Doyle Hostetler | True Calling

By Gussie Fauntleroy

Doyle Hostetler’s fine art career appears to have followed a highly accelerated trajectory—within a year of first teaching himself to paint in 2019, his work had been accepted into major regional shows, where it garnered attention and awards. He quickly began gaining collectors and within five years was represented by several galleries around the West. But the journey to success wasn’t actually that fast. As he puts it, everything he did in the years before becoming a wildlife artist turned out to be “a rehearsal for what I was meant to do.”

It started with a happy, free-rein boyhood in Ohio and Colorado and moved through 35 years of drafting, architecture, and home design and building. Everything he learned and refined, from precision drafting and design, to building in wood, to technology and organizational skills eventually translated into his fine art career. Hostetler brought a strong sense of self-discipline and confidence to his newfound calling, as well as an intense passion for the natural world and the creatures that inhabit it.

Rural Ohio, where the artist spent his first seven years, was a place of “boy stuff, pure childhood”—building rafts on a pond with his older brothers, fishing with his father, rescuing turtles crossing the road. He had eight siblings, grandparents close by and no television in the Mennonite/Amish family’s home. In many photos of Hostetler as a young boy, his head is bowed over a coloring book, a box of crayons by his side. When he was 8 years old, his father, a cabinetmaker, moved the family to Colorado Springs, realizing a longtime dream of living in the West.

The Rockies blew open the mind of a boy who already loved the outdoors. “I had never seen nature like that,” he recalls. He found himself consumed by the wonder and beauty of the forests, rivers and especially the wildlife—elk, deer, bear, coyotes, even the humble squirrels and raccoons in the wooded area north of Colorado Springs where the family soon moved. “I feel like I just got tattooed with it all,” he says.

A bike ride away from the family’s home was a museum specializing in wildlife art, where Hostetler’s art teacher took the class on field trips. Paintings by Robert Bateman and Dennis P. Anderson captivated him, and when the museum held an art contest for young people, Hostetler submitted a pastel drawing of an eagle’s head. It took first prize, winning him a year’s membership to the museum. He was there every chance he got, carrying his sketchbook to study and copy drawings and paintings.

When he was 16, Hostetler’s family moved to Phoenix, where he took drafting in high school—it was the pre-computerized era when all drafting was done by hand—and was hired as a draftsman by a friend’s father, an electrical engineer. “So that let me take my hobby of drawing into drafting,” he says. A couple of years later he started working for an architect for whom Hostetler’s father was building cabinets. Hired because of his drawing skills, he began learning about architecture, and when the field turned to computer-aided design (CAD), he learned that as well.

As the years rolled on, Hostetler found himself building and designing homes and eventually established his own design/build firm. At one job, he caught a glimpse of another possible future. It was in Oracle, Arizona, which was becoming an art town, and his clients, a couple, were both artists. “Looking back, I see clearly that I had always been an artist,” he says, noting that in all his design and building he tended toward creativity and perfectionism.

Finally, after an extended period of working on an especially large project, he realized he was burnt out on construction. He decided to see if he could make art, and in particular, wildlife paintings. In high school he had used acrylics to paint a tiger and had been dissatisfied with the result, so he was determined to learn to paint with oils. He spent countless hours studying art that inspired him, watching YouTube videos, reading and attending art shows. “That first year I just wanted to see if I could paint,” he says.

At the Phippen Museum’s 2019 Western Art Show & Sale, held annually over Memorial Day weekend, Hostetler met landscape painter Bill Cramer, who generously answered his many questions. Continuing to pursue every avenue of learning he could, Hostetler soon discovered that the single most critical factor in his progress was putting brush to canvas. “I decided that every single day I would do something related to art,” he says. “Looking at art, studying technique or painting—just keeping it always in my mind.”

In August of that year, he submitted two paintings to the Mountain Oyster Club’s Contemporary Western Art Show in Tucson, Arizona. Both were accepted. Then his work was accepted into the Phippen show, and that summer he began traveling to galleries to present his art. When the first major gallery, Sorrel Sky in Durango, Colorado, took him on, he remembers being so excited that he had to pull over on the drive home to Arizona to calm down from the adrenaline rush.

Animals have always held an enormous fascination for Hostetler, so when he began painting he knew his subject. Today he and his wife live north of Phoenix across a dirt road from state land inhabited by deer, cougars and other creatures, and javelinas sometimes cross the patio in their travels. As many as 60 quails at a time come by and wait for the artist to toss them dried corn.

On canvas, Hostetler tends to focus on North America’s large, hoofed animals including bison and elk, as well as wolves and elusive big cats. For reference, he sometimes photographs at bison ranches in Colorado and Oregon but relies primarily on images by other amateur wildlife photographers, buying or trading for usage rights. While he doesn’t sketch on location, he gains inspiration and ideas during road trips around the West and time spent on isolated land the couple owns in northern Idaho. As his mind becomes quiet, impressions from the landscape and sky stand out, like a shaft of sunlight through heavy, gray clouds in a snowstorm.

Hostetler enjoys placing wildlife in winter environments, a perfect fit for his minimalist approach to backgrounds. His goal is a subtle sense of the animal’s natural setting, but more through mood or atmosphere than detail and color. He first tried this approach with a painting of an appaloosa he photographed in a bright green field. Back in the studio, he intuited that the field should be a soft gray instead, producing a compelling contrast with the horse itself. “That was an aha moment,” he says. “I like that very clean, simple, unflashy background, with a concentrated point of focus.”

SNOWFLAKE IN JUNE is a powerful close-up frontal view of a bison, with a suggestion of icy grasses beneath him and a cloud of breath in the cold air. At 7 by 5 feet, it represented the next important shift in Hostetler’s work, larger than anything he’d painted before. “It took me to another level and changed my whole concept of what I’m capable of as an artist,” he says. Another new direction emerged with THE RUSH OF WINTER, measuring 44 inches by 8 feet, three wolves bounding through deep snow, the dramatic movement adding to his previous portrait-style approach.

Hostetler is never one to let his hands or creativity stand still—he designed and built his home, crafts frames for all his paintings, and works on his own vehicles. Lately he has been exploring black and white in his art, drawing wildlife in graphite pencil to play with composition for larger paintings or as small, finished works in themselves. He also imagines a future in which his painting may become a little more impressionistic or abstract. “I just keep going,” he says. “I keep pushing myself, to move forward and get better.”

Colorado-based Gussie Fauntleroy writes for a variety of art publications and is the author of three books on visual artists. Learn more at gussiefauntleroy.com.

Contact Informationdoylehostetler.com

RepresentationRaitman Art Galleries, Breckenridge and Vail, CO, raitmanart.comGallery Wild, Jackson, WY, gallerywild.comMockingbird Gallery, Bend, OR, mockingbird-gallery.comA. Banks Gallery, Bozeman, MT, abanksgallery.comThe Signature Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ, thesignaturegallery.comSorrel Sky Gallery, Durango, CO, sorrelsky.comPhinney Gallery of Fine Art, Joseph, OR, phinneygallery.comMain Street Gallery, Park City, UT, mainstgallerypc.com

Upcoming ShowsSolo show, Gallery Wild, opening June 5Solo show, Raitman Art Galleries, Vail, August 1-3Solo show, A. Banks Gallery, September 12-30

This story appeared in the June/July 2025 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Subscribe today to read every issue in its entirety.

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