Susie Hyer has been drawing and painting since she was a child. “I remember drawing a pair of ceramic flamingos my mother used to keep on her dining room table when I was four years old”, she says. “I knew from that moment I would be an artist when I grew up.”

Attending art programs at Moravian College, The Baum School of Art, and the University of West Florida in the 1970’s, she continues to study and expand her repertoire and abilities. Attending the Art Students League of Denver and participating in workshops whenever she can, with artists such as Quang Ho, Kim English, Jay Moore, Ron Hicks, and Kevin Weckbach. In 2001 she completed the Denver Botanical Gardens Certificate in Botanical Art and Illustration.

This award winning artist has been working professionally since 1976 and has been the recipient of a number of scholarships, grants, and awards for her work, including two international design awards. Her work has appeared in numerous galleries and national exhibitions, hangs in many private and corporate collections. She has been published in the celebrated books “Art of the National Parks: Historic Connections, Contemporary Interpretations”, “Landscapes of Colorado,” She has been a featured artist in Southwest Art , Fine Art Connoisseur, Plein Air and Art of the West Magazines. Her work has also appeared on the covers of Art Life, Evergreen Living and Mountain Country Life. The “American Art Collector” and ‘Best of American Art and Artist” series of books has also published her work. Susie Hyer has been a National Vice President of the Women’s Caucus for Art, President of the New Orleans Chapter, and is a signature member of Oil Painters of America, and an associate member of the American Impressionist Society, Plein Air Artists of Colorado, Laguna Plein Air Painters and Plein Air Painters of Hawaii. Her work is represented by a number of galleries along Colorado’s Front Range and the Southwest.

She maintains a home, studio, and multiple gardens in Evergreen, CO where she lives with her husband, sometimes one or two grown children, a dog, 2 cats and numerous elk, deer, and other wildlife. She continues to push herself in new directions and challenge herself artistically, traveling to paint en plein air, and working from sketches, field studies, and photos in the studio. She teaches workshops out of her studio in Evergreen and is an invited juror for local and national exhibits.

With both a father and a grandfather who worked as highway engineers, artist Stephanie Hartshorn had an almost mandatory detour through an engineering major, followed by a fulfilling decade in architecture before taking her first painting class. The first time Indian red mixed with Phthalo blue, it felt like a road home.

Largely self-taught, Stephanie has had the good fortune to study over the years with two of her heros in Denver. As her work continues to evolve, she emphasizes abstracting details to create a kinetic realism.

“I consider my paint as a sculptor might her clay. Each brush stroke takes on a form of its own and, in the end, creates textures that explore and express an object or scene.” Her panels rarely sit static in the easel; she turns them sideways or upside down throughout the process — sometimes even laying them flat on the floor—exploring ways to layer and move paint. “What I’m tapping into is a dynamic experience of weaving an image together, of building it.”

A fifth-generation Coloradan, her subjects fall into diverse camps. First, the West that she grew up around: an iconic landscape of barns, fields and crisscrossing power lines. Second, the West that grew up around Route 66. Living just a stone’s throw from Denver’s storied Colfax Avenue, Stephanie finds continual challenge in capturing and contextualizing the signs and sights from the bygone motor-hotel era.

Most recently, she has shown in the18th American Impressionist Society National Juried Exhibition in 2017; a featured artist at Door County Plein Air Festival 2017; received “Award of Excellence” from Plein Air Magazine at Laguna Plein Air Invitational 2017, Laguna, California; Coors Western Art Exhibit and Sale at the National Western Stock Show 2018.

Representation: Abend Gallery-Denver, CO, Sorrel Sky Galleries-both Santa Fe, NM & Durango, CO, Gallery Mar-Park City, UT

Don Sahli is an extraordinary American painter whose artistic talent was recognized early in his life and nurtured by the legendary Russian master, Sergei Bongart. Bongart, one of the foremost Russian colorists studied at the Academy of Art in Kiev under Peter Kotov who was taught by the famed Nicolai Fechin.  Fleeing Stalin’s regime, Bongart came to the United States and became one of the most renowned art instructors of the Russian method in this country. While many artists of today studied with Bongart, only a few were invited to be his apprentice.  A year after Sahli began his formal art education at the University of Texas in Austin, his talent was recognized by Bongart who invited him to study with him at the prestigious Bongart School of Art in Los Angeles.  Sahli then became Bongart’s last apprentice for three years before his death in 1985.

Having painted professionally since the age of 17, Sahli decided to carry on Bongart’s legacy by establishing the Sahli School of Art.  Continuing in the teaching tradition of the Russian School of Painting, Sahli has mentored and taught more than 500 students.  As a master artist, Sahli is best known for his vibrant and colorful American landscapes and still life which resonate with echoes of the Russian Impressionists as evidenced by his enlivened brushstrokes and uninhibited use of brilliant color.

As a plein air painter, Sahli explains that “outdoors things change quickly; the outside world is in constant motion-the Divine at work.  Quickly the scene will change as it did when painting this work in Crested Butte when I experienced fall one day and winter the next-within 24 hours.  To capture the “snow on the aspen” was a wonderful experience for me.”