Shawn Cameron
This talented Arizona painter has been creating stunning work desirable by collectors for many years, but several recent sold-out exhibitions offer concrete proof Shawn Cameron is on a hot streak that can’t be ignored. Traditional in style, she sticks to subjects she knows well, including cowboys and horses. On her work Cow Pony, she says, “The painting is of a horse we owned named Pinto, and was one of [my husband’s] favorites. He was dependable for any type of ranch work... Pinto was a large horse retired from a bucking horse string and in his later years was used by our grandkids on the ranch…he was an all around cow pony beloved by all.”
www.shawncameron.com, Instagram: @shawn8096
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Abigail Gutting
Still at the early stages of what is already a remarkable career, Abigail Gutting has seen a swift acceleration in her rise within Western art due to major sales, hit solo shows, a recent Western Art Collector cover and her appearance in exhibitions like Prix de West, which she will attend this month in Oklahoma City. She paints traditional horse subjects, but with a contemporary twist that elevates her paintings to exciting levels, as seen here in her work Born For This.
www.abigailgutting.com, Instagram: @abigailguttingfineart
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Montana-based Amanda Markel is bringing fresh attention to a younger generation of sculptors who have been adding to the time-honored medium of bronze. Her works are inventive and modern, but they also retain her delicate connection to nature and wildlife. Here she offers a small five-shot sequence of a fox stalking its prey. “I was inspired to create Intent to represent the power of clarity. Defining our desires can be daunting—either because we don’t yet know them or because defining success also defines failure,” she says. “Yet, having the courage to set an aim reveals what stands in the way. As we break challenges down into actionable steps, we align more of ourselves in that direction, becoming individuals of greater integrity, purpose and capability. Through forthright intention, the impossible becomes possible. This sculpture embodies intention, transformation, breakthrough and the realization of hidden strengths within us.”
www.agmarkel.com, Instagram: @a.g.markel
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Jessica Garrett-Lawrence
Arizona painter Jessica Garrett-Lawrence, paints what she knows, which is the beauty of the American West. Recent work—including this desert painting, Illuminating—has originated near her home in the Phoenix area. Her use of color and composition in these moody and atmospheric landscape paintings have garnered her many new fans and collectors. “Spending most of my life in the Southwest, I have always been drawn to painting the unparalleled light of Western landscapes,” she says. “Through my years of painting, I have learned how vital color is in recreating the feeling of light. As I experiment with various subjects, I still find color to be my ultimate inspiration. For an artist, color is a powerful means of expression—it is also a facet of academic painting that I feel is largely unexplored. I aim for my work to showcase a fresh approach to color and an illusion of light that does justice to nature.”
www.jessicagarrettfineart.com, Instagram: @jessica.garrett.artist
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Julie T. Chapman
Using the raw power of color and its energetic manifestation, Julie T. Chapman works in the “disrupted realism” style of art, which allows her to apply paint with an “expressionistic and fragmented fashion.” Here, in Keeper of Wisdom, Chapman’s unmistakable style is on full display. “All my recent work, including this piece, is meant to convey my strong emotions about what is happening in the world, and our country, right now… I absolutely attacked the abstract,” she says. “While painting the bear, I wiped away a lot of decent paint that ultimately felt too anodyne, too normie; only the strokes that were bold and rough felt appropriate.” She notes that since the completion of this painting, she’s begun a black-and-white series titled Chaos Theory that is even more rough and raw.
julietchapman.com, julie@julietchapman.com
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Mary Leslie
A recent appearance at Cowgirl Up: Art from the Other Half of the West at the Desert Caballeros Western Museum helped solidify Mary Leslie’s status as an exciting artist worth following closely. She paints in a bold style with powerful color and complex compositions filled with action and detail. Her wildlife pieces are exceptional, but so are her cowboy paintings, such as Spirit in the Sky. “I’m drawn to the grit, grace and paradox of the American West—it’s the heartbeat of my work,” she says. “I’m captivated by rugged landscapes, wildflowers that bloom against all odds and cowboys whose dust-covered boots carry generations of stories. Through my art, I aim to honor the beauty, resilience, and spirit of the land and those who call it home.”
www.marylesliestudio.com, Instagram: @maryleslieart
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Yun Wei
Born in TianJin, China, painter Yun Wei first became a teacher in China before showing professionally in New Zealand and Australia. In 2008, she moved to the United States and settled in California, where she creates marvelous Western still life paintings that speak to materials and history of the American West. Here, in After the Rough Day, the artist uses objects she found after exhibiting at Cowgirl Up! “The objects in this painting were found in a local antique store in Wickenburg, Arizona, on the day I finished my quickdraw and auction at the Desert Caballeros Western Museum—that was the reason I named the painting After the Rough Day,” the artist says. “When I saw them, I was imagining how to compose it and painted it in my mind.”
www.yunweifineart.com, Instagram: @yunweifineart
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Jill Carver
Painter Jill Carver comes to Western art with a long history in the arts, though not all of it as an artist. Before moving to the United States from Great Britain, Carver was a curatorial research assistant at the National Portrait Gallery in London. She’s been a painter since 2002 and presently lives in Colorado. Recent shows at Mark Sublette Medicine Man Galleries and InSight Gallery, as well as the Coors Western Art Exhibit & Sale, have elevated her work higher. “This painting [Remnants of Time], captures both the remnants of the day’s sun and a frozen-in-time horse corral in the pastureland of a mountainous Colorado valley: an iconic depiction of the West,” she says. “I was intrigued to see if I could capture the nuanced tonal balance between the alpine glow in the distance and the shadow in the foreground, the latter still full of reflected light from the expansive sky. I wanted viewers to feel that tipping point of fading light and to smell the frosty, damp, autumnal grass.”
www.jillcarver.com, Instagram: @jillcarverpaintings
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Lisa Gleim
Working in the difficult and underappreciated medium of pastels, Atlanta artist Lisa Gleim has brought a unique vision to Western art with her subjects that include wildlife, landscapes and her ledger-inspired work on vintage and antique papers. Her whimsical style and sense of humor can be seen in her piece The Burro of Labor, showing her model painted over a Grand Canyon topography map. Adept at not only Western subjects, but also subjects around the world (she was recently in Antarctica), Gleim excels at bringing light, majesty and humanity to the world around her. Her work has been exhibited around the world, including at the Booth Western Art Museum, Briscoe Western Art Museum and the C.M. Russell Museum.
www.lisagleimfineart.com, Instagram: @lisagleimfineart
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Gladys Roldán-de-Moras
One of the unequivocal stars of Western art, Gladys Roldán-de-Moras has had an explosive couple of years after stunning appearances at Cowgirl Up! at Desert Caballeros Western Museum, Night of Artists at the Briscoe Western Art Museum and recently at the Prix de West at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. Today her work is highly in demand and worth bidding on at museums, shows and gallery openings. Based in San Antonio, Texas, Roldán-de-Moras frequently speaks to the Mexican culture that was passed down to her by her maternal grandfather, who was a “proud lifelong charro who decades ago helped promote Charreria as the official national sport in Mexico.” Many of her works showcase the sport and the ancillary events related to it, as seen here in Bond of Tradition. Her paintings are not of typical Western themes—“typical” as in cowboys or cattle—but her subjects and their customs are engrained in the culture of the Southwest and part of its many traditions.
www.roldandemoras.com, Instagram: @roldandemoras
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