J Keith Zudell Fine Art, Gallup, NM
Keith Zudell is a painter who has embraced landscape forms, in order to capture the elusive dazzle of his environment, or at least record his own wonder and joy at the endless bounty of color and light, which nature casts on his tranquil New Mexico world. Working in oils and wielding a thick, impasto style, his art is emphatically defined by mass and volume rather than precise lines, reflecting his ultimate goal as an artist which he enacts with each painting: to reveal a new way of seeing the world, rather than just reproducing the world that he sees.
Surrounded by the famously majestic landscapes of the southwest, inspiration is never in short supply. Really, it's a painter's dream, for one who aims to present nature not in some photo-realist style, but to convey the grandeur, the astonishing beauty inherent in the impossibility of harnessing those singular, fleeting moments when the light and the clouds and those deceptively static rock formations somehow come together.