Living With Mountains (section)

Look closely at this scene and you can almost feel the cool mountain air. A lone cowboy sits atop a sturdy white horse, pausing on a grassy slope dotted with wildflowers. Behind him, snow-capped peaks rise dramatically beneath a sky filled with towering, swirling clouds. The rider wears a red bandana shirt and a wide-brimmed hat, looking out over the valley as if taking a quiet moment to soak in the view. This is a section of a larger work called "Living With Mountains" by Mark Maggiori.

Maggiori is a French-born artist who fell in love with the American West and now paints cowboys, horses, and big open landscapes for a living. Interestingly, before becoming a painter, he was the singer in a French rock band, so his path to the canvas was anything but ordinary. His work carries on the tradition of classic Western painters like Frederic Remington, but his real signature is the sky. Those dramatic, glowing clouds show up again and again in his art, and here they steal the show, turning a simple scene of a man and his horse into something that feels grand and timeless.