Clyde Aspevig | Landscape Painter | Aspevig - Guzman Fine Art
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Backpacker.com Features Landsnorkel

4/29/2025

 
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Land Snorkeling Is the New Trend
That’s Taking Hikers Deeper


Feel like your hikes have gotten too focused on end goals and not enough on enjoying the journey? Montana's vast American Prairie says it has the solution.

Read the full article!

A Podcast We Think You'll Like

5/14/2024

 
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Sean R. Gerrity
The Answers Are Out There


Sean is the founder and former CEO of American Prairie. He was named a National Geographic Fellow in 2010. He's created a new podcast featuring people across the world making meaningful impact.

About his new podcast, Sean says this: "While at American Prairie my team and I constantly looked around the world for examples of successful conservation efforts who’s approach and best practices might in some way improve our own effectiveness and performance in Montana.  After I left my role as President, I had time to reflect on all the extraordinary people I’d encountered around the world during my tenor. The Answers Are Out There podcast seeks to illuminate these entrepreneurs and the amazing work that they do. I hope their stories help generate some optimism about the future at a time when so much of our news is designed to do the opposite. I also hope that, like my book, this podcast might encourage some listeners to consider pursuing something new for themselves; something that is at once meaningful and important to them, and which could make a positive impact on the world."

With support from National Geographic, I’ve written a book, The Second Best Time is Now-due out in 2025.
Listen on Spotify
Website

A Poem: The Gift

1/11/2024

 
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"Montana Moonrise" 30x40" oil on linen - by Clyde Aspevig, and the poem written inspired by it.
The Gift

You say the painting is a portrait of what made us:
The drives across the west, just the two of us,
bluffs above the rivers, sunsets on the mesas
crossing ravines of bedded stones
undulating beneath the grass.
Those vistas entered us, and have remained,
telling us that we are not their measure,
but are measured by them,
telling us that landscapes shape more than land,
that their water is our blood; their wind; our breath;
telling us we are only specks
swirled in the continuing existence
of boulders, clays, brush and trees,
and fence lines leading to towns, and dreamers in them,
where the rivers carve foundations,
flooded, dry, then flooded again,
oxbowing the dreamers’ endeavors.
If one sees this, what need of other gods?
For you have your protector,
and faith in what befalls you: good or bad.
You know your life does not end with you
but runs on and on through these shifting gravels.

 - Michael Molland

Home of the Year Award

1/13/2021

 
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WRJ Design of Jackson Hole has won another Mountain Living - Home of the Year award, and this one features Clyde's artwork beautifully in the dining room. It's wonderful to see the artwork "in the wild." 

​Congratulations to WRJ Design - nicely done! 

Clyde Aspevig, John Singer Sargent & Richard Ormond

7/6/2020

 
John Singer Sargent (January 12, 1856 – April 14, 1925) was an American artist, considered the "leading portrait painter of his generation." He created roughly 900 oil paintings and more than 2,000 watercolors, as well as countless sketches and charcoal drawings. His impressionistic work is much beloved to this day. In 1916 - he painted Lake O'Hara in the Canadian Rockies. It is a stunning piece. 
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Lake O'Hara by John Singer Sargent - 1916
Clyde Aspevig saw this painting at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard in 1975. He and his wife Carol have spent many happy days hiking through this area, and recently did his own view of Lake O’Hara from Sargent Point in celebration of the master. It measures 60 x 96 inches. 
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Clyde and his recent work "Lake O'Hara" from Sargent point, in celebration of the master John Singer Sargent. 60x96"

​Clyde reached out to share the piece with Richard Ormond - one of the foremost authorities on John Singer Sargent and the former deputy director of the National Portrait Gallery and director of the National Maritime Museum and Royal Observatory in Greenwich England. Ormond's reply is below: 

Dear Clyde, 

The catalogues have arrived for which best thanks. I wish I could see your paintings in the flesh, but even in reproduction they give great pleasure capturing the spirit of the west, those sweeping views across the prairie to distant mountains, great skies, mountains up-close, placid lakes and snow scenes. But you do near as well as far, and I enjoyed your close-ups of streams and plants. It was a clever idea to match more finished works with premiere coup sketches in the spreads. You don't include people but humanity is everywhere implied in the spectacle of nature.

I appreciated your kind words about my Sargent work. Like artists, art historians cast their work on the water never knowing if it will sink or swim, be appreciated and read, strike a chord and give pleasure, or sink without trace to the basement. That I have had so many responses to the Sargent catalogue raisonne makes the effort seem worthwhile and gives me the uplift to continue my work.

All good wishes
Richard

Another masterful painter, Ian McKibben White, had this to say about Clyde's new "Lake O'Hara."

"Mostly, Clyde, I want to enthuse about your magnificent painting of Lake O'Hara. Your "biggest painting ever." It's a real zinger! How big is it? Right up there on the scale of those Thomas Morans in Washington, D.C. I found as I study it, my eye travels into the painting at different speeds. I follow the logs from their tips above water down their submerged lengths to luxuriate in the depths of the emerald green water. When I surface I go left around the line of shallow rocks to find the opening to the far reaches of the lake. My eye climbs the reflection of the sunlit butte and past it, zigzagging up the  gorge... presumably the water source that supplies the lake from the snow above. I cross the snow fields and exit into the clouds in the sky. It's been an exhilarating journey. Now, I back off to take in the composition as a whole and admire the stands of trees left and right of center stage as if waiting in the wings to take part in the drama. In your honor and for a better chance to study the painting over time, I have made it my computer screen background image." 

More about Ian McKibben White and his work can be found here. 


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Clyde Aspevig painting in the Canadian Rockies

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​You can learn more about John Singer Sargent's masterpieces in Richard Ormond's book - here. ​

Recent Paintings:

1/9/2020

 
A bit about “The Arid West” and “Conifer Hillside” by Clyde Aspevig....
"From the arid deserts of the West, to the lush conifer forest behind my studio, I find the never ending spectacle of fractals shaped by texture, color and light. I am particularly interested in a flattened sense of space in both paintings which eludes to the duality between the abstract and the representational. It gives the viewer multiple ways to interpret and enjoy the paintings.

“Pony, Montana” by Clyde Aspevig is about metaphors. There is a story behind every object, manmade or not, in the painting. The work is meant to provoke conversation.

Trip to Berlin & Denmark

5/24/2019

 
This spring, we had a fantastic couple weeks in Berlin, Germany; Copenhagen and Northern Denmark, soaking up art and history. We spent time in Skagen, and the northernmost tip of Denmark, where the Skagen School of Painters had their art colony at the turn of the 20th century. Some of the highlights we wanted to share are below. - Clyde & Carol
Concert in Berlin with 100 member choir and three opera singers
We had never seen this early Picasso.
Info card from the early Picasso painting
Self Portrait - Peter Kroyer on the beach - Skagen, Denmark.
Clyde Aspevig on the northernmost tip of Denmark where two seas meet. The Skagen School of Painters from the turn of the century had their art colony here.
Home of Anna and Michael Ancher.
Inside Ancher's Home - with portraits of the community by various artists.
The canals of Copenhagen, Denmark.
Clyde inside Ancher's Home - with portraits of the community by various artists.

Spring News

4/12/2018

 
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While we wait patiently for spring to arrive here in Bozeman, Montana, Clyde is still painting away. We've posted some new images of Clyde's most recent paintings that are available. 

We also look forward to the Gallery Talk that Clyde will be giving at the Yellowstone Art Museum on May 24th at 6:30pm.

See more info on Clyde's exhibit at the YAM this spring, and be sure to peruse the new paintings.

Guide to Plein Air Painting

9/21/2017

 
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Click to Purchase on Amazon
The Art of Plein Air Painting by Stephen Doherty is a newly released book that is an "An essential Guide to Materials, Concepts, and Techniques for Painting Outdoors." It features images of Clyde’s work and his words of wisdom about painting, along with others!

From the section on Clyde Aspevig - Contemporary Plein Air Master:
“When I’m staring out from behind my pochade box in the field, I’m trying to respond to one moment in time at one particular location.

Field studies are like feelers for locating good ideas..."

Artist Statement on "Family Ties"

2/8/2017

 
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"Family Ties"     48” x 48”
 oil on linen by Clyde Aspevig
 
All paintings originate in the mind of an artist through an emotional reaction to an experience. Being human, we like to impose our ideas on these emotions as a way to enhance and remember the experience.

Transcending the ordinary is one of the primary goals of the visual arts, and that is why the" idea "becomes the most essential part of its success or failure. It doesn't mean that the viewer of such art immediately understands the symbolism or metaphors that take shape in the process of developing an idea… it means that the artist uses the tools of technique in a more meaningful and profound way that will hopefully entice further inspection and wonderment.
 
FAMILY TIES, a 48 x 48 inch oil on linen, began as an emotional reaction to the view of the aspen grove out our window. Aspen are considered a weed, and they are attached to each other via a root system like our own human nervous system. The mother tree in this scene is the nurturing source of the grove.  My last name is also derived from the word aspen. In a way, I see the tree as my mother, rooted in the earth that sustains us. After living with the grove for a full season on our new property, I chose March as the month to paint the view…. on the edge of spring, but still melancholy enough to satisfy my Nordic roots.
 
I think the metaphors attached to the seasons in nature are obvious, but never boring, and constantly stirring our emotions in different ways as evident in our music, poetry, and fiction writing over time. The little aspen grove begins to inspire new thoughts and ideas as I experienced the character of its nuances through the seasons. During my period of observation, I noticed the repeating shapes in different forms …fractals, musicality, and the duality between the representational world and the birth of the abstract as another way to see the same image.
 
At the time I was developing these ideas, I just happened to be reading a book about the history of Echoes from the ancient Greeks to modern time. Trying to paint the idea of an echo on a flat, two dimensional surface using an aspen grove as the subject was very intriguing. Creating texture and scratching out surfaces in a painting to achieve an effect is nothing new. It's been done before. But using the idea of an echo to facilitate your image created a more powerful platform to express my idea. You can create soft and hard edges and a lot of texture all day long, but it has to have content of idea in order to become engaging to the human mind.
When you examine the surface texture of “FAMILY TIES”, you will see the ghosts of where the branches and trunks of trees were over a period of time…. their echo. The branches, the snow, and the sky are scratched, scrapped, and painted in layers…representing movement through time.
 
I think you can sense the vibrations, the syncopation, the sensuousness, of a living piece of land. It is not static, it is moving through time in an endless cycle of growth and change. I tried to make each square inch of the canvas an individual journey of discovery that exudes these ideas.
 
In the end, whether the idea succeeds or not depends on how far the viewer wants to go with it. Ultimately, the glance through an aspen grove can be just a brief visual delight …. but, with a little help from the artist, it can also evolve into a wonderful journey of discovery and imagination.
 
Clyde Aspevig
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© Clyde Aspevig - Aspevig Guzman Fine Art
Clyde and his wife - Carol Guzman - both paint under Aspevig Guzman Fine Art
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  • Home
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