Show Preview | Jared Sanders

This story was featured in the August 2015 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art August 2015 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story!

Guests attending the August 
20th artist’s reception for Jared 
Sanders’ new show at Altamira Fine Art will experience more than just the usual meet-and-greet and sip-and-snack that such gatherings entail. The evening’s highlight is a talk Sanders presents on The Architecture of Painting.

“I’ve been doing a lot of structures in my paintings,” says the artist, referring to the barns, farmhouses, silos, and other rural structures that often appear in his realistic yet spare landscapes. What he hopes to explore even more deeply, however, is “not the literal architectural elements, but the fact that every painting has its own architecture, beginning with being a rectangle or a square, and then 
everything you as a painter put within those four corners relates to that form”—in other words, the way he employs his minimalist compositions “to use the bare minimum of information that conveys what I saw,” he says.

Those very qualities are what Audrey Parish, one of Altamira’s gallery directors, finds so compelling about Sanders. “There’s a quiet grace to his paintings,” she says. “Yet the design makes them very dynamic as well, connecting you to them. The decisions he makes when planning paintings help set them apart. His work is very sophisticated, and it’s fun to watch him keep refining it and getting better and better.”

More than 12 of his latest canvases are on display during the 13-day exhibition. They range in size from a 30-by-30-inch image of a small hay shelter to a nearly 8-foot-high “vertical landscape with a few cows in the foreground, some snow, and a very misty background of willows and pines that fade back into the sky, which makes up the majority of the painting,” says the artist. “I hope that people looking at them will see a landscape or a structure in a way that they hadn’t noticed before.” Overall, he hopes viewers come away “feeling a sense of calm,” especially now that his works are becoming “more simplified, with larger areas of solid color, where your eyes can rest,” he says.

That precisely describes the kind of vistas Sanders seeks out in the real world as he and his wife, Paula, wander pastoral roads in his home state of Utah as well as Idaho, Wyoming, 
Montana, and the Southwest, searching for “something special to paint,” he says. “We spend a lot of time on the road, just going by the seat of our pants.” When he sees something that captures his imagination, they pull over and Sanders jumps out to take photographs for reference.

That process explains the title of this month’s show, Chosen Road. But, he adds, there’s also a second meaning. “Painting is the path I’ve chosen for my life. It’s not always easy. It’s very 
unpredictable. We never know what’s over the next hill or around the next bend.” —Norman Kolpas

contact information307.739.4700www.altamiraart.com

Featured in the August 2015 issue of Southwest Art magazine–click below to purchase:Southwest Art August 2015 print issue or digital download Or subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss a story!

MORE RESOURCES FOR ART COLLECTORS & ENTHUSIASTS• Subscribe to Southwest Art magazine• Learn how to paint & how to draw with downloads, books, videos & more from North Light Shop• Sign up for your Southwest Art email newsletter & download a FREE ebook

The post Show Preview | Jared Sanders appeared first on Southwest Art Magazine.