5 MASTERS OF LANDSCAPE PAINTING
FEATURED ARTISTS
Ben Aronson
Woody GWyn
Wolf KAhn
JivAn lee forrest moses
Ben Aronson
Ben Aronson (b .1958) is recognized as a respected and evocative painter of the contemporary urban landscape. His art expressively translates everyday forms of metropolitan life such as rooftops, skyscrapers, streets, and sidewalks, into arrangements of geometry and motion, light and shadow. Through his masterful, loosely painted evocations of atmosphere, color, and light, Aronson’s paintings convey the sensory experience of a captured moment in the city. He was the recipient of the prestigious 2006 Hassam, Speicher, Betts, and Symons Purchase Fund Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Aronson’s paintings are included in the permanent collections of more than fifty museums, including the De Young Museum, San Francisco; the National Academy Museum, New York; and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
Ben Aronson, Gondoliers, 2024 Oil on panel, 12 x 12 in.
Ben Aronson, Midtown Rain, 2020 Oil on panel, 12 x 12 in.
Ben Aronson, Paris Morning, Left Bank, 2022 Oil on panel, 12 x 12 in.
Woody GWyn
Woody Gwyn (b. 1944) was born in San Antonio, Texas and received his arts education from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Having moved to New Mexico in 1974, Gwyn found in his new home an awe-inspiring sense of space and scale, the ideal environment to center his artistic practice.
Gwyn is recognized as one of today’s finest representational painters of the American landscape. He is known for his incredible level of detail, radiant lighting, and an unconventional approach to composition. With extraordinary luminosity, purity of color, and the minutest of detail, it might be said that Woody Gwyn is a painter of clarity itself and his paintings are reminders of how refreshing and exhilarating nature’s lucidity can be.
Gwyn is regarded for his passion in pursuing what he calls “the truth of the land.” For Gwyn, this truth exists in the humblest of subjects: whether depicting Western mesas, tranquil ponds, or shimmering oceanic vistas, the marks of Gwyn’s brush offer new and calming ways of seeing a world he reveres.
His work has been exhibited in national and international museums including the Tel Aviv Museum; Le Centre Nationale des Arts Plastiques in Paris; the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston; the Luther W. Brady Art Gallery of George Washington University in Washington, DC; and the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, among others. Gwyn was the 2010 recipient of New Mexico’s highest artistic honor, the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts for Painting.
Woody Gwyn, October II, 2017
Egg tempera on gessoed paper, 20.75 x 15.50 in.
Woody Gwyn, Summer Coast 2, 2022-2024
Oil on linen, 66 x 48 in.
Woody Gwyn, Fog Bank 2023-2024 Oil on panel, 30 x 42.50 in.
Woody Gwyn, Rio Hoja I, 2020 Mixed media on paper, 6.25 x 9.38 in.
Woody Gwyn, Condor Pass, 2022-23
Egg tempera on panel, 48 x 84 in.
Woody Gwyn, Cloud Hill, 2023-24
Oil on panel, 4.75 x 24 in.
Wolf KAhn
Wolf Kahn (1927-2020) was a German-born American painter, whose unique blend of Realism and formal discipline of Color Field painting distinctively sets his work apart. One of the most reknowned artists of the 20th century, Kahn embodies a synthesis of artistic traits -- the modern abstract qualities of Hans Hofmann (Kahn was Hofmann’s studio assistant), the palette of Matisse, Rothko’s sweeping bands of color, and the atmospheric qualities of American Impressionism. Born in Stuttgart, Germany, Kahn immigrated to the United States by way of England in 1940. Kahn was the recipient of a Fulbright Grant, a J Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Award in Art from the Academy of Arts and Letters.
Wolf Kahn, Born in a Summer Haze, 1984 Oil on canvas, 36 x 52 in.
Wolf Kahn, Windbreak, 2016 Oil on canvas, 28 x 32 in.
JivAn lee
Jivan Lee (b.1984) is originally from Woodstock, NY, and studied painting and environmental policy at Bard College in Annandale-On-Hudson, NY. He has become a leading figure of contemporary landscape painting, known for his lively sense of color and his textural application of paint. His art incites a visceral involvement with the landscape, which he achieves through a highly physical plein-air painting process. He communicates resonant feelings of being in a place and surrounded by natural beauty by emphasizing the sheer physical nature of his work. Rather than blending his brushstrokes together, Lee allows his gestural marks to remain as sculptural as possible, highlighting them as unexpected, spontaneous sources of pattern or rhythm. The surface of a Jivan Lee painting thus becomes an energetic terrain all its own, brimming with fluid activity reminiscent at times of action painting.
Following graduate school, he taught for the University of New Mexico in Taos, and founded and directed the Project for Art and the Environment. His paintings have been exhibited nationally at museums and educational institutions and covered in numerous publications such as Western Art & Architecture, Southwest Contemporary, The Santa Fe New Mexican, Phoenix Home and Garden, Fine Art Connoisseur, Southwest Art, Art Business News, and Plein Air Magazine.
Jivan Lee, Rift Valley - Afterglow, 2024 Oil on panel, 60 x 48 in.
Jivan Lee, Sunset at the Big View, 2022-24 Oil on panel, 36 x 30 in.
Jivan Lee, Blossom Tree, 2016 Oil on panel, 48 x 36 in.
Jivan Lee, West from Rift Valley, 2024 Oil on panel, 24 x 18 in.
forrest moses
Forrest Moses (1934 – 2021) was known for painting graceful visual responses to place through distinctive and complex rhythms of color, line, and form that reveal the sudden transcendent quality of the simple experience of being in nature.
Establishing a dynamic tension between abstraction and representation, Moses’s masterful depictions of serene woodlands and placid bodies of water emphasize both the tranquility of their subject matter and the eloquence of understated gestures. He presents an art of intimation rather than disclosure, where seasons are suggested by subtle color harmonies, expertly balanced compositions include no more than is necessary in the service of evocation, and a uniquely refined and fluid elegance informs each and every brushstroke
Moses, Chama Bosque, 1992 Oil on canvas, 26 x 32 in.
Forrest
Forrest Moses, Galisteo Riverbed #3, n.d Oil on canvas, 40.25 x 42 in.
Forrest Moses, Morning Light October, 1991 Oil on canvas, 72 x 48 in.
