The Sovereigns

A single bison stands in a field of dry golden grass, dwarfed by a wall of clouds that glows orange and pink against the darker sky behind it. Mark Maggiori built his reputation on exactly this: skies that take up two thirds of the canvas and look like they are lit from inside. Below the clouds sit snow-dusted peaks, then a band of aspens turning yellow and amber, then the flat meadow where the animal grazes alone. Follow the treeline to the right and you will spot a thin curve of water catching the last light, a detail that does more to suggest the chill of a late autumn evening than any amount of blue shadow could.

Maggiori's path to Western painting was an odd one. Before he picked up a brush seriously, he was the frontman of the French rock band Pleymo, playing to crowds across Europe. He moved to the United States, discovered the work of early Western artists like Frank Tenney Johnson and Maynard Dixon, and started painting cowboys, horses, and the enormous skies of the American Southwest. His work belongs to a contemporary revival of that tradition, admired by collectors and often faulted by critics for being a little too polished, a little too much like a movie poster. That is a fair reading, though the title here is doing something simple and honest: the bison, nearly wiped out in the nineteenth century, gets the whole field to itself.