Visions West Contemporary Portrait Paintings

Patrick Oates' work explores the intersection of landscape, identity, and family history. His experimental paintings delve into queer identity, trauma, and the unknown, weaving a com...

One of the originators of the Western pop art movement, Billy Schenck incorporates techniques from photorealism with a pop art sensibility to both exalt and poke fun at images of the...

One of the originators of the Western pop art movement, Billy Schenck incorporates techniques from photorealism with a pop art sensibility to both exalt and poke fun at images of the...

One of the originators of the Western pop art movement, Billy Schenck incorporates techniques from photorealism with a pop art sensibility to both exalt and poke fun at images of the...

One of the originators of the Western pop art movement, Billy Schenck incorporates techniques from photorealism with a pop art sensibility to both exalt and poke fun at images of the...

One of the originators of the Western pop art movement, Billy Schenck incorporates techniques from photorealism with a pop art sensibility to both exalt and poke fun at images of the...

Patrick Oates' work explores the intersection of landscape, identity, and family history. His experimental paintings delve into queer identity, trauma, and the unknown, weaving a com...

Patrick Oates' work explores the intersection of landscape, identity, and family history. His experimental paintings delve into queer identity, trauma, and the unknown, weaving a com...

Patrick Oates' work explores the intersection of landscape, identity, and family history. His experimental paintings delve into queer identity, trauma, and the unknown, weaving a com...

My work deals with the complex experience of girlhood, exploring adolescent anxiety, feminine identity, and belonging. These themes are tackled within scenes of play, group interacti...

My work deals with the complex experience of girlhood, exploring adolescent anxiety, feminine identity, and belonging. These themes are tackled within scenes of play, group interacti...

Nerhbass’ paintings focus on style as a sublime element of tension within beauty. Thematically they evoke modern dilemmas of what it means to see and be seen in a manner that is simu...

My work deals with the complex experience of girlhood, exploring adolescent anxiety, feminine identity, and belonging. These themes are tackled within scenes of play, group interacti...

My work deals with the complex experience of girlhood, exploring adolescent anxiety, feminine identity, and belonging. These themes are tackled within scenes of play, group interacti...

My work deals with the complex experience of girlhood, exploring adolescent anxiety, feminine identity, and belonging. These themes are tackled within scenes of play, group interacti...

Like the Westerns I grew up with, my own work is camouflaged in a veil of nostalgia. The figures in my work are often portrayed against a stark background. This forces the viewer to recognize the myth before the critique exposes itself. I work from observation and my imagination using watercolor and traditional printmaking methods. The figurative images I create are heavily researched. By using the West, a subject that I am both familiar with and continue to question, I aim to engage with our inherent perceptions of the past and the myths embedded within. - Jed Webster Smith

Like the Westerns I grew up with, my own work is camouflaged in a veil of nostalgia. The figures in my work are often portrayed against a stark background. This forces the viewer to recognize the myth before the critique exposes itself. I work from observation and my imagination using watercolor and traditional printmaking methods. The figurative images I create are heavily researched. By using the West, a subject that I am both familiar with and continue to question, I aim to engage with our inherent perceptions of the past and the myths embedded within. - Jed Webster Smith

Like the Westerns I grew up with, my own work is camouflaged in a veil of nostalgia. The figures in my work are often portrayed against a stark background. This forces the viewer to recognize the myth before the critique exposes itself. I work from observation and my imagination using watercolor and traditional printmaking methods. The figurative images I create are heavily researched. By using the West, a subject that I am both familiar with and continue to question, I aim to engage with our inherent perceptions of the past and the myths embedded within. - Jed Webster Smith

Like the Westerns I grew up with, my own work is camouflaged in a veil of nostalgia. The figures in my work are often portrayed against a stark background. This forces the viewer to recognize the myth before the critique exposes itself. I work from observation and my imagination using watercolor and traditional printmaking methods. The figurative images I create are heavily researched. By using the West, a subject that I am both familiar with and continue to question, I aim to engage with our inherent perceptions of the past and the myths embedded within. - Jed Webster Smith

One of the originators of the Western pop art movement, Billy Schenck incorporates techniques from photorealism with a pop art sensibility to both exalt and poke fun at images of the...

Piggott finds resonance and beauty in the familiar. His subjects, anchored in the stuff of the every day, are quietly captured in a moment of time. Each composition speaks to the art...

June Glasson is an artist, illustrator, and designer. She lives in New York. Her paintings have been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London, Nature Morte Gallery in Ber...

This is a framed original painting. Biography Creating paintings inspired by western movies and by Remington and Russell, he is a native of the West, having been born and raised in rural Colorado. He studied art at Baylor University in Waco, Texas; at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, and at the University of Colorado, Boulder where he earned a Master's Degree in 1979. For two decades he worked as curator at the Yellowstone Art Museum in Billings, Montana, before leaving in 1999 to begin work as a full-time painter and independent curator. His work is in the collections of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming; the Art Museum of Missoula; and the Yellowstone Art Museum; the Federal Reserve Bank in Helena, Montana; and the Deaconness Medical Center in Billings, Montana. Artist Statement For a long time, the images in my paintings have been identifiably, even iconically, western-stagecoaches and false-front main streets, poker games and gun battles, cowboys, Indians, cavalry troopers and horses, all suspended in a choreographed matrix of dancing paint. Distinct from the traditional western genre-which inventories the minutia of cowboy gear or tells sentimental stories of rangeland romance-my paintings embody something more elemental and timeless, animated and abstract. The images tend to be stark, graphic, and charged with painterly energy. Though they are derived from fugitive television images, the paintings, as paintings, are still, silent and non-ephemeral. They register the technological transfer of primal shadows onto the electroluminescent screens of our collective consciousness, a shimmering blur of perception and memory transposed in an interchange of gesture and description, painted marks simultaneously arresting and embodying movement. I've always liked what a painter friend, Marc Vischer, wrote in 1988 about an early group of my western paintings. Now, I'm fourteen years closer to actualizing my vision for this work, and his astute remarks seem more pertinent today than they did then. He wrote in part, "For McConnell, a searing light emanates from a new desert: that of television. And from that most desolate backdrop, he salvages fragments from a movie world that spoke of honor in a land that was lawless. In a romantic sense, McConnell's works are a visual seance. Figures, like specters distorted through intense heat waves, are captured from their eternity of 24 frames a second. Their shapes and shadows are brought back into a radically different world and given substance and texture. It is an impossible attempt to freeze them, to arrest the present's ceaseless molestation of the past, to close off the continuum. Sometimes this is done darkly and thickly as an emphatic gesture of permanence. In other works a few light strokes quickly applied suggest the ephemeral nature of film and perhaps the fleeting nature of our own lives." I have been examining new imagery in my paintings, drawing subjects from Mexican graphic novelas, modern women and men of romance and mystery from the mid-20th century, motorcycles and airplanes. The end titles of movies, stated in several languages, have inspired me to begin a new series of cross-media translations in both acrylic and watercolor. My paintings have long begun where the movies have left off. The elements of water and light co-mingle in some pieces from this series and in others which take the viewpoint of a swimmer, watching other swimmers from the wet side of this aqueous membrane, looking up toward the light. My arrival in Montana in 1982 brought me into intimate contact with some of the most storied places of the historic West and also gave me the opportunity to study the paintings of two of the most influential codifiers of western imagery, Frederic Remington and Charlie Russell...

This is an framed original painting. June Glasson is an artist, illustrator, and designer. She live in Laramie, WY. Her paintings have been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery...

Tracy Stuckey received his BFA in painting from Florida State University and his MFA from the University of New Mexico. He has exhibited his work extensively throughout the United States, with numerous solo and group exhibitions, including shows curated by gallery owner Linda Durham and artist Joel Peter Witkin. He has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, most recently the Professional Development Grant from the West Virginia Division of Culture and History. In 2009 he was an artist-in-residence at the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Wendover, Utah. Also a professor, Stuckey has taught at West Virginia University, and most recently, Colorado State University. Tracy and his wife, artist Erika Osborne, live in Fort Collins, Colorado. ARTIST STATEMENT My paintings operate in a fictitious world that utilizes the mythologies and realities of the modern American West. Because of its unique history, the Western United States is more than just a location; it is a label, a persona and most importantly a cultural identity. The word "Western" is a category; it is used to describe films, literature, music, art, and fashion. In my work I use the cowboy and cowgirl and other stereotypical Western themes coupled with pop cultural depictions of the region to reflect my own interpretations of the contemporary West. I am interested in historian Michael Johnson...

Jennifer Nehrbass is a painter living and working in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She was born in West Bend, Wisconsin in 1970. She received her B.S. in Art and Textile Design from the U...

June Glasson is an artist, illustrator, and designer. She live in Laramie, WY. Her paintings have been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London, Nature Morte Gallery in B...

June Glasson is an artist, illustrator, and designer. She live in Laramie, WY. Her paintings have been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London, Nature Morte Gallery in B...

June Glasson is an artist, illustrator, and designer. She live in Laramie, WY. Her paintings have been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London, Nature Morte Gallery in B...

June Glasson is an artist, illustrator, and designer. She live in Laramie, WY. Her paintings have been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London, Nature Morte Gallery in B...

June Glasson is an artist, illustrator, and designer. She live in Laramie, WY. Her paintings have been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London, Nature Morte Gallery in B...

June Glasson is an artist, illustrator, and designer. She live in Laramie, WY. Her paintings have been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London, Nature Morte Gallery in B...

Jennifer Nehrbass is a painter living and working in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She was born in West Bend, Wisconsin in 1970. She received her B.S. in Art and Textile Design from the U...

Creating paintings inspired by western movies and by Remington and Russell, he is a native of the West, having been born and raised in rural Colorado. He studied art at Baylor University in Waco, Texas; at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, and at the University of Colorado, Boulder where he earned a Master's Degree in 1979. For two decades he worked as curator at the Yellowstone Art...

This is an unframed painting from her "Mountain Drag II" series. June Glasson is an artist, illustrator, and designer. She live in Laramie, WY. Her paintings have been exhibited at t...

This is an unframed painting from her "Mountain Drag II" series. June Glasson is an artist, illustrator, and designer. She live in Laramie, WY. Her paintings have been exhibited at t...

This is an unframed painting from her "Mountain Drag II" series. June Glasson is an artist, illustrator, and designer. She live in Laramie, WY. Her paintings have been exhibited at t...

This is an unframed painting from her "Mountain Drag II" series. June Glasson is an artist, illustrator, and designer. She live in Laramie, WY. Her paintings have been exhibited at t...

Matt Flint is a painter from the mountain town of Lander, Wyoming. He grew up surrounded by woods, animals, and family. As a boy, He spent endless days creating art and exploring the...

Matt Flint is a painter from the mountain town of Lander, Wyoming. He grew up surrounded by woods, animals, and family. As a boy, He spent endless days creating art and exploring the...

A very nice painting by Patrick Webster of a woman laughing.

Adirondack artist Judy Scammell is well known for immersing her viewers in the personality and essence of her animal subjects. Her unique portraits capture the intelligence and supre...

Jennifer Nehrbass is a painter living and working in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She was born in West Bend, Wisconsin in 1970. She received her B.S. in Art and Textile Design from the U...

Reed's primary focus has been the rich vein of Northern European art from the mid-17th through 18th centuries, a period of enlightenment and profound interest in science, nature, and the animal world. Animals were assigned human traits (peacock:vanity; dog:fidelity), and nature itself was considered a symbol of...