Julee Hutchison | Full Immersion

By Gussie Fauntleroy

When Julee Hutchison was a young art student, prone—as many of us are at that age—to forming instant opinions about people, she watched critically as a fellow artist assumed a fencing stance to paint: feet planted wide, shoulders shifting with the broad movements of his painting arm. To Hutchison the posture seemed showy, maybe a little pretentious, but then she tried it at her own easel at home. The result was humbling, since she had to revise her impression of the artist, but also exciting. It offered what felt like a full immersion in the experience of painting. “I said, yes, I get it, it’s the whole energy of the body!” she says.

Another early lesson also stayed with her. During freshman art classes at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, she glanced at another student’s drawings and thought, “What is she doing? She can’t draw!” Fast-forward to a senior exhibit featuring the student, who had gone into sculpture. “Her work was so expressive; it was phenomenal,” Hutchison remembers. “Walking out, I thought, that’s art. It’s from her soul!” In that moment, she understood that passion can be as fundamental to great art as technical skills.

Happily, Hutchison has both. She delights in plein air painting in part because the ever-shifting light and weather in the Rocky Mountains, where she lives and paints, requires her to work quickly. “Make a good decision and put the brushstroke down,” she says. Yet, the confidence and skill to make those instant decisions has accrued over decades of continual learning and experience at the easel. And one other element contributes to her award-winning art: a deep connection with the subject itself, the spectacular Colorado landscapes, wildlife and pastoral scenes she enjoys every day from her home near Telluride.

Although Hutchison grew up in a Chicago suburb, as a young child she fell in love with the West during summer family road trips. She remembers being awestruck by the national parks, especially Yosemite and Zion. “It fed my heart,” she says of those experiences. Her love of art began early as well. When she was in second grade, her grandmother Marguerite, who had studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, started giving her lessons. The two would sit together in Marguerite’s living room, Hutchison drawing while her grandmother worked at her easel. “I knew from then that I wanted to be an artist,” she says. Her grandmother’s influence was so great, in fact, that Hutchison signs her work by affectionately including her middle initial “M” for Marguerite.

Through high school the aspiring artist constantly drew and painted. At Miami University she majored in printmaking, studied painting, and told herself she was not interested in commercial art—until she realized fine art might not support her right away. So after graduation she took a job as assistant display manager for Nieman Marcus in Chicago. Then, wanting to live in the West, she moved to Phoenix and began doing graphic design for an ad agency.

One day, not long after joining the agency, Hutchison was walking down a hall to get coffee when, at the end of the hall, she saw her future husband, Steve, for the first time. “I thought: Yes, please,” she says, smiling. The two hit it off and established their own graphic art and writing business. They married, and their marriage and business has been a happy foundation for more than 40 years, although both she and Steve are highly selective about the commercial work they do these days.

A few years into Hutchison’s time in Phoenix, fine art came back into her life when she signed up for a plein air painting workshop through the Scottsdale Artists’ School. That first class “ignited something in me,” she says. For the next 10-plus years she continued taking workshops, studying with acclaimed artists C.W. Mundy, Scott Christensen, Michael Workman, Tim Lawson and others. Each one provided artistic wisdom that greatly increased her painting fluency.

One lasting shift in approach took place during a figure painting workshop with Carolyn Anderson. As the participants were working, Hutchison asked Anderson to look at her canvas, saying, “I don’t know what to do with the background.” The instructor glanced at the painting, turned to her and said, “That’s your problem! Your problem is you’re thinking about the background separate from the figure.” Hutchison noticed that in Anderson’s paintings, and in the work of other artists she admired, the edges between the foreground figure or objects and the background often merge and blend into each other. “I thought, Oh! I need to develop and consider the whole painting and not isolate the parts!” she recalls. From that moment on, all parts and pieces of an image began interacting as she paints.

While Hutchison’s body of work these days includes figurative and still life imagery and occasional interiors and cityscapes, most of her focus is the landscape. In 2004 she and Steve bought land on the side of a mesa northwest of Telluride. They transformed a small, hundred-year-old barn into their home, where Hutchison’s studio looks out on grassy, tree-speckled land “like a carpet rolling up to the mountains,” and longer views of magnificent peaks and ridges. In summer, cows meander along the mesa, leased by a local rancher. Their presence reminds the artist of her college days, when a family connection took her to a nearby dairy farm where she would spend hours in the field, sketching the gentle creatures. Watching mother cows with their calves began opening her to a deep love of animals and appreciation for their emotional natures.

Along with animal life and the landscape as it changes with each season, Hutchison lives with an enormous sky whose moods shift quickly and often dramatically. “I could spend a lifetime walking out my back door and painting,” she says. Indeed, STORM’S CURTAIN OVER THE ROCKIES depicts a view from her deck. In it, storm clouds amass over snowy peaks as the late afternoon sun illuminates a few areas of cloud and mountainside. “One of the things I love here is the interesting contrast between warm and cool—warm light in the sun and cool light in the shadows,” she says.

Hutchison’s goal with many of her landscapes is to communicate the smallness of our human scale within the immensity of the natural world. “I think it’s important to see ourselves that way,” she reflects. “It commands respect for nature. When I’ve had challenges, it’s comforting to me to be a small part of a big picture.” It’s also why she and Steve wanted their barn-turned-home, with its hand-hewn beams, to have a small footprint. “We wanted to be part of the land,” she says, noting that the presence of deer, elk and other wildlife add to a sense of cohabiting, rather than dominating, the landscape.

While Hutchison uses photographs for reference with some of her paintings, others begin as oil sketches done on location, where she can feel the air, accurately record colors and take in her surroundings with her whole being. Back in her studio she translates these small works into full-scale paintings. Lately, her studio time has also included exploring new media. The slightly abstracted AUTUMN’S STAGE, for example, was created by utilizing cold wax to create a foundation of surface texture. Over this, the artist applied layers of paint, some thick and some scratched into the base layer, producing an image of snowy purple mountains towering above golden aspens.

Trying something new in the studio reminds Hutchison of another kind of challenge she successfully undertook. When she lived near Phoenix she earned her pilot’s license, discovering that she absolutely loves to fly. She often flew to Sedona for breakfast and envisioned eventually flying a tail-dragger and landing in remote spots to paint. But then she and Steve moved to the Rocky Mountains, a very different aeronautical environment. Yet the thrill of having piloted a plane continues to inspire her studio time. “Flying pumped me up,” she says. “It’s the confidence to take risks and then that incredible feeling of conquering challenges!”

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 informationjuleehutchison.com

representationMockingbird Gallery, Bend, OR, mockingbird-gallery.com.Paul Scott Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ, paulscottgallery.com.Fringe Gallery, Telluride, CO, fringegallery.com.InSight Gallery, Fredericksburg, TX, insightgallery.com.Cimarron Song Gallery, Montrose, CO, cimarronsonggallery.com.

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

The post Julee Hutchison | Full Immersion appeared first on Southwest Art Magazine.