James Reynolds Sold at Auction Prices

PROPERTY OF A PROMINENT TEXAS COLLECTOR JAMES REYNOLDS

PROPERTY OF A PROMINENT TEXAS COLLECTOR JAMES REYNOLDS (American, 1926-2010) Near Wilcox, Arizona, 1986 Oil on canvas 18 x 24 inches (45.7 x 61.0 cm) Signed and dated lower left: James Reynolds / '86 James Reynolds was born in California and received his early training as an artist there at the Kahn Institute of Art and the School of Allied Arts. He began his career as a commercial artist and spent several successful years working in the movie industry. By 1967, however, he was working as an artist who specialized in scenes of both the old and modern west. He moved to Sedona, Arizona in that year, met and befriended artists Joe Beeler and Charlie Dye and was voted into membership in the Cowboy Artists of America. Over the years, he became one of the group's most successful members and frequently won awards in the organization's annual sales and exhibitions at the Phoenix Art Museum. He also was a member of the National Academy of Western Art and is the only artist to ever win the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum's Prix d West purchase award, the gold medal for painting, and buyer's choice award in the same year. He perfected an impressionistic style and expert use of color, much in the style of one of his early artistic influences, Frank Tenney Johnson. Both painters excelled in creative a distinctive mood with color and light. Today his work can be found in many museums and private collections. Prior to his death earlier this year, Reynolds began devote an increasing amount of his time to painting landscapes of the American West. He gave workshops on landscape technique and confined his teaching to only those artists whom he thought already possessed great skill. To be accepted into one of Reynolds' landscape classes was an honor in itself. Reynolds had long been interested in mentoring younger artists and was instrumental in founding the Scottsdale Artist's School. Given the numerous awards that he won, perhaps his greatest tribute came from other artists who considered him a master painter. He has frequently been hailed as an "artists' artist," and many of his colleagues have collected his work. Near Wilcox, Arizona, 1986, shows his ability to capture the desert landscape with its many nuanced colors and shadings of light. Here Reynolds leads the viewer's eye carefully from the brown sage of the foreground with its soft brush strokes and delicate shadings of color to the mountains rising in the background. The cool colors of the mountains contrast effectively with the warm shades of the foreground. The overall effect places the viewer in the midst of a landscape that has a rapidly changing light giving the feeling of being present just as the morning turns to day.