Michael Ome Untiedt

Mr. Untiedt strives to "paint like Mark Twain wrote." He is a gifted story-teller who turns his subjects into narratives through his use of color, imagery and brush strokes. "I'm descended from a long line of tool users, farmers, ranchers, and carpenters," he explains. He worked on his grandfather's eastern Colorado farm all through high school before trading in his wrench for a paint brush. He studied art at the University of Denver, but soon grew disenchanted with the academic approach and decided to buy an old truck to tour the country in, teaching himself to draw and watercolor on the road. But it wasn't until he began using oil paints to capture the Western landscape of his boyhood that he finally found his home as a painter. The artist often includes buildings in his landscapes in order to explore the way their geomtry interacts with wilder surroundings. He is less interested in being photographically accurate than, as he put it, "searching for what the thing I'm seeeing feels like." Mr. Untiedt won Best in Show at the 2002 Masters in Montana. Untiedt was honored with the Tuffy Berg award as the top emerging artist at the CM Russell show in 2004.