Archives for Wildlife

Amazing Life, Amazing Art

October 8, 2026 | by Joe Tougas

From Medical Student to Wildlife Artist: Valerie Gobeil’s Unlikely Journey There are a few key moments that led to wildlife oil painter Valerie Gobeil’s promising career. One of them left her with neck and back injuries and a concussion after a distracted driver T-boned her car. The collision occurred 13 years ago, during Gobeil’s first year of medical school in Arizona, forcing her to take some time off. “I would read one paragraph, and I’d have to re-read it five, six, seven times to try to retain some of it,” she says. “When I was studying basically the equivalent
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The Studio of Andrew Peters

October 8, 2026 | by Mark Wilcox

How Andrew Peters Is Restoring Native Prairie and Wetlands as His Largest Artistic Creation For most artists, 1,000 square inches represents a large canvas. But Andrew Peters is painting his biggest masterpiece on a living canvas of nearly 1 million square feet: approximately 20 acres of land that he’s actively shaping as home to his dream studio. “This is the painting that I will work on for the rest of my life,” he says of the “canvas” he frequently traverses and admires on foot. “The masterpiece of my lifetime will be the ecology and the beauty of a native
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Excellence and Beauty

August 6, 2026 | by Joe Tougas

How Atelier Training Helped Jonathan Noon Transform a Passion for Drawing into a Fine Art Career Named after the French word for studio, atelier schools are where students immerse themselves in an intensive series of training in realism. For months on end, they draw and paint repeatedly, often the same subject—usually still lifes or human models—with a focus on detail. Along with most of the world, Jonathan Noon had some time on his hands during the pandemic, so he decided to seriously explore his interest in drawing and painting. Up to that point in his life, he had set
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The Puzzle is Complete

August 6, 2026 | by Mark Wilcox

How Hannah Harper Turns Years of Outdoor Experiences into Stunning Wildlife and Landscape Paintings Hannah Harper once watched a black bear bound out of the forest while she was parked at a trailhead in Glacier National Park. It playfully romped through a beautiful buffet and stuffed itself with a critical, early spring food source by eating grass and wildflowers and then ambling back into the forest. That experience formed the backbone of a painting Harper created years ago, and she’s now in the planning phases of another painting that will use the same reference photos in a unique way. “I
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The Studio of Walter Matia

August 6, 2026 | by Mary Nelson

Award-Winning Sculptor Walter Matia Combines Artistic Vision with Entrepreneurial Discipline Maryland sculptor, Walter Matia, is a practical and pragmatic businessman; he has to be. “Sculpture is a business; you can’t treat it like a hobby,” he says. “There’s way too much money involved and too many things to keep track of.” Becoming a sculptor was a natural step for Matia. From the time he was 16 until he was 23, he worked at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in Ohio, alongside the exhibit staff. “I also worked with a taxidermist there, Larry Isard, who was also a sculptor,
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The Evolution Continues

August 6, 2026 | by Sara Gilbert Frederick

How Kelly Leahy Radding Turns Birdwatching and Outdoor Exploration into Award-Winning Paintings On a recent May morning, Kelly Leahy Radding sat on the deck of her rural Connecticut home and watched the birds flying by overhead. The 20 acres that she and her husband Greg live on is located half an hour southeast of Hartford and is surrounded by woods that Radding explores almost daily. It’s also on the migratory path of the birds that return to the East Coast each spring. “I sat for two hours, just watching and listening to the birds,” Radding says. “I think I counted
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Ink, Oil, and Graphite

June 9, 2026 | by Vicki Stavig

How Maia Chavez Larkin Transitioned from Illustrator to Acclaimed Western Fine Artist You would think that having parents who are successful artists would naturally set their offspring on a path leading directly to fine art. Not so if that offspring is Maia Chavez Larkin. “I was certain that I would never be an artist, because it seemed like a tough way to make a living,” she says. “I thought it also meant being nervous about finances. It seemed like a hard life and a tough way to make a living. I thought I’d have a real job.” After years of
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Wildlife With a Twist

June 9, 2026 | by Joe Tougas

How Lisa Gleim Transitioned from Portraiture to Wildlife Art Inspired by Montana’s Wilderness About 10 years ago, after painting portraits for more than 20 years, Georgia-based artist Lisa Gleim needed a change. She found what she wanted when she and her oncologist husband Bill Jonas bought a vacation home in Big Sky, Montana. While there, she spent days photographing bears at the Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Center, a sanctuary for bears and wolves that for various reasons wouldn’t survive in the wild, and taking in the mountain scenery. That visit made a profound impression on her and kickstarted a
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The Sculptor and His Village

April 8, 2026 | by Clover Cameron

Inside Dan Ostermiller’s 50-Year Journey as a Master of Wildlife Sculpture Loveland, Colorado-based sculptor Dan Ostermiller is hard at work on a new piece that will be part of a 50th anniversary celebration of his work at Nedra Matteucci Galleries in June. It’s a huge sculpture—nine feet long—and it’s somewhat unusual. “It’s 12 rabbits,” he says. “They’re all interacting with each other—jumping off this wall and running around it and sleeping on it, scratching their ears. All of them doing different things on it. It’s pretty cool.” In the world of wildlife sculpture, Ostermiller’s pieces stand out in a
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The Grandmother of Scratchboard

April 8, 2026 | by Mark Wilcox

Sally Maxwell Blends Art, Mathematics, and Wildlife in Her Distinctive Scratchboard Work Scratchboard is a subtractive medium that Sally Maxwell has moved toward becoming an additive medium as well. The medium consists of etching away black India ink from a white clay subsurface, using fine-tipped tools—one painstaking line at a time. For Maxwell, the process evokes emotions she can’t find in other art forms. “It feels so good to work with it,” she says, adding that her personal satisfaction stems from the way she’s wired—specifically mathematically. Many artists of her caliber came through top-tier art programs in college, but
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Archives for Wildlife

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