Claudia Hartley

"Superstition Mountains"

2020

"The comment I hear most often about my paintings is 'happy'". I've loved art all of my life and it warms my heart to know that I'm able to pass that love and joy on to others. I use...

Lauded by critics and collectors alike, the art of Gary Ernest Smith resonates in the mind and memory of contemporary America. Over the past years the artist’s one-man shows have attracted the attention of collectors from coast to coast. His three year exhibit, “Journey I Search of Lost Images” hung in 22 museums and institutes across the United States. In an exhibit curated by the Brooklyn Museum of Art, his work toured the New Orleans Contemporary Art Center, San Jose Museum of Art, the Palm Springs Desert Museum and many more prestigious art institutions. Although he must strictly limit the number of commissions he accepts, his mural size paintings are highly prized by corporate collectors. Gary Ernest Smith was born and raised in a relatively isolated farm community 25 miles northeast of Baker City, Oregon. His interests and intensity for painting began at an early age and progressed through college degrees, numerous commissions and awards to a full time pursuit of painting. The commission work that dominated the early years eventually stifled his creativity. Dissatisfaction with this career direction forced him to reach inward and search beyond popular style and accepted artistic norms to a personal vision. Following years of artistic training and experimentation, subject matter began to emerge based on the artist’s background of a rural life-style that celebrates the values of hard work and self-reliance. These aspects of Smith’s life came together and became the catalyst for his distinctive style. Living in the west, his work is primarily of that region, but it is not western in the traditional sense. Although it defies precise classification, the artist considers his style “minimal” and seeks to express the essence and simplicity of each subject. Whatever the focus might be, his work expresses the artistic elements of bold form and color. These two components become the vehicle that melds the style and subject into a symbolic visual language, expanding the artistic appeal beyond the west...

From the time he was four years old Max Hammond was destined to paint, as he began on the walls of his home, a budding muralist. As he ran along the edges of the salt marshes of the ...

Landscape painter, Gail Morris, has won many prestigious awards for her paintings and her work can be found in private and corporate collections throughout the United States, Japan, and Europe. Painting since 1999, her work as an artist has taken her on a number of extraordinary adventures around the globe, from the Navajo lands in New Mexico to the Dogon villages of West Africa. Morris attended Washington University, where she studied art history and eventually graduated from Webster College. However, as an artist, she considers herself to be self-taught. With her artwork, she likes to experiment with deconstruction and making the layers of paint as thin as possible, often times rubbing 60% of the paint off the canvass, or using steel wool and razor blades to distress the paint. She captures the soothing exuberance of the Western landscape by reducing each experience to its visual and emotional essence. Her serene paintings are influenced by the traditions of early California painting...

Stunning vertical landscape of dramatic rock formations towering over the desert below by Ken Lucas (American, 20th Century). Location and date are written o...

Arizona Morning

Desert Vista

Through the unique usage of color, light and spirit, K.L. McKenna's style captures the landscape in a most unexpected way. Her paintings are not just paintings of landscapes but color harmonies of a very high and unusual order. Her inspiration for the west comes from childhood summers spent prospecting for fossils in Wyoming with her paleontologist father and family. K.L. McKenna's scenes of Colorado, Arizona, Wyoming and Montana reflect her enthusiasm and spiritual connection to the geology of the west, where she paints on site throughout the year. K.L. McKenna, a resident of Woodstock, NY and Ward, CO, has had extensive experience working for museums and top exhibition design firms in New York, such as Ralph Appelbaum Associates and Albert Woods Design. She worked throughout the United States and Canada as a graphical user interface designer for major banking firms such as Citibank, First Boston and Lehman Brothers. K.L. McKenna was awarded a U.S. Patent for "The Geozoo," an educational toy design. She studied painting first with Mary Buckley at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY and later with Nicholas Buhalis at the Kingston School of Art, Kingston, NY. In 2005, K.L. McKenna exhibited 24 of her paintings in the Borderlands Gallery at the Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville, GA. She has participated in the annual auctions "Expanded Horizons," Yellowstone Art Museum, Billings, MT, and the "Annual Buffalo Bill Cody...