Archives for Figurative

Embracing the Challenge

Embracing the Challenge

June 15, 2023 | by

Paul Van Ginkel will tell you he’s an all-in kind of guy. Every time he does something, he challenges himself to do it better than ever before. That kind of tenacity and ambition paid off in early March when Van Ginkel, who lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, learned that he’d been nominated for the prestigious Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Distinguished Artist Award. The winner will be honored at a ceremony in September. Although he’s not a stranger to awards—there have been many—he was particularly pleased that his patrons were so insistent on nominating him to be recognized for his outstanding
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‘The Ball Just Kept Rolling’

‘The Ball Just Kept Rolling’

June 15, 2023 | by

Russell Smith’s original career plan was to become an aeronautical engineer so he could design airplanes. That changed after he took a few art classes during his first year of college. “I realized I didn’t want to design them, I wanted to paint them,” he says. And that’s just what he’s been doing for more than 20 years. His depictions of early aircraft—combined with the people and land of the West—are wonderfully crafted and carry with them a captivating energy, excitement, and perspective. His paintings, fueled by an early love of aviation, have earned him several awards but the real
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A Compelling Medium

A Compelling Medium

June 15, 2023 | by

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
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Looking to the Skies

Looking to the Skies

June 15, 2023 | by

Canadian artist Ross Buckland developed his love of the land while growing up on a farm in Ontario. “I was always looking at the sky or at the colors on the ground,” he says. He’s still looking at the sky and the ground but now he’s sharing what he sees through his paintings of landscapes, wildlife—and airplanes. “Aviation became a passion for me, and so did drawing,” Buckland says. “For summer vacations we would go to visit our grandparents in Calgary. The airplane flight was the most exciting part of it. I wanted the window seat so I could see
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The Adventure Continues

The Adventure Continues

June 15, 2023 | by

Last fall, Lee Alban took a trip to Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Although he and his family had traveled through the Tetons back in the 1970s and had explored some of the National Parks out West in the early 1990s, he hadn’t yet been to Jackson Hole. The purpose of the trip was to participate in the National Oil and Acrylics Painters Society’s Best of America exhibition. It was Alban’s first trip to Jackson Hole, and he was eager to see the city and gather photographic reference materials he could use in future works. But it wasn’t just the quintessential beauty
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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
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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
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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
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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
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‘I’m Inspired by God’s Creation’

‘I’m Inspired by God’s Creation’

March 4, 2023 | by

“I have to paint my vision.” So says Frank Ordaz, whose visions range from portraits and landscapes to cowboys and old trucks. He is so eclectic in his subject matter and style that a gallery owner once told him, “I don’t know where to put you; I don’t know how to sell you.” That gallery owner needn’t have worried because his paintings sell themselves, appealing to a similarly eclectic group of collectors. Simply put, Ordaz’s paintings cannot be labeled—and neither can he. Although he was trained as a fine artist when he was a young boy, Ordaz spent his early
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