Living with Mountains

A single horseman rests on a grassy slope, gazing out at a sight that would make anyone go quiet. Mark Maggiori, a French artist who traded Paris for the wide open spaces of the American West, made his name painting moments just like this one. The cowboy sits in a red shirt and pale hat aboard a white horse, the two of them nearly lost against snow topped mountains and green hills scattered with tiny white flowers. Overhead, enormous rounded clouds pile up in soft heaps, and they carry much of the drama in this 2021 painting called Living with Mountains.

Clouds like these have become Maggiori's calling card, and he paints them with a sense of theater that feels almost like a movie scene. That makes sense once you learn about his past. Before turning to the brush, he worked as a musician and directed music videos back in France, so composing an image for full effect comes naturally to him. The gap between the small rider and the giant world around him says everything the title hints at. To live among mountains is to accept your own smallness, and this quiet cowboy seems perfectly at peace with that fact.