The Gerald Peters Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new and classic paintings by Theodore Waddell.  The exhibition is available to view online. A digital and soft cover catalog will also be available.

For over five decades, Theodore Waddell has pursued his passion for art.  His work, now iconic of contemporary American Western painting, is collected by museums and owned privately and publicly across the globe. His abstract impressionistic paintings of horses and cattle dotting the rural Idaho and Montana landscape reflect the American experience of living in the West and his love of the land. The bold brushstrokes, luscious textures, colors and generous layering of impasto work in his paintings create glimpses of the harshness and beauty of contemporary ranch life in the high plains and mountain valleys of the Rocky Mountains.

I am a western artist in that I live in the West and have been making art for 61 years. My first big trip out of my home state of Montana was to study art in New York where I could absorb the influences of abstract expressionism. When I returned home to begin ranching and raising cattle, those influences intersected with western subject matter: mountains, seasons, cattle, horses and sheep. Thus, my work is primarily about the animals and landscape of Montana and Idaho, subjects I see every day and understand well enough that the references are implied, not realistic.  Recently I’ve been painting elk and buffalo. Ted Turner has beautiful ranchland in Montana full of buffalo, and our own back yard pasture in Idaho is full of elk.  Much of western art depends upon narrative and past history.  To me, the West is as it is today, right now. I feel very fortunate to travel between two states that I love and paint whatever is present in the landscape.

– Theodore Waddell