode of choice for Thorne, who finds herself celebrated in a genre often associated with large-format oils or bold acrylics. “We’re really the red-headed step-children of the art world,” she says. “But pastel has been around since we were humans. That’s what’s
Read More

Wandering the Colorado Plateau

Lorenzo Chavez is an admired landscape painter living in Parker, Colorado. A native of New Mexico, he fell in love with Colorado when he studied at the Colorado Institute of Art in 1983, graduating with honors. He started working as a commercial artist out of school, then turned to fine art in his mid-20’s and has been doing that ever since. This past April, Gallery East at the University of Utah Eastern in Price, Utah hosted an exhibition titled “Wandering the Colorado Plateau,” featuring 45 works from artist Lorenzo Chavez. Each piece was inspired by or painted on location in
Read More

Flying Free

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

Patterns of Light

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
Read More

‘This is My Life’

Sculptor Chris Hunt has dislocated each of his shoulders at least four times and broken both clavicles, both scapulae, and a couple of ribs. The Texas-born artist and former Air Force senior airman has always jumped feet first into new things, be it riding in rodeos or introducing a new medium to his repertoire. “‘No fear’ was my mantra, and still is to this day,” he says. Hunt grew up in Damon, Texas, on a ranch on the Brazos River, where he was raised by his father Maurice and had no problem amusing himself by drawing, fishing, hunting, and riding
Read More

A Spiritual Connection

It’s a Monday morning in late May, and Linda Mutti is feeling lucky. “I am gonna paint today,” she announces jubilantly. “And then I’m doing a mentoring class, and then I’m going to hang with my two little rescue dogs. They’re very yappy, but I adore them. They like to come hang out in the studio.” If Mutti’s day doesn’t sound sufficiently idyllic, consider this: The studio in question is on the second floor of her home in Santa Barbara, California, with a panoramic view of the Santa Ynez Mountains. If she feels like painting outside instead of in the
Read More

Endless Inspiration

Denise LaRue Mahlke doesn’t have to go far to find inspiration for her paintings. She simply has to step outside and look up—or out. “I find great inspiration in the beauty of big, cloud-filled skies and wide-open places, but I am also drawn to quiet, intimate scenes that require a closer look,” she says. “Subtleties in nature excite me, particularly the exquisite light and atmosphere found early or late in the day.” Mahlke paints the beauty she sees in and around her home in Whitehouse, Texas, as well as other places in the West, using pastels as she does so.
Read More

Looking For Attitudes

The two weeks that Trish Stevenson spent at her grandparent’s log cabin in western North Dakota each summer as a child were the best part of her year. She and her five siblings loved how different it was from their home outside Denver, Colorado. They even loved the outhouse. “It was like camping for two weeks,” she says. “It was the highlight of the year for us.” But what Stevenson remembers most is her grandfather. She remembers how tall and lanky he was, how he sat with his legs crossed in a certain way, how he rolled cigarettes with Bull
Read More