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