Under the radar

Gendron Jensen

With his full beard and flowing corona of snow-white hair, Gendron Jensen looks a little like a poet from another century. Sometimes he sounds like one, too. “Nature is dispassionately nurturing at its heart,” he intones at one point during an interview. “I can reach...

Christopher Rico

Although they are not overtly religious, Christopher Rico hopes his subtly explosive black and white paintings convey a spiritual quality—“whatever that means,” the soft-spoken painter hastens to add in conversation. The son of a Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force,...

Carole D’Inverno

In the 18th and 19th centuries, history painting was considered the loftiest genre to which a European or American artist could aspire. High drama from ancient and contemporary events—battle scenes or coronations, for instance—inspired painters to produce grandiose...

Jackie Skrzynski

Like many kids, Jackie Skrzynski (pronounced skrin-ski) was an ardent draftswoman from a very young age. “The idea of moving lines around the page, and then having them turn into something recognizable, was just magic to me,” she says. These days, as her work has...

Patricia Moss-Vreeland

Patricia Moss-Vreeland launched her career producing that most traditional of genres—still life. After pursuing studies at Washington University in St. Louis, MO, and the Philadelphia College of Art, she ended up in Rome as part of Tyler School of Art’s program...

Jerry McLaughlin

Though he grew up poor in a part of rural southern Ohio that falls within the cultural swath known as Appalachia, Jerry McLaughlin was a precocious kid who learned to learned to read at the age of 18 months. A few years later, after his mother bought a set of the...

Peter Roux

Peter Roux believes an attraction to landscape, one of the principal motifs in his work, may stem from the many upheavals of his childhood. His father was a career marine and for the first 12 years of his life the family moved on average once a year. “I think I was...

Jodi Colella

Though she is often categorized as a fiber artist, Jodi Colella works with all manner of materials that extend the boundaries of what we think of as sculpture. These have included aluminum screening, found driftwood and gnarly twigs, plastic sleeves for newspapers,...

Andrew Lyght

Though it may not be immediately apparent in his elegant abstractions in many different mediums, Andrew Lyght’s works are infused with memories of his boyhood in Guyana, a small multicultural country on South America’s northern coast. The only child of a single mother...

Mokha Laget

What Mokha Laget recalls best about her childhood in Algeria—and what has stayed with her throughout her career as an artist—is the quality of the light in North Africa. The daughter of a French diplomat, she spent the first six years of her life in the former colony...

Lee Albert Hill

Lee Albert Hill grew up in Midland, TX, at a time of huge changes to the landscape and the economy as oil and gas discoveries transformed the small city in West Texas into a booming oil patch. His father, a geophysicist, was “out on the land a lot,” says Hill, who...

Tracy Linder

It’s hard to imagine an artist more authentically “Western” than Tracy Linder. She grew up on a family farm not far from where she lives now in Billings, Montana. As a girl, she participated in all aspects of life lived close to the land—harvesting, irrigating, and...

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Photo credit: Joe Fig Self Portrait: Collinsville, 12 ½” x 31 ½” x 21”, Mixed Media, 2013. Courtesy Cristin Tierney Gallery