The Center for Western Studies

It has been said that Roy Andersen works with deliberation and supreme confidence. With family roots in Denmark, and a life-long interest in American Indian art, Andersen brings to his audience an unusual international perspective on nature that reflects both his affinity for animals and his belief in artistic authenticity.

He grew up on a horse farm in New Hampshire, and he learned about Indian customs from his many hours spent at the Chicago Museum of Natural History. He trained at the Chicago Academy of Fine Art and the Art Center School of Los Angeles.

Andersen was admitted to the Cowboy Artists of America in 1989.

Inspired by the sagebrush and wide-open horizons of Wyoming and Montana, Clyde Aspevig is a landscape painter with little formal art training.

He was born in Rudyard, Montana, and raised on a small working farm near the Canadian Border. He left the farm in 1969 to attend college at Eastern Montana College, but eventually dropped out, only to return later to receive a degree in art education. He taught for one year in Sandy, Oregon, and then returned to Montana to paint full time.

"Fired On"; Bronze, nd

A sculptor and painter of western subjects, Ernest Berke was born in Harlem, New York City. He was a self-taught artist and anthropologist, who became fascinated by cowboys and Indians.

His devotion to the West covers over four decades, completing more than 2,500 paintings and nearly 80 sculptures. He has portrayed the North American Indian with considerable accuracy and sensitivity, having lived with the Northern Shoshone Indian Tribe in Blackfoot, Idaho.

The son of a lithograph salesman, Oscar Edmund Berninghaus was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He was educated in St. Louis grammar schools, and then began to work as a lithography apprentice. His job provided him with the technical knowledge of printing, lithography, color separation, poster art, and engraving. The exacting needs of this aspect of commercial art would serve the young artist well, for it was his masterful draftsmanship that gave strength to his later creative work. While working, he attended night classes at Washington University and the St. Louis Society of Fine Arts.

In 1899, the Denver and Rio Grand Railroad hired Berninghaus to come west to sketch and produce watercolors of the mountain scenery, people, and villages in order to attract Easterners to their part of the country. This trip made him decide to pursue a career as a painter. He became of founding member of the Taos Society of Artists.

His style was one of short, quick brush strokes, which gave his work a unique texture. He depicted the Indians in a realistic, unromantic way, going about their lives as they actually did in twentieth-century New Mexico.

Born in New York City, George Browne was the son of the noted artist, mountaineer, and sportsman Belmore Browne. In addition to structured art training with his father from an early age, he studied art for four years at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Though a premature death, resulting from a firearm accident, cut short his promising career, Brown is acknowledged by collectors today as one of the century's finest sporting artists and bird painters.

Nancy Cawdrey spent most of her childhood overseas in France and England, and her work reflects these early influences. She has studied with a variety of artists, and continues to explore with oil, watercolor, pastel, and silk.

Line Camp on Smoke Creek" Oil/Canvas, 2002

A resident of Poplar, Montana, C.R. Cheek was raised on Montana's Fort Peck Indian Reservation. He developed an early interest in art, and won his first art award at age 12, with his pen and ink drawings. His workshop is 20 miles north of Brockton, Montana, and has no electricity or running water.

E.I. Couse was born in Saginaw, Michigan, and began his art career by sketching the Chippewa Indians who lived around his hometown. He attended the Chicago Art Institute and the National Academy of Design in New York. In 1887, he went to Paris to study at the Julian Academy. He was also one of the founding members of the Taos Society of Artists.

Couse is best known for his intimate images of Native Americans in moments of spiritual ceremony and quiet repose.

Born in Moscow, Russia, Nicolas de Grandmaison became a Canadian painter of Indian portraits. He studied art in Paris and at St. John's Wood School of Art in London before immigrating to Canada in 1923. He spent many years in Alberta, painting members of the Blackfeet Tribes, the Blackfoot, the Piegan, and the Bloods.

"Cowboy" Gouache, 1908

Maynard Dixon was born on a ranch near Fresno, California. A sickly child, Dixon spent much of his time sketching scenes near his family home. At the age of sixteen, he sent some of his sketches to Frederic Remington, who responded with praise and encouragement to continue his work. It was suggested that he apply to the School of Design in San Francisco, where he was readily accepted. He began his studies there in 1891, but found the approach too formal and withdrew.

Dixon's many works: sketches, drawings, paintings, illustrations, and murals, attest to the deep understanding he had of his subjects - primarily the desert and its inhabitants, the Indians, early settlers, and cowboys.

A major collection of Dixon's work is at the Art Museum of Brigham Young University.