In Duke Beardsley’s newest show at Altamira Fine Art, he will be showing the painting Murciélago Rosa (Pink Bat),which is painted with many shades of red, and with a bubblegum-pink outline around his main subjects. For the Colorado artist, these colors are as Western as his cowboys and horses.
Murciélago Rosa (Pink Bat), mixed media on canvas, 36 x 24 in.
“You don’t have to go very far in the Southwest to find truly pink dirt or pink in the skies or pink in the sand. It’s Western in my books,” he says. “I really love that opportunity to just continue to shake that snow globe and ask Western art to live someplace I’ve never seen it. I welcome every chance I can to shake up the color game.”
Beardsley, fresh off an important run as the featured artist at the 2025 Coors Western Art Exhibit & Salein Denver, is not afraid to push his work into exciting new directions. He does this with massive canvases, fields of repeating subjects as if stamped by a large piece of paint-filled machinery (he hand-paints everything), and with genre-bending Pop Art conventions.
Lineas Platas, mixed media on canvas, 32 x 40 in.
His new show has an interesting title: Run Plumb Wild: Wanton Disorder from the Lost Trail to Nowhere. It’s clever, but the artist doesn’t allow larger themes to dictate the work. Each piece is self-contained and stands alone as a larger idea about the West, its imagery and iconography. “It’s safe to say patterns are evident in my images, which I've become obsessed with this past year,” he says. “But really, what happens is each painting is its own thing, which is what I like.”
The show will open March 11 and an artist reception will take place on March 13 from 7 to 9 p.m. at the Scottsdale gallery. —
Altamira Fine Art 7038 E. Main Street » Scottsdale, AZ 85251 » (480) 949-1256 » www.altamiraart.com
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