Legacy Gallery, Santa Fe, NM September 19-29
From the Grand Canyon and the desert Four Corners region, to the woodlands and streams of the Rocky Mountains, the varied landscapes of the American West invite visitors to revel in nature’s grandeur. How appropriate then that artist Brad Teare should represent such settings through oil paints he generously and dynamically applies to canvases with palette knives, creating textured scenes that invite viewers’ eyes to explore. Teare’s sensuous approach to such subjects is on display in around 15 paintings for a new show, appropriately titled Painted Earth: The Impasto West, at Legacy Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, from September 19 to 29. The artist will be present on the 19th from 5 to 7 p.m. for the opening reception—at which, he says, “I’ll be more than happy to say a few words.”
Mere words, of course, cannot begin to capture the experience of beholding Teare’s paintings. He creates them using impasto, a Renaissance technique in which oil paint is applied as a thick paste, producing a near-sculptural surface. The artist credits two key influences that led him to adopt impasto. First, for 20 years he worked in New York as a top professional woodcut illustrator, including creating the iconic artwork for the cover of the 1992 nonfiction bestseller Women Who Run with the Wolves. Then, one day, he visited a Vincent Van Gogh show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, examining the paintings up close. “And it dawned on me,” he says, “that a lot of his work is inspired by the rhythmic feel of a woodcut, and I loved the way his thick paint invited closer observation.” Teare began exploring impasto in his own paintings, and he now excels at that technique in the fine art career he pursues from his base in northern Utah.
That location provides him with an ideal vantage point for exploring the settings he now celebrates. The 40-by-40-inch MOUNTAIN CASCADE, for example, portrays a snowmelt-fed stream he came across while hiking last autumn in the backcountry of the Uinta Mountains, not far from his home. The sketches he made and photos he took informed the final studio scene. “I’m really dependent on my source material,” he notes. The enthralling canvas, which seems to capture every detail like the distant peaks, the golden leaves and the mossy rocks along the bank, was accomplished with the assistance of “literally hundreds of different palette knives, from a very small and fine one up to almost a trowel.” Those same immersive qualities can be found in Teare’s most expansive scenes, such as CANYON RIM LIGHT, based on a series of plein air studies he did last spring at Moran Point during a week along the Grand Canyon’s South Rim. Here, Teare’s renderings of the endlessly variegated rock forms become pleasing abstract paintings in miniature.
In such manifold ways, every work in this latest outing from the artist rewards repeated and close appreciation. “If people love color and texture,” Teare simply sums up, “this will be a show that they might want to see.” —Norman Kolpas
contact information(505) 986-9833legacygallery.com
This story appeared in the August/September 2025 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Subscribe today to read every issue in its entirety.
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