Mark Maggiori

Mark Maggiori is a French-American painter who has become one of the most talked about names in contemporary Western art. Born in France in 1977 and raised near Fontainebleau, he had a whole first career in music as the singer of the French band Pleymo before he ever took up serious painting. A cross country American road trip as a teenager planted the seed, and after training in academic drawing at the Académie Julian in Paris, he committed to painting the American West in 2014.

His subjects are cowboys, Native American riders, and the wide desert light of the Southwest, and he is best known for his dramatic clouds, which pile up like solid, sculpted forms above the figures below. Critics tie his work to earlier Western masters like Frederic Remington and Frank Tenney Johnson, while noting that his outsider's eye and his background in photography and film give the paintings a cinematic punch. Maggiori settled in Taos, New Mexico, where he has also worked to support art education for local schoolchildren.