Western Art Collector Magazine Previews John Moyer's Debut Exhibition

John Moyers has found a great place to reside within Western art: his work has a traditional feel to it, especially in his incredible paint quality that’s loose and evocative, and yet he has an experimental streak in him that pushes his work into the contemporary wing of the genre. 

“I’ve always tried to do my own thing, to paint different stuff,” Moyers says. “I paint for myself. And sometimes experimentation comes out of it because I would be bored out of my mind if I couldn’t experiment.”

Moyers will have a new show, “Echoes of the Land,” opening June 15 at Maxwell alexander Gallery in Los Angeles. It’s his first solo venture at the gallery, where he has previously had work available in the group shows. Of the eight new works that will be available will be new Native American portraits, and several new cowboy paintings, including “Turbulence,” which shows a rider valiantly clinging to his bucking horse.

“I try to do one or two cowboy pieces a year, so when I do them I want them to be very different. Of course, over the years there has been so many cowboy paintings, so it can be a real struggle to really develop a unique painting, so I fiddle with them for a long time. I like this one because it’s a variation on the bucking horse,” Moyers says, adding that he and his wife, painter Terri Kelly Moyers, recently moved from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to California. “The move kept us busy for a long time, so I’m excited to once again be doing more cowboy pieces like this.”

While the cowboys remain an important part of Moyers’ studio, it’s his depictions fo Native Americans for which he is most widely known and respected. The new show will include pieces suck as “Chinook Winds” and “Kooteney Man”, both of which feature the artist’s experimental use of color. In both paintings he’s uses warm colors and their complementary hues-including electric blues, lightly applied pinks, and glowing oranges- to create magnificent portraits that present these historic figures in a more contemporary style, one more similar to Andy Warhol than Frank Tenney Johnson.

 “I love playing around with complementary colors, just really focusing on them, even substituting colors in where they work best,” he says. “This is where experimentation is really fun for me because I can dial in all these different colors – I use a really high-end color wheel- in really unexpected ways. I’m trying to stay away from these, romanticized, cookie-cutter Native American figures. I want them to feel more spiritual and unexpected.”

To view more work by John Moyers and the exhibition, click here.

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

Western Art Collector Magazine Highlights Maxwell Alexander Gallery

Maxwell Alexander Gallery is located in the South Park district of downtown Los Angeles, just a couple streets over from the Convention Center and Staples Center. In recent years, downtown LA has become one of the most sought after locations in Los Angeles. Maxwell Alexander Gallery is continuing its service to out-of-state clientele but has also gained a group of new collectors this past year who are new residents of downtown LA. As a result, sales have doubled in 2018 and the gallery looks forward to continue the trend in 2019. Keeping things interesting with multiple exhibitions running each month in its front and south galleries, the gallery’s primary focus is on high-quality art. “I can say with confidence, no other gallery in the Southwestern market has a roster as strong as ours. We are developing new artists’ careers, but we are lucky to have the biggest names all under on roof,” says Beau Alexander, president. In March, Maxwell Alexander Gallery is hosting a three-person exhibition featuring legendary painters Howard Post, Gary Ernest-Smith and Bryan Haynes. In April, an exhibition will be held for Grant Redden, his Los Angeles debut. In May the gallery hosts the thirst consecutive solo exhibition for Eric Bowman.

American Art Collector Magazine Interviews Beau Alexander about Maxwell Alexander Gallery in Downtown Los Angeles

Maxwell Alexander Gallery is a leading West Coast destination for some of the country’s best realists, dubbed “The New Breed of Fine Art.” The gallery specializes in middle and early career artists with exceptional technique and a unique vision. Noted artists include Jeremy Mann, Serge Marshennikov, Cesar Santos, Joseph Todorovitch, Kim Cogan, Michael Klein, Joshua LaRock and David Kassan.

“Maxwell Alexander Gallery is located in the South Park district of downtown Los Angeles, just a couple streets over from the Convention Center and Staples Center. In recent years, downtown LA has become one of the most sought-after locations in Los Angeles. Recent articles have shown 35 new high-rise building projects, many of them including residential units,” says Beau Alexander, president of the gallery.

“Needless to say, the market is booming. We are continuing to service our out-of-state clientele, but we’ve also gained a whole group of new clients this past year who are new residents of downtown LA. As a result, sales have doubled in 2018 and we look forward to continue the trend in 2019.

He continues, “The roster of master artists exhibited in our white walled, 16-foot high ceiling contemporary gallery, has transformed typically modern collectors to take a second look at contemporary realism— and add works to their growing collections. We are thrilled to be in the middle of this growing market and a worldwide destination for enthusiastic collectors.”

In February, the gallery will host an exhibition for Todorovitch featuring his new series of muted-toned figurative works that feature hist of color, creating a dreamlike sensation.

Western Art Collector Reviews G. Russell Case Show

G. Russell Case’s works often show the immensity of the land and sky towering over the desert. The size of his subjects is imposing and magnificent-terrifying when you think of your own place among the grandeur. And yet his monumental mountain cliffs and endless skies feel accessible, in large part to his careful inclusion of human figures, structures, or even just clusters of sheep that offer a visual scale that brings viewers into the painting without overwhelming them in the scenery.

“Adding those things helps with the vastness of the desert,” Case says from his Utah studio. “I’m drawn to these big, open places. And they really are quite big. The land just seems to go on for forever.”

Case, who has a new show opening at Maxwell Alexander Gallery in Los Angeles on May 5, will be presenting as many as 10 new works, including pieces like Between a Rock and a Hard Spot and Vermilion Flats, both of which feature stunning rock formations and distant cliffs, as well as smaller more intimate scenes of sheep and Native American sheepherders in the foreground. “Growing up on and around Indian reservations, you really do get to watch the human-scale elements of the land as these people walk through. It gives you some insight into their daily routine, and their personal stories, as they walk through these landscapes that are ruthless and barren,” the artist says, adding that the ruthless elements of the land can be seen in his works. “You can see in the land the struggle for existence as sagebrush stretches for miles and miles and then out in desert there’s a dot that is a person’s home. It reminds me a lot of Edward hopper, who did these great street scenes in Maine and the shut down shops filled with lonely silence.”

The new show also displays Canyon de Chelly, Repetition in Clay and Autumn Canyon- works that are punctuated with dramatic shadows that caress cliff faces and deeply carved ravines. “Shadows and other dark areas are usually what the composition hangs on. I draw with the shadows, and those areas anchor the painting,” Case says. Shadows are the silent partner in the painting, We see color and light, but it’s those parts of any painting that inform the composition.”

Other works on view include Coming Rain and Spring at Tabletop. Both are colossal landscape scenes with riders trudging through the endless sagebrush amid the monuments of the desert.

For the show exhibition, 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.

Logan Maxwell Hagege Featured on the Cover of Western Art Collector

Logan Maxwell Hagege's painting " Pursuit of Happiness" is featured on the cover of February 2018's Western Art Collector Magazine. This painting will also be on display at the Autry Museum this February. Congrats to Hagege on another excellent piece.

To view more work by Logan Maxwell Hagege, click here.

WESTERN ART COLLECTOR COVERS "TAOS" GROUP EXHIBIT

The small town of Taos, New Mexico, has provided inspiration for Western artists since Joseph Henry Sharp first visited there in 1893. The art haven is the subject of a new group show at Maxwell Alexander Gallery, which opens with a reception from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. on September 23 and remains on view through October 7, and features the artwork of Danny Galieote, Kim Wiggins, David Grossmann, John Moyers, Tim Solliday and Logan Maxwell Hagege.

“The mix of cultures in Taos, its history and its beautiful surroundings make it a fascinating place to paint,” Grossmann says. His painting Clouded Sunset, Taos, captures an adobe structure called La Morada on the outskirts of Taos, which was part of a Catholic monastery dating back to the late 1700s. “The evening that I did this painting, the silence of La Morada seemed to carry a hidden history, a feeling echoed by the clouds that veiled the glowing sunset. I wanted to capture the sense of deep solitude and the way that the adobe walls seemed so connected to the land.”

In Galieote’s The Watchers, three protectors watch over their Pueblo family. “I wanted the figures to conjure a feeling of order and stability and that nothing could get past their glistening inscrutable eyes,” Galieote explains. “The middle figure seemed to naturally take his place as the wisest and the one who will have the final word to carry forth in war or in peace.”

Taos is an alluring subject for Wiggins. The landscape and the history imbue a sense of importance in his work. “My work, One Night at Taos Pueblo, centers on the iconic San Geronimo de Taos Mission located at the Taos Pueblo,” he explains. “In the painting two beautiful Pueblo children stand outside the mission under the light of a full moon. This painting is both symbolic and ethereal in nature hopefully capturing the very heart and resilience of the Taos people.”

View the show preview HERE

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Maxwell Alexander Artist Len Chmiel Wins Award at Prix de West

Oklahoma City, Oklahoma June 2017

The 2017 Prix de West Invitational Art Exhibition and Sale finished up this year’s successful award’s ceremony at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum this past weekend. The show saw $3.1 million in art sales, and brought out 700 fans and collectors to the event, held in Oklahoma City. Maxwell Alexander Gallery attended to support gallery artists Scott Burdick,   G. Russell Case, Len Chmiel, Glenn Dean, Josh Elliot, Logan Maxwell Hagege, Jeremy Lipking, Susan Lyon, John Moyers, Howard Post, Matt Smith, and Tim Solliday.

T. Allen Johnson won the Prix de West Purchase Award and will have his piece “Nursery Tree” joined into the museum’s permanent collection.

Maxwell Alexander Gallery artist Len Chmiel was awarded the first-time Wilson Hurley Memorial Award for landscape painting with piece “Transparent Water Colors”. Bob and Margaret Mills sponsored the award.

The show will continue to exhibit until August 6th, 2017. Included are some highlights from the show below. For more work by Chmiel or other Maxwell Alexander Gallery artists click here.