Everyone finds the West in their own unique way. For Idaho-based painter Aaron Hazel, his route into Western art took him through pet portraits, paintings of celebrities and the NFL, where he was painting sports scenes of the athletes, and routinely for the athletes who were his collectors. At one point, the young artist started taking design courses in hopes of going into advertising. Fate had other plans. 
Cattleman, oil, 20 x 20”In 2009, he had a lucky encounter with landscape painter Robert Moore. “My uncle did his frames for him, so my uncle was nice enough to barter some frame work for one of Robert’s workshops, which he then gave to me,” Hazel remembers. “That’s how it all started for me. I was a fan of his work, which was great when he really got the ball rolling for me.”
Since then, Hazel’s presence in the West has steadily grown as he creates powerful portraits and wildlife images, many of them rendered in his chunky modernist style with blocks of color applied with a palette knife.
Hats Off, oil, 40 x 30”
“I love what the palette knife can do, particularly with skin. It can have this tactile and textured quality. When you load your knife up with color, each stroke creates these chords of color. It can have an almost pixelated look to it,” the artist says. “I was really drawn to this way of working through the work of Gerhard Richter, who used a palette knife, and Jasper Johns, who got me interested in color. And then Robert Moore opened it up even further.”
Besides his painting technique, other fascinating aspects to Hazel’s work are his subjects, many of them people of color, including a number of black cowboys and Native Americans. 
Hairy Moccasin, oil, 20 x 16”
“As a black man, I’ve been otherized. It’s just normal, and that’s difficult to learn and accept. But that’s why I’m drawn to these subjects, including the black cowboys and the Native Americans like the Nez Perce or Shoshone,” Hazel says. “I love this idea of searching for identity, which is something that runs through my work. I see parallels between these two subjects.”
Aaron Hazel in his Idaho studio.
Buddy Le, owner of Coeur d’Alene Galleries—which will be showing Hazel’s new show Voices of the Past, opening July 8—says Hazel is definitely one of those artists to watch. “We are overjoyed to feature the unique and timely style of Aaron Hazel. We are very selective regarding the artists we feature in our solo shows in July, and Aaron is very deserving,” says Le. “He is underrated and undervalued for his Western works. He’s reminiscent of Winold Reiss with his use of 2D and 3D effects. His heavy implementation of paint gives his works a tactile, rugged quality that’s balanced by smoother simpler components. Collectors love his juxtaposition of realism and abstraction that you don’t truly appreciate until you’re standing in front of his paintings. Aaron lends a strong voice to the minorities of the West in his strong portrayals of contemporary and historical figures that star in his paintings. His work really needs to be seen in person, and with eight to 10 new works for Voices of the Past, it’s a terrific opportunity to get a glimpse of the next generation of Western art.” —
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