Southwest Art Magazine Previews John Moyer's "Echoes of the Land"

In his first solo exhibition in over a decade, acclaimed painter John Moyers breathes new life into iconic western themes with his bright, modernist palette and invigorating, design-focused imagery. The show, which opens this month at Maxwell Alexander Gallery in Los Angeles, represents the next chapter in the artist’s ongoing efforts to “push his limits,” says gallery director Beau Alexander. “John is in his mid to late career, but he’s still developing his work; he isn’t creating the same old pieces,” observes Alexander. “He’s one of the best western artists alive, so for him to push the envelope is really exciting.”

Echoes of the Land, as the exhibition is titled, features some of the oil painter’s favorite motifs, including Southwestern landscapes and portraits of American Indians dressed in historically precise, trice-specific garments and headdresses from his own extensive artifact collection. To kick off the show, Moyers is on hand at an afternoon reception on Saturday, June 15, and he isn’t traveling far to attend: The longtime resident of Santa Fe, NM, moved to the Los Angeles area a few years ago. “It adds another artistic stamp to L.A.,” enthuses Alexander. “Many of today’s top western artist live within an hour of the city.’

Moyer’s move to the City of Angels has also enabled the pair to collaborate more closely. In preparation for this show, Alexander visited Moyers’ home near Pasadena. “When I walked into John’s studio and saw his painting of a bucking bronco, it caught me immediately,” says Alexander of the vivid, high-octane scene entitled “Turbulence”. “It almost feels like a William Herbert Dunton painting from the early 1900’s.”

Moyer’s, however, puts a contemporary spin on the classic western subject by portraying the rearing horse and his intrepid rider from a bold, head on view-point, rather than the more traditional side angle. “It creates a 3-D feeling-you feel the motion and the action in the painting,” notes Alexander.

Viewers can expect to see other refreshingly modern, convention-breaking perspectives like this in the show. “I’m having fun,” says Moyers. “I’m experimenting with color and design a lot. As an artist, you always have to try new things.” –Kim Agricola

To view the exhibition, click here.

WESTERN ART COLLECTOR PREVIEWS GRANT REDDEN'S "VIEWS FROM THE RANCH"

Maxwell Alexander Gallery in Los Angeles will present new works from Cowboy Artists of America member Grant Redden beginning April 6. Redden, who frequently explores less-traveled areas of the West such as sheepherding and farming, will focus entirely on classic cowboy material for this new show, his first solo exhibition at the gallery.

“These will be signature paintings, paintings with subject matter that is very familiar to me,” he says. “I’ll also be informed by historical painters for these works. I’m never consciously trying to make my work like theirs, but they certainly inspire me, especially when I’m going through depression and doubt—something all painters feel at some point in the studio—with every brushstroke. That may sound like it’s miserable to be an artist, but it’s not. It’s actually a lot of fun, but artists doubt everything they do sometimes. It’s part of the process.”

Redden will be turning much of his attention to cowboys from the early 1900s, particularly the 1920s and 1930s. William Herbert “Buck” Dunton and Frank Tenney Johnson are two artists who speak to the time period he’s painting. In one new painting, The Call of the Night Bird, Redden seems to call out

to Johnson with a nocturne scene. But where Johnson would use looser brushstrokes and more primal paint application, Redden paints a tighter picture with more detail and more nuance in the light. It creates a wonderful call- and-response aspect with Johnson, one of the great cowboy painters.

The Wyoming artist says that he did not use a photo reference for the painting, simply because it’s nearly impossible to capture moonlight in a photograph or even a sketch. “Paintings like this are almost entirely from imagination, because once you’re out there in the moonlight there is not much information

to record. You have to invent and imagine it all in the studio,” he says. “It’s kind of a theatrical production with the nocturne. Some are successful, and some aren’t. But when they’re successful it’s a reward because it’s all you, every piece of it.”

In the piece the horse is white, mostly because white horses are more fascinating for the artist and the viewer. “A white horse has so much reflection that it can make things around it more interesting. They’re like aspen trees in that way,” he adds. “As for black horses, just hit me in the back of the head. They just absorb all the light around them. If you can successfully paint a black horse you deserve a medal.”

Another work in the show is Old Unreliable, a painting of the timeless image of a rider on a bucking horse. The painting has a pleasing convergence of lines—from distant mountain ridges and rocky cliff faces to closer outcroppings carved into the desert soil—that guide the eye toward the leaping horse and its cool, collected rider who clings to its back.

Redden’s first solo show at Maxwell Alexander Gallery will continue through April 27. VIEW IMAGES FROM THE EXHIBITION HERE

Southwest Art Magazine on Grant Redden's Upcoming Solo Show

In a small solo show opening at Maxwell Alexander Gallery on Saturday, April 6, Wyoming artist Grand Redden captures timeless vignettes of the cowboy, his horse, and the land upon which he works. If the showcase conjures the spirit of early cowboy artists like Fran Tenney Johnson and W. Herbert Dunton, who captured the Old West, Redden wouldn’t mind the comparison. In the half dozen oil paintings he brings to the show, the artist seeks to share a bit of his own western heritage with viewers.

Redden’s paternal ancestors were among the first pioneers to settle in southwest Wyoming, and he himself grew up in the region on his father’s sheep and cattle ranch. Today he lives with his wife and family in the area, where he raises a small herd of sheep, chickens, and a few cows on 120 acres of pastureland. It’s a way of life that has always appealed to the artist— modernized methods of farming aside. “I really don’t have much interest in painting tractors,” he admits unapologetically. “With some of my work, I try to make it look like the cowboy and western life from 1900 to the 1930s. The Zane Grey and Gene Autry period is an exciting and interesting time to people, and I think contemporary desires are reaching back to that time.”

Over the nearly three decades he has been painting, Redden has studied with acclaimed artists ranging from Jim Norton to Gerald Fritzler to Walt Gonske. He has also closely observed the techniques of a variety of living and deceased masters. “How I paint is as important to me as what I paint,” says Redden. who was inducted into the exclusive Cowboy Artists of America in 2012. “The longer I paint, the more excited I get about the craftsmanship that goes into a well-made painting—the textures, the colors, the design. I’m more focused on using large shapes and bright colors in a harmonious way, and I use a lot of sanding and glazing.”

Also propelling Redden forward on his creative path is the ongoing urge to share his world with others. “If you haven’t ridden a bobsled with a load of hay, it’s amazing—the sounds, the smells,” says the artist. Of course, while he can’t arrange for viewers to physically experience such pleasures he adds, “I can paint it for them.” And being able to do that, says Redden, “is like being paid to eat ice cream.”

Southwest Art Magazine Previews Joseph Todorovitch's Upcoming Solo Show

In a small solo show opening at Los Angeles-based Maxwell Alexander Gallery on Saturday, February 9, California figurative painter Joseph Todorovitch continues to explore the nuances of the human form. But this showcase of about 10 new oil paintings is also sprinkled throughout with what Todorovitch describes as “magical, fairy-dust things,” including quiet, almost dreamlike moments in the human experience. A few pieces convey, for example, the feelings of wonder and inspiration that come through wandering and discovery. “I’m really focused on creating a genuine feeling in these paintings that is simple and hopefully universal,” adds the artist. “They are kind of whimsical with a little bit of charm.”

Todorovitch, whose works have appeared in such prominent national shows as the Salmagundi Club’s American Masters and the California Art Club’s Gold Medal Exhibition, has been painting for nearly two decades. “That’s a lot of time to explore and feel that I have dexterity in painting and with artistic concepts in general,” he says. Now, adds Todorovitch, “I feel like I can throw it all out the window and be free. I’ve had great joy in learning all those skills, but it’s nice to retire into this person who owns all the technical experience and can just kind of play with it.”

Although the contemporary realism remains faithful to the representational acumen of historic masters like William-Adolphe Bouguereau and John William Waterhouse, he has increasingly been tapping into his own life experiences and personal creative vision when he paints. “It makes it feel like I’m creating something more special,” says Todorovitch. “I do love representational work with high-fidelity realism in doses, but not at the sacrifice of my personal choices in portraying the subject,” he explains.

So, while photographic references still have a place at the artist’s easel, these days they are mostly a loose visual compass for Todorovitch, who is armed with years of experience working from life. “I’m feeling free to make design decisions that may even stray from what I’m actually seeing. That’s really where I’m starting to feel fulfilled in my work,” he says. These creative choices extend to the varied ways he is applying his paint. In a single picture plane, some areas might feature large, graphic shapes with impasto and expressive brushwork, while other areas might display thinner, more delicate paint applications and refined detail. “The engineering of the paint should have a certain impact,” he says. “I’m trying to create a simple, elegant and poetic statement with this new work.”

That means Todorovitch is engaging more fully in the process of editing and simplifying, which includes not only abridging his use of the many technical tools in his repertoire, but also paring down his palette, even in figurative pieces that feature California landscapes in the backgrounds. In his latest work, he notes, “I still wanted to portray a subtle sense of illumination, but not so much the strength of color that I was using in my last few shows.”

Todorovitch’s efforts to personalize and simplify his vision have added up to an unanticipated but welcome effect: the luminous, understated works of Edgar Degas are revealing their influences in his paintings now more than ever. “Degas was one of the artists I really started admiring at the beginning of my artistic journey,” he says, “and I think I’ve come full circle.” — Kim Agricola

Southwest Art Magazine Previews the Upcoming Michael Klein Show Land Dwellers

Show Preview

A major change of scenery has brought a dramatic shift of subject matter for painter Michael Klein, as is evident in his 20-painting solo show that opens with a reception on Saturday, December 8, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at Maxwell Alexander Gallery in downtown Los Angeles. The artist, who often travels the world presenting painting workshops, will be in attendance.

In recent years, Klein, 38, and his wife moved first from Buenos Aires, where they’d lived for several years, to New York, and they have now relocated to Raleigh, NC. That’s where the artist first came to learn of and witness firsthand the wild mustangs that roam the shores of the northern Outer Banks islands. Now protected through nonprofit foundations, the steeds are descendants of horses believed to have been left there by shipwrecked Spanish or English explorers in the late 16th century.
All of which struck Klein as ideal inspiration for his classical approach to realist art. The artist trained, since the age of 19, in ateliers and workshops including those of New Hampshire master portraitist Richard Whitney, the Art Students League of New York, and Jacob Collins at his widely respected Water Street Atelier (now called the Grand Central Atelier). Klein has also been influenced by his intensive studies of art history, including 19th-century naturalist painters such as John Singer Sargent, Jules Bastien-Lepage, and Émile Friant. “In these works, I’m exploring a little bit of American history, and I’m using all my training to portray a single horse, or five or six horses, walking down the beach, in moonlight or in the morning, on a cloudy day or at sunset,” he says. “I love the variety.”

Klein expects to be showing about a dozen of these equine images, most of which are painted in oils on panel. There is also a generous selection of other subjects for which he is already well known: four or five of his widely admired floral still-life paintings—which in recent years gained Klein a large Instagram following—along with four figurative works that include a portrait of “a gentleman from the Apache reservation,” another of his wife, and a self-portrait.

“Twenty paintings is a pretty significant number for a solo show,” observes gallery director Beau Alexander. He considers Klein—who had a small show of his floral works at Maxwell Alexander’s former Culver City location in late 2015—more than worthy of such a major display. “Michael possesses a vast knowledge of art history, and while never forgetting the masters that have come before him, he is definitely making his own mark,” Alexander says. That impact, he thinks, will be all the greater as a result of the artist’s new subject matter: “I find it interesting to see his technical ability being translated to something new, while his brush strokes and technique haven’t changed. When an artist is unexpectedly inspired like this, you can see the interest and the passion in the finished works.”

Southwest Art Interviews Mark Maggiori

Mark Maggiori: Lightning Strike

Courtesy of Southwest Art July 16, 2018

by Norman Klopas

Two bone-tired young cowboys descend a cactus-studded slope toward an iconic western landscape of red-rock pinnacles and winding canyons. They are not so much riding their horses as being patiently borne by them. Massive storm clouds billow behind them, threatening a downpour that may arrive before the men reach their destination.

This majestic 5-foot-wide painting by Mark Maggiori, titled WEST SIDE OF THE RIO GRANDE, so impressed the judges at this year’s Masters of the American West show at the Autry Museum that it received the Don B. Huntley Spirit of the West Award as the most outstanding work in cowboy subject matter. Despite the acclaim Maggiori has been earning recently, that recognition was surprising for multiple reasons: Not only was it the artist’s Autry debut, but he is also a relative newcomer to American western subjects. The 41-year-old is a Frenchman who, until a moment of revelation and a leap of faith less than five years ago, had never considered painting cowboys.

“I took a chance back then,” says Maggiori. “This was something I had to do.”

Maggiori’s background may not have clearly predicted his future calling or phenomenal success. But it’s possible nonetheless to trace subtle indicators of the painter he is today.
“I guess I was pretty good at drawing at a young age,” he reflects. “When my mother picked me up my first day of kindergarten, the teacher had put my drawing on the classroom wall. I don’t remember what it was, but the teacher told my mom I was very good.” That classroom was in his hometown of Fontainebleau, southeast of Paris, where Maggiori grew up as the middle of three
children of Robert, a philosophy professor and author, and Helen, who taught French, Latin, and Greek. Early in his school years, he enjoyed drawing at home, filling sketchbooks with pictures of robots and spaceships. His parents, however, “wanted me to have a real job,” urging him toward more academic pursuits.

“But I wasn’t really good at school,” Maggiori continues, laughingly explaining that his “monomaniacal” nature led to obsessions first with playing soccer, starting at the age of 7, and then, by his mid-teens, with skateboarding. That pursuit, in turn, fostered a fascination with America, particularly the skateboarding culture of Los Angeles.

During the summer of his 15th year, Maggiori gained his first up-close-and-personal experience of America when his uncle Claude, a successful magazine and newspaper art director, took him and Mark’s 15-year-old cousin Leon on a summer road trip from New York to San Francisco, with stops along the way at western landmarks. “That month changed my life,” he says, “implanting America in my brain.”

When the time came for college, however, young Mark still wasn’t sure of his goals. He enrolled in some history classes at the Sorbonne but dropped them within a month. By then, he had picked up the guitar, “and I just wanted to make music with my friends and hang out with girls,” he says. Finally, in 1997, his uncle convinced him to try classes at the Academie Julian, a venerable private art school in Paris. “That was life-changing for me,” Maggiori recalls. “All of a sudden, my world opened to so many options and possibilities.”

Now a committed student, he stayed in art school for the full four-year course. Along the way he gained experience in animation, interning at the Paris studios of Disney, where he was involved in the 1999 film Tarzan. “I had dreadlocks at the time, and so did Tarzan, so the main animator used me as a model to see how the dreadlocks moved,” he says.

Upon graduation, Disney offered him a job at its California headquarters. By then, however, another passion had, quite literally, taken center stage. In 1997, Maggiori and his friends had formed a band called Pleymo, writing and performing “numetal,” combining heavy metal with other genres including hip-hop and grunge. After releasing their first album in 1999, they signed with Sony Music in 2000. By the time their second of four albums came out in 2002, they had begun playing at festivals across Europe and Japan, with Maggiori as lead vocalist. At the same time, he had also begun a compatible career directing music videos. So, he says, “the idea of being stuck in an animation studio somewhere in Burbank wasn’t appealing to me anymore.”

Eventually, the Pleymo years ended, with the band going on hiatus in 2007. (This summer, however, they’ve reunited for a 20th-anniversary tour in Europe.) Maggiori continued to direct music videos, while exploring opportunities to helm documentaries and feature films. In 2011, he moved to Los Angeles, where he met and fell in love with multimedia artist and creative director Petecia Le Fawnhawk, whom he married in 2012. And he developed a particular interest in rural America. “Every time I had a little money,” he says, “I’d go somewhere like Texas or Louisiana and take photos of Americana,” he says. “And that’s how I discovered rodeos.”

That interest led him, in late 2013, to take photos at the International Finals Rodeo in Oklahoma City. His father-in-law suggested he check out the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum while he was there. So Maggiori did, and his first encounter with its collection of historic and contemporary western art, much of it produced by participants in its annual Prix de West Invitational, was revelatory. “It was like I was struck by lightning—the storytelling, the American myth, the lighting, the clothing, everything about the cowboys in those paintings!” he remembers. He left with one laser-focused goal: “This is something I want to do.”

Back home, he began researching the market, which included reading Southwest Art. “I realized there was a whole western art scene. I wanted to be part of it.” So, he says, “I took a big step into unknown territory.” He and Petecia moved to her mother’s house in Kingman, AZ, and, with the same kind of monomaniacal dedication he’d always shown, Maggiori began painting in a backyard shack.

Seeking to jumpstart his new career, he posted his early efforts on Instagram, and his following boomed (today it exceeds 65,000). That quickly led to a connection with successful western artist Logan Maxwell Hagege, who invited Maggiori to meet at the respected Maxwell Alexander Gallery in Los Angeles, directed and owned by his brother, Beau Alexander. “I put simple wood frames on four of my paintings, loaded them in my car, and drove from Kingman to LA,” Maggiori remembers.

“Logan and Beau welcomed me, we talked, and Beau put my paintings on the wall for 10 minutes.” And then, to Maggiori’s astonishment, Alexander bought all four works. “Soon after that,” he adds, “I heard that Bruno Mars had bought one of those paintings.” Another top western gallery, Gerald Peters Gallery in Santa Fe, signed him on a few months later. By October 2015, a painting by Maggiori landed on the cover of Southwest Art.

His successes continued mounting quickly: the Patron’s Choice Award in his first big event, the 2016 Night of Artists show at the Briscoe Western Art Museum in San Antonio; the Sam Houston Award for Painting at the same show the following year; and now, this year, his major recognition at the Autry.

These days Maggiori immerses himself in a field and subject matter that feel as if they’ve chosen him. While painting, he incessantly listens to audiobooks about the West. “I’m actually catching up big-time with American history, and the more I listen, the more I get ideas,” he says. Meanwhile, he continues to travel the West, gathering landscape photos and often meeting up with other artists for organized photo sessions with Indians wearing authentic garb.

Back in his studio, he says, “I go through my photos and start sketching.” His experience as a director and animator has made him especially adept with Photoshop, which he uses to refine his designs before heading to the canvas. Using a pencil or charcoal, he’ll quickly transcribe the composition. “And then I start painting, with most works taking two to three weeks to completion, including drying time,” he adds. Maggiori pays particular attention to rendering his clouds, which have won him special praise for their luminous realism. “Like a chef usually doesn’t invite you into the kitchen, I don’t want to tell how I do it,” he laughs, revealing only that he uses “a little bristle brush” and spends “hours blending all the colors to make a cloud look smooth and fresh.”

That attention to detail reached new heights in another work Maggiori exhibited at this year’s Autry show, THE CROSSING. Depicting a wagon train fording a river in a mountain valley fringed by snowcapped peaks, the stirring scene tried the artist’s own seemingly boundless patience and focus. “After I finished the mountains, I had to put the whole bottom part aside for maybe two months,” he says. “Then, one morning, I told myself to just do it, step by step, like climbing a gigantic staircase. It took me maybe three weeks of long, hard, sweaty days and lots of coffee. But it was one of those epic paintings I want to do once in a while.”

His ultimate goal is to please and reward his ever-growing audience. “It’s encouraging for me to see the thousands of followers I have on Instagram now, who write to me every day. That’s amazing, and it makes me feel so good,” he reflects. He feels he best serves both himself and his fans by “never being boring, and never being bored. I always want to stay excited and to be able to put my excitement for the West into my paintings.”

For more work by Mark Maggiori, click here.

Southwest Art Magazine Previews Eric Bowman

A lone cowboy sits atop a hill overlooking the desert below. As he sits on his horse with his hat pulled down low, he watches the sun fall into the horizon and thinks about his day. There are no houses or cities in the distance. He has no companions with him. Man and horse sit alone in contemplation of the adventures ahead. Eric Bowman’s new body of work drops viewers into these quiet moments in the lives of American cowboys. “This is what I like best about the western genre,” Bowman says. “Hollywood has romanticized that vision of the cowboy, and I’ve always loved it.”

The artist presents 12 of his newest works in a solo show this month, titled Storybook Cowboy, at Maxwell Alexander Gallery. The show opens on Saturday, June 2, with an artist’s reception that evening. The early illustrators of the 1900s, who depicted the American West that soon grew into the expansive western genre of entertainment, influence Bowman’s style and subject matter. The artist is simultaneously paying homage to those artists while putting his own contemporary spin on the subject. To create his new pieces, Bowman worked with models and took photos of modern cowboys and ranch hands for reference. But he changes their clothing for a more historic feel in each piece. “It’s this fusion of contemporary working cowboys and the iconic images we associate with western heroes,” Bowman says. “Nothing would give you a sense of them being contemporary, but they’re still generic enough to belong to any era.”

Gallery director Beau Alexander says the work fits with the gallery’s overall aesthetic that combines old and new. “We respond to that contemporary edge, but Eric still has that masterful technique of someone who has been painting for a long time,” he says. “This show is an exclamation point in his career that will make people take notice of his skill. He won’t be flying under the radar much longer.”

While the artist recently began expanding his figurative oeuvre, his background in landscapes remains strong. “I still want the bulk of the scene to be comprised of the landscape, but these works meld the two genres together to make up that one romanticized, storybook scene,” he says. Nearly all of the pieces feature a solitary cowboy in the wilderness. There are no man-made structures to speak of in the hills around him. Bowman says the loneliness of that lifestyle is a key theme throughout the show. “It’s about the overall feeling you get when you see this cowboy alone, and what he might be feeling from his perspective,” Bowman says.

With most of the pieces set during sunrise or sunset, the artist plays with a unique juxtaposition between subject matter and lighting. “You can make this subject gritty and rough and hard, but with these colors, the cowboy becomes more restful and contemplative,” Bowman says. “With the time of day, the work signifies the end of an era when these men were revered and needed. But if a kid sees them, I want him to think of them as heroes, too.” —Mackenzie McCreary

For more work by Eric Bowman, click here.

Southwest Art Previews G. Russell Case Exhibition

This month Maxwell Alexander Gallery unveils as many as 10 new oil paintings by award-winning artist G. Russell Case, who turns his attention to the warm, desert canyons and sandstone spires of Canyon de Chelly and Vermilion Cliffs National Monuments in northern Arizona. The gallery hosts an artist’s reception on Saturday, May 5, at 6 p.m.

“Russell captures these places in such a classic way,” says gallery director Beau Alexander. “He creates calming landscapes where you can feel the quiet of the desert in them, but he also conveys the vastness of the space and the height of the cliffs, often putting small figures in his paintings for scale.”

 Over the millennia, exposure to the elements has produced rich colors throughout Canyon de Chelly and Vermilion Cliffs, and those colors tend to be even more pronounced in Case’s spare, uncluttered paintings, notes Alexander. “Russell really tries to stick to portraying only what the viewer needs to see. A lot of people compare him to Maynard Dixon and the simpler, modernist techniques of the early 1900s, and Russell falls right into line with that style.” Indeed, Case counts Dixon among his most significant influences, along with American masters Thomas Moran, Robert Henri, and George Bellows. “When I look at Dixon’s field studies on location, they are recorded one time—cleanly,” says Case. “The calligraphy of the recording isn’t manipulated. He had the courage to make a mark, leave it, and move on. That painterly quality gets me excited. I like as much freshness and direct painting as possible.”

 In Spring at Tabletop, Case explores a verdant section of Vermilion Cliffs on the cusp of summertime, when the desert is just starting to explode with color, he says. Rather than portray every craggy crevice of the sandstone canyon in the scene, he instead focused on conveying the “horizontal movement” of the composition. The artist organized the painting into just a few parallel “bands” of scenery: a towering wall of clouds floats over the expansive, rose- tinged canyon and green mesa below, where three Navajo riders add “spots of color and shape” amid the sagebrush. “Usually, I’ll put figures in a painting as an afterthought to create visual interest, drama, impact, and scale,” says Case. “It lets us know the size of things, and it gives the work a finished quality, like the cherry on top.”

The artist spends days at a time sketching, photographing, and painting out in the field, where the scenic details are often overwhelmingly beautiful, and hence, difficult to pare down at his easel. Back at his studio in northern Utah, Case reviews his reference material with a renewed eye, looking for gripping “compositional themes” that supersede the minutiae of a scene. It might be as simple as a large, stormy sky or the “hot” desert cliffs at midday, he says. “When you’re out there, you’re so flooded with information that it’s hard to edit things—you think it’s all beautiful,” notes Case. “In my studio, I’ll create a small painting and then work it up to a big painting, editing things down. The abstract quality behind subject matter is what gets me excited—the big shapes and patterns. I’m continuing to move in a simplified direction—it’s a constant evolving toward how to say more with less, but better.” —Kim Agricola

For more work by G. Russell Case, click here.

Southwest Art Previews Cumulus Show

Los Angeles, CA

Maxwell Alexander Gallery, March 10-31

Dennis Ziemienski, Summer Thunderhead, Monument Valley, oil, 20 x 30.

We probably take them for granted more often than we should. This month, however, clouds receive a well-deserved tribute at Maxwell Alexander Gallery, where 12 leading western artists portray these billowing beauties of the sky in more than a dozen new paintings of the American West. Fittingly titled Cumulus, the exhibition opens on Saturday, March 10.

Devotees of historic western art might presume the show is a commemorative nod to early western landscape painters like Maynard Dixon (1875-1946), who frequently depicted massive, showstopping cloudscapes over low-lying horizons. But gallery owner Beau Alexander is quick to note that, while this group of contemporary painters may be influenced by such artists, it’s not the focus of the exhibition. “We’re really trying to look forward,” he says. “These artists are cutting their own path and doing something a little different.”

Among those portraying clouds in a new light are Eric Bowman, Scott Burdick, Phil Epp, Danny Galieote, and Michael Klein. The artists were invited to interpret the theme in any way—and any size—they saw fit, notes Alexander. The result is a diverse collection of cloud-infused scenes that range in tenor from whimsical to contemplative.

Bowman, a western native, has given the theme plenty of thought himself. “Clouds are such enigmatic elements in our landscape’s skies, constantly moving and shape-shifting, especially here in the West where they’ve helped define wide-open spaces like Montana’s Big Sky Country,” he says.

Clouds typically play a “backup role” in his landscape paintings, says the Oregon artist, but in his major work for the show, titled "Levels and Degrees" they take center stage. “I wanted to create some cloud iconography using various levels of depth, large-mass shapes, and temperature shifts to convey a larger-than-life impact,” he explains. Bowman strategically set his cloudscape over southern Utah’s ancient bluffs and canyons, both to support the composition’s vertical design and to create a “large-scale, heroic feel,” he says. “As a design feature, clouds can theoretically be shaped into any configuration imaginable, and in this case, hopefully they inspire our imagination about how large and legendary the West really is.”

Landscape artist Phil Epp has been painting clouds for years, and like Bowman, he thrills in their potentially endless configurations. In his cloud-dominant painting "Hilltop Trio", Epp portrays a triad of horses in the Kansas hills near his home. They are dwarfed, however, by a cobalt-blue sky with plump, unfurling clouds that fill nearly 80 percent of the picture plane. “In my imagery, it’s basically earth and sky, and clouds become the characters of the scene,” says Epp. “I don’t intend for them to be realistic. I make an effort to show vastness, space, and emptiness. Out West, you’ve got the ground ahead of you and the sky above you, and that’s about as basic and primal as it gets.”

If anyone can inspire us to glance skyward with a deeper appreciation for clouds, surely this group of artists can. “We all know what clouds look like,” notes Alexander, “but it’s not until master artists share their vision that our own vision opens up.” —Kim Agricola

To view the Cumulus exhibition, click here.

Southwest Art Previews Mark Maggiori Show

Show Preview | Mark Maggiori

By: Southwest Art | November 15, 2017

Mark Maggiori, In Altitude, oil, 24 x 30.

by Laura Rintala

A cowboy peers down at the rocky trail as his horse picks its way through the loose rock and sagebrush, while behind them the ground falls away to distant snowcapped peaks against a blue sky. In another scene—a nocturne—another cowboy shifts his weight in the saddle and gives his horse rein to make its way down a steep, shrubby incline, the full moon highlighting distant canyon walls. These two paintings, and seven more canvases that examine the often solitary beauty of cowboy life, are on view this month in Mark Maggiori’s solo show entitled Lonesome Souls. It opens at Maxwell Alexander Gallery on Saturday, December 9, with an artist’s reception from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.

“When I started work for the show, I was going up to Wyoming [and photographing] cowboys,” Maggiori explains. “For two or three days we were on the Continental Divide. It was very inspiring for me visually. When I came back, I wanted to paint what I had just experienced.” After working through his photos and making sketches, the artist realized a recurring theme: “I ended up painting mostly lonesome cowboys,” he says. “My feeling is that the cowboy life is very lonesome. It’s a feeling of being far from world reality and having symbiosis with nature.” And the painter, alone in his studio day after day, recognized the parallel to his own work. “There’s the beauty of [that solitude] as well as the hard part,” he says.

Lonesome Souls is Maggiori’s second solo show at the gallery and, notes gallery director Beau Alexander, his second solo show ever. “In this show we’re seeing Mark’s style develop. His ability as an artist and his voice as an artist has really matured since his first show in 2015. This show is cohesive and focused on the lonesome cowboy on the range in different scenarios.”

Maggiori pays particular attention to making his images timeless. “I don’t want to mark [a time period] through [the tack or] gear—when you’re a specialist you know it is [contemporary]. But I want to stay on the iconic side of the West,” he says. “That is what brought me to paint cowboys. That is what I have been fascinated with.”

And those cowboys are depicted as larger than life. “I cheat scale. My cowboys are 20 times bigger than they are supposed to be,” he says. And while there is limited human interaction depicted, Maggiori explores other relationships. “We don’t say enough about how important the horse is to that person being in that place and having that experience,” he says.

“The solo show is such a special event for collectors,” Alexander says. “In group shows you see one or two paintings by an artist, maybe three. But you can’t know an artist without seeing them in a solo exhibition, their small works, large works. Mark’s been working on this show for a long time, and we’re excited to be able to present it to the public.”

For more work by Mark Maggiori, click here.

Southwest Art Magazine Previews Glenn Dean's "Into the Night"

By: Southwest Art, April 14, 2017

Los Angeles, CA
Maxwell Alexander Gallery, May 20-June 17

This story was featured in the May 2017 issue of Southwest Art magazine.

This month Maxwell Alexander Gallery presents Into the Night, a solo show for Glenn Dean featuring 10 new paintings that explore the light at the end of the day and into the moonlit hours. The show opens with an artist’s reception on Saturday, May 20, from 6 to 8 p.m. “People get used to the light effects in bright works,” says gallery director Beau Alexander, but the more subtle effects found in these works “make the paintings so much more interesting, not only for the artist but for the viewer as well.” While western artists Frederic Remington and Frank Tenney Johnson were well-known for their nocturnes, Alexander says not many artists have really focused on them since then, and Dean felt inspired to do so.

Although Dean has worked with nighttime and sunset scenes in the past, this show focuses on the times of day when light is most challenging to interpret. “I spent most of last summer going out during the last half hour of daylight and doing little color sketches very quickly, working until I couldn’t see anymore,” Dean says. He also spent a lot of time walking around in the moonlight and just observing.

Dean is known for his simplified landscapes that create an illusion of detail—a style he developed over 15 years of painting outdoors—and these works take those simplified forms even further. “This show is really an exploration of light and color, working within the transition from the fading light of day to the moonlit night,” he says. “I wanted to explore how the changes in light affect how we see our surroundings, and how the surroundings themselves visually merge together and into the night sky, nearly losing all definition, unless defined by the direct light of the moon.” Dean finds working within that tight range of values and colors intriguing but also really challenging. “You want to be truthful to moonlight, but you can’t really see,” he explains, “so you have to make artistic decisions to add more life, more vibration of color working within that low color key. You can very easily push it too far, and it doesn’t feel right, or you don’t go far enough, and it is too dull and boring.”

Most of the works in the show include cowboy figures coming and going in the landscape, figures that offer the idea of a narrative, but one Dean keeps purposely vague. “That story is more in the viewer,” he says. The riders, like his work overall, create the illusion of detail “without banging the viewer over the head with it.”

Alexander notes that nocturnes can be hard for viewers to understand, but “when you see them in person, you realize that nighttime has a special, unique glow, and the subtleties and variations in value appear in a whole new light.” Into the Night remains on view at Maxwell Alexander Gallery’s new location in downtown Los Angeles until June 17. —Laura Rintala

To view more work by Glenn Dean, click here.