Pastoral treasures
This story was featured in the March/April 2019 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art March/April 2019 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.
SOME OF ALLIE Zeyer’s most cherished childhood memories center around the routine drives she and her family would make from their home in northern Utah to Jackson, WY, where her father, landscape artist Michael Hadley, would sell his oil paintings. During those picturesque car rides following the meandering Snake River, says Zeyer, “I remember everyone being enthralled by the grandeur of the Tetons, and I’d look out my window and see these lacy cottonwood trees and barns and think, ‘Gosh, what’s wrong with me? I like these views better than the Tetons.’”
Today Zeyer (pronounced Zigh-er) still prefers intimate scenes of the countryside over nature’s more grandiose displays of beauty. Since she began painting en plein air five years ago, she has found much of her subject matter right in the Treasure Valley of southwestern Idaho, where she lives with her husband and young children. The area boasts views of the Boise Mountains to the north and the Owyhee Range to the southwest, but more often than not, Zeyer looks to the valley’s bucolic interior for inspiration—to its ample farmland, grazing cattle, old red barns, and humble cottonwoods. “There are these little gems, a little part of the past,” she says. “I don’t need to drive to southern Utah to paint the Vermilion Cliffs.”
Zeyer earned her fine-art degree from Brigham Young University, but she learned the crux of what she practices today through classes with artists Jill Carver, G. Russell Case, and Kathryn Stats. And though she’s a landscape painter, she has also turned to the expressive portraiture work of Nicolai Fechin and John Singer Sargent for guidance. “If you look at the build-up of their paint and how abstract some of that is, it just sucks me in,” says Zeyer, who garnered an award of merit from American Women Artists and an honorable mention from Oil Painters of America last year. “I think about how I can bring those wonderful qualities into my landscapes.”
But the artist’s work isn’t just about the paint. The mighty Tetons will remain for centuries to come; meanwhile, Zeyer’s subjects are fast disappearing. “The other day I went out to paint, and there are these two spots with barns that are demolished now,” she says. “With all the growth and development that’s happening, these are views that aren’t going to last forever.” —Kim Agricola
representationRelics Framemakers & Gallery, Salt Lake City, UT; The Mission Gallery, St. George, UT; www.alliezeyer.com.
This story was featured in the March/April 2019 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art March/April 2019 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.
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