Ralph Oberg was born in 1950 and raised in Colorado since 1954 and has always loved the wild mountain country and its wildlife. An avid outdoorsman he has hunted, fished, hiked and climbed the mountains of the American West and beyond all his life. His fathers cabin west of Denver gave Ralph his first experiences of the mountain world early. He also knew early in life that drawing and art were his passion. A brief stint at CSU was cut short due to the curriculum not meeting his needs. Briefly working as an architectural illustrator and graphic designer ended with his first trip to Alaska on a month long mountaineering expedition in 1973. His 50 year art career started with highly rendered watercolor portraits of birds and mammals. Repeated appearances at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Museum’s “Birds in Art” show in the early 80’s and his 1982 election to the Society of Animal Artists were high points of his early career. The work of Rungius, Liljefors and Kuhnert inspired his movement into oil paints. Rungius’ field sketches showed him the need to paint outdoors to develop his skills for the “animals in the landscape” studio works he wished to do. So in 1987 he began attending professional workshops with many of the contemporary plein air masters of the day, (Wolfe, Aspevig, Williford, Chmiel, Whitcomb, Lynch, Reynolds, Jacob etc) and for 10 years his focus was on observing the colors and values of the landscape on location, although the studio wildlife subjects were still his mainstay. He has maintained an equal love of the mountain wilderness landscape and the wildlife subjects, and resisted the tendency to be pigeon-holed as one or the other. Today his outdoor studies inform the studio paintings with a sense of place and a more impressionist technique. He and his artist wife, Shirley Novak, live and work in Southwest Colorado. Ralph was elected to Signature Membership in the Plein Air Painters of America in 1998 (the first such group in the country), the Society of Animal Artists in 1984, and the Northwest Rendezvous Group in 2001.