“Clyde Aspevig is arguably the greatest American landscape painter of our time. In my various careers as an art dealer, an art historian, a college-level art history instructor and a museum director specializing in American landscapes, I have seen a great number of American landscape paintings. In my short list of the very best contemporary landscape painters, Clyde Aspevig is at the top.”

 

Jean Stern

Executive Director, The Irvine Museum

“In the circle of contemporary American landscape painters, Clyde Aspevig is widely regarded as one of the best. Working in the plein air style, Aspevig focuses on the inherent beauty of untouched and lightly treaded scenes in a unique manner that makes him a genius of contemporary Western Realism”

 

Daniel C. Calderon

Curator, Santa Barbara Historical Museum

“In a sense, field studies are reactions. Clyde sees relationships rather than things. He paints these with enough clues to their identity so we know where we are, but it is the color harmonies that attract him. These are determined by the light of the moment – the sun perpetually on the move, the clouds, the atmosphere. 

 

He sets out to capture all this within an hour or two. He is not copying a scene; he is summarizing its impact. The idea is important, but it is the precise series of color relationships that he carries back to the studio. “

 

Thomas S. Buechner (1926-2010)

Director of the Brooklyn Museum

Founding Director, Corning Museum of Glass

From Elemental Solitude: The Landscapes of Clyde Aspevig

 

“What Clyde Aspevig admires in the work of his predecessors, he says, is the sincerity of the “emotional intensity” with which they have observed and pictorially recounted the natural world around them. He has been committed, through his fresh and spontaneous field work and the individual poignancy, chromatic balance and compositional force of his studio paintings, to resolving those components into his own expressions of emotional intensity. And it is this wedding of the spirit of place with aesthetic harmonies and personal temperament that has allowed Aspevig to command the top 

ranks of today’s American figurative landscape tradition.”

 

Peter H. Hassrick

Director, Petrie Institute of Western American Art, Denver Art Museum