Phil Epp provides a context for viewing his paintings: “I related more to cowboy spaces rather than cowboy activity.
I portray the spaces that both mythical ideas and real life occupy.” A man of the Great Plains, he relates, “In college I learned about Picasso and Rothko and got an appreciation of other movements in art history. For a time I was intrigued by minimalism—Donald Judd and Jules Olitski. I went back to realism but I kept some of that minimalist thinking.”
Along the Ridge, oil on panel, 14¼ x 39¼”
Turbine Field, acrylic on board, 20 x 40”
There is no mistaking a Phil Epp painting—luminous landscapes beneath expressive skies, a few icons of the West like horses, cowboys and the moon to give it context, and a sense of vastness both awesome and inviting.
An online exhibition of his paintings will be shown by Modern West Fine Art in Salt Lake City through September 30 featuring 10 paintings. 
Moonrise on the Mesa, acrylic on canvas, 15 x 40”
Among the paintings is Along the Ridge. Despite his familiarity with all aspects of the plains, he travels around with a fresh eye looking for horses in different relationships to one another in the landscape and the visual phenomena of clouds in the vast sky. In this painting, one horse is in the lead and Epp has given form and depth to the clouds by painting them with thick impasto against the nearly featureless sky.
Collapsed Barn, acrylic on panel, 30 x 40”Human impact on the plains is sometimes hinted at and, sometimes, the subject of his paintings. In Turbine Field, rain falls in the distance and horses roam freely in the foreground while wind turbines generate electricity in the space between them. Epp has painted the turbines in a geometric abstract manner suggesting, perhaps, their innate energy, or the fracturing of the natural landscape. —
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