Archives for Wildlife

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.”
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It’s Never Too Late

Arkansas oil painter Brenda Morgan’s artistic life currently is a tale of two buffalo—or maybe three. “It’s a long, sad story,” she says with a sigh. “The painting I’m working on is actually a replacement for the Woolaroc/Women Artists of the West Invitational Exhibition in May. I had two buffalo that were going to be in it but now I’m basically repainting one of them, painting the same painting. I varnished it, the same way I varnish all my paintings; I’ve used the same varnish for years. I don’t know what happened.” The varnish, Morgan says, got “a little weird.”
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Blazing His Own Trail

During his 40-plus years as a photographer, David Yarrow has been held at gunpoint, chased by a hippopotamus, and suffered hypothermia when his raft capsized in the Arctic Ocean. No matter what he encounters in the field, however, it is the art world that keeps him up at night. “My biggest fear is to bore people,” he says. Yarrow’s life has been anything but boring. Born in 1966 in Glasgow, Scotland, his childhood love of sports led him to pick up a camera when he was a teenager. He learned his craft on the job while photographing local sporting matches
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The Road to Western Wildlife

Carol Lundeen’s love affair with animals of the West began in the 1970s. During a family trip to the Black Hills in South Dakota, she was fascinated by the bison and herds of pronghorn she saw there. “Everywhere you’d look, you could see herds of pronghorn running over the land,” she says. “I was so impressed with their beauty.” It would take many years for art and the fascination with Western wildlife to combine and become a focus for Lundeen. But, here she is today—enthusiastically capturing in oils the animals that made such an impression on her when she was
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Peaceful, Spiritual Paintings

In November, Jane Hunt expects to move into her “dream studio” in her family’s home outside of Boulder, Colorado. Building it has been a three-year process, and she’s more than excited to leave behind the small, temporary space she’s been using. It isn’t just the open floor plan and the additional space for new, larger easels that Hunt is anticipating. “The thing I’m most excited about is the view,” she says. “The studio is on the very top of my house, which is on the very top of a mountain so the view is just amazing. It’s a vista as
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Striking Gold

Harper Henry sees gold in everyday things, both figuratively and literally. Her stylized and visually rich depictions of animals and other Western subjects, some of them set against backdrops that incorporate materials such as gold leaf, represent the creative product of someone who is continually collecting and sifting through the things of day-to-day life, as she searches for a telltale glint of something precious. She’s always on the hunt for the proverbial flash in the pan—an expression that had its origin during the Gold Rush, a formative period in the very landscapes that inspire her art. “When an artist is
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‘I Have to Explore’

Wildlife sculptor Tim Cherry is constantly finding new ways to delight the eye. “I’ve kind of reinvented myself in the last three years,” says the artist, whose lyrical interpretations of animals have earned him many honors and a devoted following during his 35-year career. “The work I’m doing now is a little more contemporary, a little brighter in color than my past work, and I’m incorporating a natural sandstone from Colorado’s Front Range into my bases more often. I’m very excited about the results I’m getting.” A natural evolution of Cherry’s trademark style, this change was not born out of
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Creating A Legacy

Some people follow sports teams, some follow the stock market. Award-winning artist Mark McKenna follows a herd of wild horses that roams the McCullough Peaks not far from where he lives in Cody, Wyoming. “Just last week, I was able to get some great reference shots of this stallion named Sargent, who recently won over a group of horses from another stallion,” says McKenna, who describes Sargent as being mostly black with significant white markings, including a mane that shifts from black to white to black. “If you’ve ever been around a wild horse, they have so much character, especially
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Sharing Her Light

“My goal is to show others how I see the world,” says Kwani Povi Winder. “Being an artist has completely changed how I see it; it’s so incredibly colorful.” While she’s always seen the world and its people as a wondrous place, since 2013 Winder has been sharing her visions—whether they be landscapes, people, spiritual images, or animals—through paintings filled with vibrant colors and brilliant light. “I am constantly analyzing everything before my eyes and trying to identify what made me stop and take a second look at something,” she says. “Was it the contrast, the saturation, or maybe the
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One Step at a Time

Paul Rhymer had just received one of the biggest honors of his artistic life, and he was making those noises humble people make—noises that sound an awful lot like, “Why did they pick me?” In this case, “they” would be the folks who organize and conduct the annual Birds in Art event in Wausau, Wisconsin, who selected Rhymer as Master Wildlife Artist of 2023. A longtime attraction of the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wausau, Birds In Art has included works by thousands of avian artists from around the world. Most years—not all—they select a Master Wildlife Artist. And
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