Immersive Views

Western Art Collector | July 2022

JOSH ELLIOTT GOES BIG — REALLY BIG — FOR HIS NEWEST SHOW AT CLAGGETT/REY GALLERY IN COLORADO.

By Michael Clawson

“Sun Stones” | Oil | 60“×115“

Painting has its own challenges, including all the usual ones: color and paint, composition and design, and storytelling and themes. So when an artist makes a work that is larger than normal, they are willingly accepting all those challenges, but also injecting new and profoundly different ones into their studio.

For painters, the questions they find themselves asking must seem preposterous at first: Will the large canvas fit into the studio? Will my easel hold it? Will I be able to reach the top? Do I need to buy a ladder? How much is this frame going to cost? How will I ship it? Wait, is there an extra zero on that shipping invoice? Hey Siri, can you show me driving directions to the gallery? Hello, U-Haul, how much is a 10-foot box truck for a weekend? Should my next works be miniatures?

For Josh Elliott, who set out to create the largest works of his career for a new show at Claggett/Ray Gallery, these questions answered themselves naturally as the work developed. For instance, when he couldn’t reach the top of one of his newest paintings, Elliott and his daughters built a simple scaffold out of five-gallon buckets and wood planks. It was a lo-fi solution, but it worked. “My easel goes pretty high, especially with my 11-foot ceilings, but the painting was so big I couldn’t really move the easel up or down anymore and I had to add a new counter balance to the easel. I tried painting sideways for part of it, but that’s not really ideal,” Elliott says from his Montana studio. “Another thing that helped was when I was up on the planks I would want to have the paint right there so I was using my grandfather’s handheld palette. He was never a professional painter, but he had some great stuff I inherited a couple years ago. He studied under Grant Wood at the University of Iowa, so it was neat to use his art supplies.”

Elliott’s show, titled GRANDEUR, opens July 31 at Claggett/Rey in Edwards, Colorado. It will have only six paintings in the exhibit (three of which appear in this article), but all six are among the largest works the painter has ever created. The idea for the show came in 2017, when Elliott was presenting new work with sculptor Tim Shinabarger. Bill Rey, owner of Claggett/Rey, came over and they started dreaming of large pieces. “I just remember telling Bill, ‘Let’s do it!’ It took me five years, but we did it,” the painter says. “One of the reasons it took so long was that I didn’t want to do a large work just for the sake of size. I wanted to have solid ideas and do each work for the right reasons.”

Back then, in the years before and after 2017, Elliott had done a number of larger pieces that performed strongly at Claggett/Rey. Some of those earlier pieces were Cloud Curtain, a 60-inch-wide sunset with snow and sapphire skies; Alkali, a 48-inch painting of the high desert; Fall’s Finest, a 40-inch scene with fall color and a peaceful stream; and River Rhythms, a 60-inch-wide examination of reflections on water. But even larger works were still elusive. Like many artists he was enamored by massive landscapes at museums, including Thomas Moran’s 148-inch-wide Shoshone Falls on the Snake River at the Gilcrease Museum. “I just love the vastness of that scale, where you can almost step into the painting because that’s how large it is,” he says. “It also gives artists opportunities to explore more detail and texture. In several of these new works, I was using larger brushes with bigger brushstrokes, but I really didn’t want to just paint a small painting big, but rather paint a big painting with that same level of detail that I normally paint. I want simple statements, but strong overall design.”

One of the still-untitled works on his easel is a desert scene from the Vermilion Cliffs area in Northern Arizona. The 115-inch-wide painting has a mostly dry desert wash that makes a distinct S-shape curve through the center of the composition, while eroding riverbanks reveal boulders hidden within the sandy soil. “I loved the idea of the rocks tumbling down the side and revealing the bons of the land,” Elliott says. “And working at a larger scale really allowed me to get in there and show the land even better.”

“Gilded Grove” | Oil | 96“×60“

Another new piece that will be in Grandeur is Winter’s Design, a snow painting showing layers of thawed and frozen ice winding through a pristine landscape. “For this one, I was attracted to the sculped ice that the river had designed after the ice thawed and froze and thawed and froze, over and over again, until it created this incredible ice that you could see down into,” the artist says. When asked if white paintings are challenging, he chuckles. “I didn’t truly think about all the white when I stated. I noticed quickly because there are huge areas of white. The trick is to make you feel like the snow is folding around itself. You want to see structure in snow like that and it can be hard to paint what’s underneath giving it structure. It all comes down to subtle values and color temperature. It’s tricky, but it was fun too.”

A third work in the show is Gilded Grove, the 96-inch tall vertical piece that tested the functionality of his easel and prompted a makeshift scaffold. The painting shows a fall scene in Colorado's Rocky Mountain National Park, though Elliott admits it could just as easily be near his studio in Montana. The piece has layers of nature painted onto each other: a pine forest in the far distance, a golden meadow just in front of that, a stand of yellow-leaved aspens in the center, a stream in the mid-foreground and a grassy cluster of foliage in the immediate foreground. And because the painting will tower over viewers, it will feel like a doorway into a lush forest world.

Elliott freely admits that not many collectors even have room in their homes for these works, but whether or not they are safe market bets or not is not something that entered his mind. “I wanted to paint them for the right reasons. I wanted to see if I could do it, and also really push myself and my painting,” Elliott says. “My reasoning was pure. And if they sell, well then that’s even better.”

Even the gallery acknowledges that large paintings are not common, but they are worth the risk. “There is a strength and conviction in the paintings of Josh Elliott, where his textures and layers are as exciting and interesting as his subjects and compositions. It’s so great to be able to host a major show of work like this, and it is unprecedented in the gallery world today,” Rey says of the show. “This is not nostalgic paintings of a world gone by, but actual locations of the West he loves. I think his time in the field as an observer and deep thinker shows through his creative truth, no matter the scale of each painting. They are just different, and we are honored to represent Josh Elliott, and walk this artful path together.”