Archives for Landscape

Magnificently Mesmerizing

Magnificently Mesmerizing

May 19, 2016 | by

Romel de la Torre won his first art award at the tender age of 10. Although his parents had supported his interest in art—encouraging him to draw and sketch the world around him—it wasn’t until he appeared on a local TV program to receive his award that they began to think, “Maybe he’s got a talent here.” He did indeed. Since then, de la Torre has earned many awards for his paintings, including the grand prize and artist of the year awards from the Oil Painters of America and, in 2008, a gold medal and the People’s Choice Award from
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Landscape Love Affair

Landscape Love Affair

May 19, 2016 | by

Oh, to live the life of a landscape painter, to be blessed with the ability to see—and put down with paint—the beauty that surrounds us, beauty that too many of us take for granted. Each outing is an adventure, a sensory immersion into the sights, sounds, smells, and feel the great outdoors. Grace Schlesier Show Off (Yosemite in Fall) Oil 16″x20″ “Painting the landscape is where I feel most at home. It makes me happy. My studio work springs from the sketches and studies done on location, since I find nature the best teacher. Larger studio works often take months
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Timeless Places

Timeless Places

March 19, 2016 | by

In his much-loved memoir “A River Runs Through It,” writer Norman Maclean famously noted, “In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly-fishing.” For Brent Cotton, who counts Maclean among his favorite authors, there is no clear line between art and nature, particularly rivers. And for him, both represent a sort of near-religious calling. “Just as Maclean writes at the end of ‘A River Runs Through It’ that he is ‘haunted by waters,’ so am I,” says Cotton, who strives to evoke similar feelings through his art. “There is something magical and enchanting about flowing water and
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Honoring the People of the Past

Honoring the People of the Past

March 19, 2016 | by

Historically speaking, Montana artist Charles Fritz is always historically speaking—well, at least through his paintings. History for him is an enduring passion, and doesn’t show signs of letting up any time soon. “My interest in the history of the West just keeps growing,” he says. “The fur trade era, the Pony Express, the Oregon Trail, the voyageurs, homesteading, the native cultures and the Indian Wars all present great opportunities for paintings. These may seem like unrelated topics, but in actuality they all seamlessly weave one into another, and it becomes one large fascinating story with endless nuances to explore through
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I’m Not Fit For Anything Else

I’m Not Fit For Anything Else

March 19, 2016 | by

The young woman approached Romona Youngquist, during an art show in Scottsdale, Arizona, and asked for her autograph. A little surprised, but pleasantly so, Youngquist obliged. “How the hell did you hear about me?” she blurted out. Youngquist was one of those three artists, and the young woman had chosen her and her work for the assignment. “She was copying my paintings to see how I do things,” Youngquist says, adding that it probably was a tough assignment, because “it’s hard to explain how I do things; I just do them.” Romona Youngquist Autumn Sky Oil 40″x40″ “With this painting
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Simple Serenity

Simple Serenity

March 19, 2016 | by

Pristine and peaceful, the paintings of Canadian artist Jeremy Browne are a celebration of freedom, nature’s beauty, and man’s relationship to the natural environment. Like Monet’s haystack imagery, which explores the perception of light across various times of the day, seasons and weather conditions, Browne’s paintings create similar visual essays that celebrate his own fascination with the inherent natural beauty found in rustic, rural homesteads enhanced by the glow of sunrise, evening shadows, or moonlight reflections on a snow-covered landscape. Born in 1977 in Brampton, Ontario, Canada, Browne’s early upbringing imbued him with an inherent love for the simplicity of
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Mother Nature’s Magic

Mother Nature’s Magic

March 19, 2016 | by

Christine Drewyer (Annapolis, Maryland) Aged to Perfection Oil 30″x30″ “I’m very attracted to a sense of drama. That can be an extraordinary sky, or a fog-filled meadow, or some ancient tree that is just calling me to paint it. I’ve been known to stop and just stand before a tree as if it were the Taj Mahal, and I get this sense of profound wonder and even reverence. There needs to be a connection before I paint something, and I especially love painting at dusk and dawn, when there is an ethereal quality to the light, a veiled sense of
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Answering the Call of the Open Road

Answering the Call of the Open Road

January 19, 2016 | by

“As a landscape painter, you want to kind of get your arms around the planet.” So says Andrew Peters, who has made a valiant attempt to do just that, traveling far and wide to see and capture magnificent and varied landscapes. When he was just 25—three years after winning the Iowa Duck Stamp Competition—he packed up and headed to Africa, where he spent a year painting game animals and indigenous peoples. He’s also painted throughout North and South America, as well as in Romania, Morocco, Spain, Italy, France and Ireland and has plans to visit and paint in Slovenia. And
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Seasons of Change

Seasons of Change

January 19, 2016 | by

Landscape artist Carole Cooke is pushing a deadline—and she’s pushing her envelope. Sometimes you need to take a good look around and change course. After all, life is change. A major change for Cooke came about 11 years ago when, as a fledging artist, relatively speaking, she was accepted into the Masters of the American West Art Show at the Autry National Center of the American West in Los Angeles, California. “I really wanted to get into that show, because I knew it would be a turning point for my career, and it really was,” she says. “John Geraghty [a
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It’s About the Light

It’s About the Light

November 20, 2015 | by

Nancy Bush noticed something recently, when she was looking at her website. Scrolling back to look at some of the older paintings shown there, she realized a difference between then and now. “I could see a progression,” Bush says. “I could tell that I am expressing myself in a more advanced way now than I was then. There’s a softening of my technical side, and more of my internal thoughts and feelings are coming through.” It’s been 30 years since Bush gave up her corporate job and launched a career as an artist.. She’s grown from a fledgling artist studying
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