Show Preview | Douglas Aagard

In October, Douglas Aagard will exhibit 15 to 20 new landscapes at Legacy Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. As an added highlight, Aagard will be in the gallery on October 9 and 10, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. when visitors will have the opportunity to see the artist paint live. While he admits some pressure to painting with people looking over his shoulder, Aagard says, “It can be energizing. I’m looking forward to it.”

Aagard’s luminous rural landscapes evoke serenity, tranquility and a bucolic peace. He first seeks composition, and his paintings are grounded in looming mountains, pastures with grazing horses, cattle near creeks, the shapes of barns or hay bales. “I always gravitate to nature, and to me, composition is number one. That’s where you need to start,” he says. “If you have good composition, you can almost mess it up with any color.”

The painter says light is his second essential for inspiration. Aagard’s landscapes seem to glow from within. He is an atmospheric artist who seems capable of painting thin air. “Good light is paramount. Light is so, so important to me,” he explains. “You can see a drab scene 100 times and then the light changes and it becomes incredible, like someone put a frame around it and set it apart. And that doesn’t always mean bright light, but a good light source.”

Aagard, who started as a watercolorist, now works in oils with a palette knife. He paints his smaller works on board and larger pieces on canvas. “As a watercolor artist, I liked bold strokes,” he recalls. “When I tried my first painting with a palette knife, it was so much fun. It turned out so cool and I was really intrigued. There’s depth I can’t achieve with a brush that I can with a knife.”

Gallery visitors will witness Aagard’s impasto process. “Once I started painting with a knife, I was able to mix and blend paint right on the canvas,” he shares. “It’s fantastic because I’m not muddying my paint as much.”

Aagard’s paintings defy pigeonholing, yet his landscapes suggest impressionism. He elaborates, “There are impressionistic leanings. You can pick out areas of my painting that look like impressionism. As I get older, I gravitate to a little more, a little more, a little more loose, but I’m still a representational painter.”

Aagard now lives in a small town in Utah, but his love of landscapes is rooted in his childhood in Western Montana and on his grandfather’s sheep ranch in the high mountains of Utah. “As a kid I loved to hike the canyons, and the scenery was incredible. It spoke to me,” the artist says.

He continues, “As a young boy walking with my grandpa in the aspen trees, taking care of sheep—that feeling, that’s what it comes down to. The joy, the happiness, the feeling of well-being, the love of this great, beautiful world, speaks to me really deeply, and I want to show that to people. My job is to see that beauty and do my best to portray that.” —Colleen Smith

contact information(505) 986-9833legacygallery.com

This story appeared in the October/November 2026 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Subscribe today to read every issue in its entirety.

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