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.”

Grant Redden's cover of Western Art Collector Magazine

Congratulations to Grant Redden for landing the cover of Western Art Collector magazine for October 2018. Be on the lookout for a show of his new paintings at our gallery this coming Spring 2019.

Western Art Collector Magazine Previews Mian Situ Exhibition

Cowboy focus

Mian Situ prides himself on the variety of his interests in the Western world. “I like so many subjects,” he says. “Chinese-Americans, mountain men, Canyon de Chelly, Monument Valley, historical scenes...I love all of it.” For his newest show, opening September 8 at Maxwell Alexander Gallery in Los Angeles, the accomplished painter will be laser focused on cowboys, the most iconic figures of the American West.

Situ, who’s originally from southern China, has been acquainted with the American cowboy nearly his whole life, even before he first lived in Canada and now the United States. “The cowboy was a legend even in China. We knew about them and were attracted to them, how they dressed, how they lived and how they acted,” the California-based painter says. “It was John Wayne really. And Tom Mix and all these actors that appeared on the posters. We didn’t see many of the movies, but we knew who they were from the magazines and the posters.”

The painter permanently settled in the United States in 1998, and since then he’s slowly absorbed the cowboy experience, including on location at ranches in the Southwest, as well as at rodeos where he’s seen roping and riding up close and at ferocious speeds and skill levels. The Maxwell Alexander show will feature Spring Time in the Rockies, which shows two riders roping a calf during a spring roundup as a majestic mountain range fills the background. In Ridge Riders, Situ paints two cowboys on a rocky butte with a vast mountainous background that seemingly envelopes the men in the landscape. While the new paintings often exemplify the cowboy experience, they also elevate another Western icon, the cowboy’s horse. “I want to show how important the horse was,” Situ adds. “They are magnificent animals, especially to paint.”

In Coffee at Dusk, a man prepares to call it a day as he sits next to a glowing campfire under fading light. The cowboy is certainly a central figure in the painting, but the horse commands more attention as it occupies more real estate and it leads the viewer deeper into the painting thanks to Situ’s stunning composition, which features an interesting diagonal posture of the horse as it stands on a slightly declining hill.

“For me, the challenge for that one was the color. Nighttime is such a romantic feeling that I wanted to capture it for the painting,” he says. “The lighting leads your eye in and lets you focus on the subject. The contrast also helps make the painting look more colorful. It’s interesting to play with light in these ways, but it’s difficult to capture with your models—the light is so hard to get right.”

Situ, whose works are in some of the most important Western collections in the country, recently won the coveted museum purchase award at the Prix de West in June. His show will be on view at Maxwell Alexander Gallery through September 29.

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.