Mountain Trails Gallery, located in the Village of Tlaquepaque, celebrates the month of February with a new exhibition “In Love with the West” as they showcase artists who focus on what makes the American West so meaningful as well as memorable.

The gallery’s landscape artists bring awareness to the breathtaking beauty of the land and seasons, figurative artists share their passion for the history and culture unique to the West, and wildlife artists tell the story of nature from their own impressions and experiences. The exhibition opens with a reception on First Friday, February 4, 4-7 p.m.

Along with unique experiences and individual outlooks, artists who are in love with the American West bring a certain joy to their work that communicates their own exuberance and optimism of living in such beauty and peace, all the while remembering its deep and varied cultures and history as well as what it took to allow for the opportunities.

Mountain Trails Gallery welcomes Arizona painter Shawn Cameron to the gallery with her rich storytelling paintings that chronicle the activities of life on a working ranch. Her paintings of cowboys and characters, cattle and horses, sweat and leather, and long days on the range fill her canvases with impressions that seems to exude the very dust of everyday life in which she is immersed.

No matter the subject, Cameron has a poetic way of telling her story that conveys an elegance of intention, as exemplified in her spirited “Dawn to Dusk” 20-by-16 oil. This Arizona rancher makes no mistake about her message that there is uplifting freedom in a day well spent on a working ranch out West.

Mountain Trails Gallery has become a destination for the variety of landscape artists and styles, and they all share their love for the West. In expanding the offerings, the gallery is also proud to announce that expressionistic painter Greg Dye, with his colorful Southwest desert and mountain paintings, will be joining the gallery as will Tamara Rymer who is in love with her own West as experienced from Texas to New Mexico. Tamara’s dreamscapes are memories and stories from childhood when cowboys and traders, travelers and outlaws, horses, and Native Americans crisscrossed the ranch owned by her great-grandparents.

In viewing Western landscape paintings by such award-winning artists as Gregory Stocks, Bill Cramer, Susanne Nyberg, Betty Carr, Linda Glover Gooch, Marcia Molnar, Joshua Been, Susie Hyer and Michelle Condrat, it is clear these artists cannot wait for the day to begin, and to begin a new work of art.

Drawing from their travels to the Grand Canyon, Red Rock Country, hiking trails, and outdoors in vistas of the West, each day’s local conditions inspire something new. The impressions of the changing light, the color, the unique passages of a desert bloom or atmospheric pallor over the land is a kind of inspiration that can make the ineffable more tangible for these artists as they begin to lay down that first brush of paint onto a canvas.

Realist paintings by Lisa Danielle and Sue Krzyston, who never stop seeing the beauty in a Pueblo pot, a beaded bag, or a southwest weaving, continue to awe viewers of their work. Although both artists have an individual style, they are collectors of artifacts and visit museum and private collections in search of remarkable objects that are works of art in their own right.

Part of their passion is to shine a light on the anonymous makers from historic Native American Pueblos and Nations who innately made beautiful utilitarian objects for their tribe, but it was not their cosmology to be recognized as individual artists.

The passion for the West with each of the gallery’s award-winning artists has been front and center for more than 35 years, and bronze sculpture has been leading the way. Western storytellers such as Vic Payne, Dustin Payne, Deborah Copenhaver Fellows, Susan Kliewer and new artist Pedro Ramos all sculpt with a fervor as if their life and land depended upon the outcome of the story being told.

A figurative sculptor, Kliewer presents her latest work in its clay stage, before going to the foundry. Her “Maiden in Repose” is a tribute to art history’s focus on the beauty of the female form. With Kliewer’s historic Native American dancers as well as with her Western storied sculpture, this artist always builds the foundation of a figure in clay from the inside anatomy (bone structure, musculature, even adding a heart) to the outside of the figure before adding any drapery. Her new sculpture allows the beauty of pure form to shine on its own.

Colorful detailed wildlife paintings by Jennifer O’Cualain, Barbara Rudolph, Sandra Byland, Adele Earnshaw and Joe Garcia give animal lovers a good reason to visit during this celebration.

Sculpture by the gallery’s animal artists, including Raymond Gibby, Bryce Pettit and Mark Edward Adams, also add to the richness of visuals available. Wildlife artist Jeremy Bradshaw gives an ebullience to his colorful contemporary bronzes which suggest more than detail, and that includes seeing the delight each creature has in being alive.

“In Love with the West” also opens with new jewelry by Susan Adams and Nancy Neumann who are passionate about the beauty of stones and the shaping of medal as they offer additional delightful choices that make the month of February a joyful celebration of creative talent from all the gallery’s outstanding artists. Mountain Trails Gallery Sedona is in Tlaquepaque Arts and Crafts Village, upstairs overlooking the Patio de las Campanas.

Information provided by Mountain Trails Gallery.