Taryn Boals is an emerging contemporary artist whose work channels the raw emotion, movement, and enduring spirit of the American West. Drawing inspiration from sweeping Western landscapes, migratory wildlife, and the resilient personalities of Rocky Mountain pioneers, Boals creates compositions that feel both ancient and immediate. At the heart of her practice is process. Boals works extensively with Nitram Liquid Charcoal, a water-soluble evolution of one of humanity’s oldest artistic materials. Charcoal connects her to the earliest image-makers, the artists of Lascaux Cave, Altaxmira Cave, and Chauvet Cave. Ancient, cave-dwelling depictions of animals pulse with life across tens of thousands of years. Boals embraces that lineage, finding kinship in their instinctive mark-making and reverence for animal form. Her work is characterized by sweeping gestures and visible revisions. Corrections, drips, and erasures remain embedded in the final surface, revealing a process that is honest and unguarded. For Boals, the marks themselves carry meaning. They embody traces of anxiety, struggle, awkwardness, and refinement existing simultaneously. The fluidity of liquid charcoal allows her to move quickly and intuitively, building atmosphere and motion while preserving a sense of immediacy. Washes bleed and settle; bold lines carve structure; passages are pushed and pulled until balance emerges. This raw materiality is often juxtaposed with strong, independent subjects — wild horses, moose, elk — rendered with both structural integrity and expressive force. The tension between the gestural medium and the solidity of her forms creates a visual language that feels timelessly primitive yet distinctly contemporary. Sophisticated in composition yet rooted in biological essence, her work speaks to the primal relationship between land, animal, and human. Boals is continually inspired by her surroundings in Jackson and the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem. From the cyclical migration of the region’s elk herds to the shifting terrain they traverse, she is drawn to fleeting moments, a change in light and a collective surge forward. These observations translate into compositions filled with physical movement layered with emotional resilience. Boals received her BFA from Montana State University and her MFA from Northern Illinois University. Though raised in the rural Midwest, she now calls Jackson home, where the immediacy of the landscape continues to inform her evolving practice. Taryn Boals creates work that feels excavated rather than painted, as though each image has been unearthed from the shared memory of the West itself.