Rick Howell’s masterfully balanced compositions of the diverse terrain of the Colorado-New Mexico borderlands have earned him a reputation as one of the leading contemporary landscape painters in the American West. Howell chose to depict the extraordinary within the ordinary, emphasizing both the serenity of his subject matter and the power and tranquil majesty of the everyday landscape. He drew considerable inspiration from the land that surrounds his studio at the mouth of the Conejos Canyon in the Southern San Juan Mountains. Favoring the use of studies over photographs as reference for their “raw honesty,” as he put it, Howell often painted studies en plein air for weeks at a time, even in the harsh winter months. His work emphasizes the necessity to create strong design by simplifying the wealth of information presented by nature in order to preserve a specific mood. His art gives one the sense of having feet firmly planted on the ground before the mouth of a winding river or a vast, open plain tingling with the light of early evening. Howell employed the canvas as a space where he catalogued and combined his own experience and interpretation of the landscape with a careful palette to create a scene that demonstrates the importance of capturing a feeling rather than relaying a mere visual reproduction. After receiving a degree in Biology from Colorado State University, he pursued a successful career managing stock brokerage firms in Denver. Primarily a self-taught landscape painter, Howell left the business world in 1993 to fully dedicate his time to oil painting. With a keen eye for color, atmosphere, and shifting light, Howell has garnered top awards presented by the American Impressionist Society, Salon International’s International Museum of Contemporary Masters, and the Oil Painters of America. In 2010, in partnership with The Nature Conservancy, Howell founded Art for Endangered Landscapes, in the hope of preserving the landscapes which inspired such depth of emotional articulation in his paintings.