Luke Anderson, Vernal Snow Fields, oil on canvas, 28 x 28” 

A mainstay at Gallery Wild and outposts across the country, Idaho-based Hazel interprets the faces of the West with blocky palette knife gestures and striated bands of color. His outsized works often feature underknown or misrepresented figures from American history—Indigenous leaders, Black cowboys and, for Elemental, key players in the early conservation movement. Subjects include botanist George Washington Carver, Sequoia National Park superintendent Colonel Charles Young and the “independent, awesome women” who helped turn Jackson from a few scattered homesteads into a full-fledged community, he says.

Aaron Hazel, Blast Off, oil on canvas, 48 x 36” 

The artist agrees with that description. “I think I have an aesthetic based off of two ends of the spectrum. I really like the bold, flat, graphic, two-dimensional look. But then I also like the traditional things about oil painting that really celebrate the texture of it,” Anderson says, noting his interest in painterly brushwork and varied surface thickness. Often employing atmospheric elements like smoke, mist and clouds, Anderson’s work can have a flat, almost cut-paper appearance on first read, and grows in complexity the more time you spend with it. “The layering and stripping away and adding back on really helps with that,” he says of his working practices. Now living in Salt Lake City, Anderson started experimenting with these techniques during wildfire season. “Painting the Wasatch Mountains went from an almost daunting challenge to something more relatable with an understandable scale,” he says. Each subsequent layer of the range recessed behind a blanket of smoke—a true lesson in atmospheric perspective that informs his work today.

Luke Anderson, Torrent, oil on linen, 18 x 24”

While they may have occupied “slightly different little corners of the community” before their Gallery Wild matchup, Anderson thinks his work is a logical pairing with Hazel’s. “He does a lot of portraits and wildlife and figures, and mine’s a little more landscape based, but I think we share a lot of roots in our sort of design and aesthetic language,” says Anderson. Stylistic choices like using playful color and paring back complex forms can be seen through both artists’ work.

Luke Anderson, Hanging Clouds, oil on canvas, 30 x 40”

“Aaron’s work definitely stops people in their tracks,” says Wild. “That pushing and pulling and that simplification of shapes. But then, within those shapes, he’s using a super heavy paint application which is just full of color and texture. Because of the simplification, we thought that they would be a good duo to show together and they also use that really interesting texture in their own way. That’s really part of the thing that makes people stop and look at the work. They’re just enthralled with it. They get super close to it and—you know—get their nose in it. It’s really cool.”

Aaron Hazel, Chappy, oil on canvas, 48 x 48”

While nothing beats seeing a painting in person, presenting well online is an effective way of getting their work out there for today’s artists. Hazel was living in Seattle when Instagram “was in its infancy,” he says, and it played a major role in spreading the word about his work. There was a little luck involved, too, he admits.

Aaron Hazel, Teddy Out West, oil on canvas, 48 x 48”

A 2012 workshop with artist Robert Moore brought his practice into the Western genre proper and triggered a reassessment of subjects from his youth in Idaho. “I enjoyed going to the rodeo growing up,” says Hazel, noting parallels between cowboys and pro athletes—the movement, the spontaneity, the performance. “There’s a lot of Western culture here in Idaho, which was interesting to be a part of.”

Aaron Hazel, Big Fox, oil on canvas, 60 x 48”

Anderson, too, has taken the scenic route to Western art. Growing up in Cheyenne, he absorbed the landscapes of the West on family road trips, but didn’t have much connection to the cowboy side of the cowboy state. “I really liked going to Denver and seeing all the skyscrapers,” he tells us, noting that they lived a pretty cosmopolitan life—or as cosmopolitan as one could get in Wyoming. As opportunities to show in the Western art scene came up, Anderson tried his hand at classic Western themes. “You know, especially when you’re starting out, you generally tend to start more by imitating and looking at what other people are doing,” he says. “That was sort of what I understood that Western art was—it was cowboy art and horses.” While successful with those earlier works, it was the wildlife and wilderness of the geographic West that called him back to his own roots. “The thing that did always impress me about the West first, was the big landscapes and the big skies and clouds and not as much some of those other stories and narratives,” he says. “My experience with the West has been about things that you see from the car window.”

Luke Anderson, Timekeeper, oil on canvas, 16 x 20”

Elemental will be Anderson’s first major show with Gallery Wild. “He’s definitely one to watch. He’s really pushing things,” Wild says. “They’re both a joy to work with,” she continues, noting how the artists’ respective styles continue to evolve. With these two artists, she says, each painting is elemental to the next, which creates building blocks that trigger a butterfly effect. Collectors are showing high interest in this