About the Artist

Don Rantz has devoted his career to capturing the subtleties of light found in the skies and land of the American West. He was raised in Williams, Arizona, and spent his boyhood exploring the forests and mountains behind his home. From an early age, he grew to appreciate the land, water and sky of Arizona. He studied oil painting and figure drawing at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff in the ‘80s, preferring realism at a time when the prevailing winds blew in the direction of anything but representational accuracy. After college, he worked a great number of different jobs, traveling and living throughout the West, studying its many faces and adding to his vocabulary of shape and light.

Don first started working with pastels in 2003, and quickly developed the ability to capture light in the style he had always dreamed of, a style he could never quite capture in oil. He found that pastels’ extensive range of dark and light colors enabled him to convey the realistic feeling of the land in an exciting, new way. Though he has incorporated the use of digital photos in the studio, he continues to rely on the visual acumen developed through plein air painting.