Archives for Wildlife

Ink, Oil, and Graphite

June 9, 2026 | by Vicki Stavig

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 working as an illustrator, four years ago Larkin became what she
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Wildlife With a Twist

June 9, 2026 | by Joe Tougas

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 change in her subject matter. “I was gobsmacked, being right there, not far
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The Sculptor and His Village

April 8, 2026 | by Clover Cameron

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 few key ways, including their sheer size and the virtuosity of
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The Grandmother of Scratchboard

April 8, 2026 | by Mark Wilcox

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 Maxwell dropped out of Monmouth College in the early 1960s after an
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The Studio of Krystii Melaine

February 4, 2026 | by Sara Gilbert Frederick

When Krystii Melaine and her husband Michael moved from Australia to the United States 15 years ago, they settled in Spokane, Washington. They had a large, lovely house with a tree-filled backyard that sloped down to a river. They regularly saw moose, eagles, coyotes, porcupines, owls, and many other birds from their windows. “It was fabulous,” she says. Melaine loved that house, but Michael was concerned about keeping it up as they got older. So, he dangled the one thing he knew would convince his wife to move: her dream studio. In Spokane, Melaine’s studio was in the basement
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Reflecting the Magic of Light

February 4, 2026 | by Madeline Cisneros

When Michelle Kondos was a senior at Bennington College in Vermont, her advisor told her something no aspiring artist ever wants to hear. “I had a bad experience toward the end of college with my main advisor there, who told me that I had zero talent and no hope of ever earning a living as an artist,” Kondos says. “When I left school, I was so discouraged by this that I didn’t paint for about four years.” Kondos’ academic career was full of ups and downs. The curriculum at Bennington College focused on abstract art, leaving her unsatisfied, because
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Communicating Without Color

February 4, 2026 | by Mary Nelson

California artist Ray Brown says that, if he could have chosen his dream job after graduating college, it would have been working as a children’s book illustrator or science fiction fantasy book cover illustrator. That wasn’t the path he took but, when you look at his charcoal drawings, you can see his love for illustration and for the natural world. Brown’s highly rendered images seem ready to leave the canvas for the world beyond. Each creature he draws is alive with personality and presence; it is not merely a one-dimensional depiction. Art didn’t hold much interest for Brown as
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Renaissance Western Art

October 8, 2025 | by Mary Nelson

You might describe Colorado artists Olga and Aleksey Ivanov as contemporary Western art pioneers. Why? Because their partnership, medium, and technique stand out among Western artists. Their creativity is formed by intuition and collaboration—they paint together on the same canvas—storytelling, whimsy, symbolism, and a Renaissance art technique. Their harmonious paintings could be called the artistic equivalent of perfect pitch. “We are using one of the oldest techniques,” Olga says. “We are modern artists trying to connect the old medium to the modern vision of the West.” Vivid colors are the hallmark of the couple’s art—the result of using the
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Chasing the Top Spot

October 8, 2025 | by Sara Gilbert Frederick

Every fall, Rebekah Knight’s mind is on the Federal Duck Stamp Contest. She’s entered the annual competition for the past 16 years—every year since she turned 18. She also participated in the Federal Junior Duck Stamp Contest for five years before that, winning the competition the third time she entered, when she was 15. That experience gave Knight the confidence to pursue art as something more than a hobby and helped to launch her career as an artist. “I had always known that I wanted to do art and that I had a talent for it, but I also
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The Studio of Dustin Van Wechel

August 7, 2025 | by Mark Wilcox

Before wildlife artist Dustin Van Wechel built his current studio, he worked at an easel standing alone in the corner of a “disturbingly sparse” room in his Arizona home. At the time, fellow artist Krystii Melaine stopped in for a visit and was excited to see the studio of an artist she admired. He tried to warn her that it was nothing to get excited about, but his words fell on deaf ears. “My studio hit her like a death in the family,” Van Wechel says, and jokingly adds that he thinks that his reputation diminished considerably in Melaine’s
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Archives for Wildlife

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