For working artists, rising material costs aren’t an abstract economic issue. They show up everywhere—from canvas, paint, glass, clay, and framing to fabrication, kiln operation, packaging, and shipping.

Those increases affect more than the cost of making a piece. They influence how confidently artists can price their work, quote commissions, manage inventory, and ultimately build a sustainable business.

For emerging artists in particular, the challenge can be significant. Many are selling originals, commissions, prints, installations, or market work while simultaneously managing shipping, customer service, bookkeeping, marketing, and promotion. When material costs rise, the temptation is often to absorb the difference rather than raise prices and risk losing a sale.

That may work temporarily. Over time, however, shrinking margins can make an otherwise successful art practice financially unsustainable.

The solution isn’t to panic-buy supplies or compromise the quality of your work. It’s to develop a better system for purchasing, using, tracking, and pricing materials. In fact, periods of rising costs can reveal weaknesses in your studio operations—and provide an opportunity to correct them.

Here are six ways artists can better manage material costs while protecting both the quality of their work and the health of their business.

Know the Real Cost of Every Piece

It sounds obvious, but many artists know approximately what they spend on materials without knowing what it actually costs to produce an individual work.

You should be able to estimate how much of each necessary material goes into a piece. I’m a glass artist, for example, and when I create a work, I track expenses ranging from the glass itself to kiln operation.

Without understanding your costs at the individual-piece level, it’s difficult to price accurately—or recognize when your margins are slipping.

Start with a basic spreadsheet. It doesn’t have to be perfect. The important thing is to develop the habit of tracking costs. Over time, your estimates will become more accurate.

Once you begin tracking by piece, size, or product line, patterns emerge. You may discover that certain types of work are considerably more expensive to produce than others. You may even find that something that sells well isn’t particularly profitable.

You’ll also begin to see which premium materials genuinely add value to your work and which may not justify their cost. That information can help you make better creative and business decisions.

Standardize Where It Makes Sense

One of the easiest ways to reduce waste is to eliminate unnecessary variation.

Artists often stock multiple sizes, surfaces, colors, substrates, and specialty materials because they want maximum creative flexibility. That may be manageable when costs are stable and cash flow is strong, but excessive inventory can quickly become expensive.

Standardization doesn’t mean making generic work. It means identifying formats that make sense for the way you create and sell.

A painter, for example, may discover that three or four canvas sizes account for most sales. A glass artist may find that several forms make up the majority of their production.

There are operational benefits as well as financial ones. Standard sizes simplify ordering and storage, make pricing more consistent, and allow you to purchase frequently used materials in larger quantities when doing so makes financial sense.

The goal isn’t to standardize your creativity. It’s to standardize the parts of your operation that don’t need to be complicated—leaving more time and energy for the work itself.

Buy in Bulk—Selectively

Buying in bulk can reduce your per-unit costs, but only if you’re buying materials you know you’ll use.

Inventory isn’t a bargain if it deteriorates, becomes obsolete, sits unused, or consumes cash you need elsewhere in your business.

Cash flow is particularly important for artists building their businesses. Money tied up in six months’ worth of supplies isn’t available for studio rent, shipping, marketing, fair participation, or other expenses.

Reserve bulk purchases for essential materials you use consistently and predictably. More specialized supplies can often be budgeted and ordered on a project-by-project basis.

The lowest unit price isn’t always the lowest overall cost.

Build Relationships With Your Suppliers

It’s easy to shop based entirely on price, particularly when you’re watching every dollar. But continually moving from one supplier to another in search of the lowest price can create costs of its own.

A lower price doesn’t help if an order arrives late, the quality is inconsistent, or a missed deadline disappoints a client.

Reliable supplier relationships can pay dividends over time. Working consistently with the same vendors may give you access to professional or trade pricing, volume discounts, advance notice of price increases, and advice about alternative products that can lower costs without compromising quality.

Ask questions. Does the supplier offer professional accounts or artist discounts? Is there a less expensive alternative to a material you’re using? Are there seasonal periods when it makes sense to place larger orders?

Don’t assume the listed price is the only price available. For a professional artist, purchasing materials is a business transaction, and it’s worth learning what options are available.

Price Custom Work With Discipline

Commissions can be an excellent way to grow an art business, but they also carry additional financial risk—particularly when material costs are changing quickly.

Custom projects frequently require unique dimensions, specialized materials, additional proofs or revisions, custom framing, rush orders, or additional fabrication. Each increases direct costs as well as the potential cost of waste and rework.

Artists building their careers are sometimes tempted to underquote custom projects because they want the commission. But custom work should carry custom pricing.

If a project requires specialized materials, rush ordering, additional revisions, or a higher allowance for breakage or waste, build those costs into your estimate.

Just as important, define the scope clearly. Spell out what the quoted price includes, how many revisions are permitted, and what changes will result in additional charges.

A clear estimate and approval process protects your margins while also giving your client greater transparency and confidence.

Invest in Tools That Last

Saving money doesn’t always mean spending less.

The right tools can be one of the best investments an artist makes. Buying inexpensive equipment simply because it costs less initially can be a false economy if it needs to be repaired or replaced repeatedly—or makes your work more difficult.

Many of my glassblowing hand tools are expensive. I bought a pair of specialized cutters for $275 approximately 30 years ago. They seemed expensive at the time, but I’m still using them today.

That’s value.

When a tool is fundamental to your practice, consider its lifetime cost rather than its purchase price. A quality tool that performs well for decades can be considerably less expensive than a succession of cheaper replacements.

Treating Art Like a Business Protects the Art

There is still a persistent idea in the art world that treating an artistic practice like a business somehow diminishes its creative integrity.

I believe the opposite is true.

Artists who understand their costs, margins, cash flow, and pricing are in a better position to continue doing what matters most: making art.

Rising material costs create real challenges, but they can also force us to examine how efficiently our studios operate. Know what your work costs to make. Buy intentionally. Price confidently. Invest where it matters.

Protecting your margins doesn’t mean compromising your art. It helps ensure you can afford to keep creating it.

 

“Since light is the main focus of my paintings, the entire physical world is potential subject matter.”  — Marlin Rotach

Some painters chase light. Marlin Rotach captures it in water and holds it fast.

This September, that mastery earns Rotach a place among the fifty artists in the Eiteljorg Museum’s 21st annual Quest for the West, one of the country’s premier Western art shows and sales held at the Museum September 11-13, 2026. He is one of only ten artists invited to make a first-ever appearance at the event, arriving with “Beneath the Azure Sky,” a luminous watercolor that the museum’s vice president for curatorial affairs singled out by name. Behind that invitation sits a quiet argument the market is finally ready to hear that transparent watercolor belongs in the same conversation as oil and bronze.

Sorrel Sky Gallery, which represents Rotach across its Durango, Santa Fe, SoHo, and East Hampton locations, has understood that argument for years. For four decades, Rotach has built a body of work that treats the least forgiving medium in painting as a vehicle for high drama, and collectors who know the field have taken notice. His acceptance into Quest, joining a roster that set an all-time sales record in 2025, is not a debut so much as a wider public confirmation of what his peers already knew.

A Kansas Upbringing, a Lifelong Study of Light

Rotach came to the American West honestly. He was born the son of a commercial artist who also trained stock horses in Kansas, and he grew up among cowboys, horses, billboard layouts, type books, paint, and brushes all at once. That childhood gave him two inheritances at once: a working knowledge of Western life and an early fluency in how images are made. He went on to earn both a BFA and an MFA in painting, then settled in Kansas City, where he keeps his studio.

His influences reach far beyond the ranch. Rotach traces his artistic lineage from Caravaggio to Frank Tenney Johnson to Charley Russell, a line of painters bound by one shared obsession: the power of dramatic light and shadow. He carried that obsession into watercolor, where the transparent medium suited his aim exactly. Where other painters build light by adding paint, Rotach builds it by holding paint back, letting the white of the paper itself become the brightest light in the picture.

The Discipline of Transparent Watercolor

Transparent watercolor allows no second chances. Every stroke is permanent, and a lost highlight cannot be repainted. That unforgiving quality is precisely what draws Rotach to it. He plans his highlights before the first wash touches the sheet, thinking in reverse the way a printmaker must, reserving the paper’s brightness from the very beginning.

The results reward close looking. In For Spacious Skies, one of his most ambitious recent paintings, the drama lives in what he withholds. Riders of the Red Cliffs turns the same discipline on stone and rider, the pale sandstone glowing precisely because he never painted it at all. In Cow Pony #2, a horse’s sunlit flank carries a charge that oil often struggles to match. And in quieter works such as The Tracker and Moonlit Rendezvous, Rotach lets deep shadow swallow most of the composition so a single shaft of light can carry the entire story.

Rotach’s subjects range widely, from ranch horses and working cowboys to sweeping high country and intimate floral studies, yet light remains his true subject in every one. A blossom in Summer Splendor receives the same rigorous attention to illumination as the open land of For Spacious Skies. For all his technical command, he approaches each painting as a fresh test. “The goal is always to exceed expectations,” he has said. “The work must be ambitious, otherwise what’s the point?” That restlessness keeps a four-decade career from ever settling into formula.

A Résumé Built on Recognition

Rotach’s credentials read like a survey of his field’s highest honors. He holds signature membership in the Transparent Watercolor Society of America, the National Watercolor Society, and the Watercolor U.S.A. Honor Society, with signature standing in nine national watercolor societies in all. His paintings have appeared in more than two hundred exhibitions, and he has taken eleven Best in Show awards among more than twenty honors overall.

The Western establishment has embraced him with warmth. The Cheyenne Frontier Days Rodeo, one of the oldest and largest in the country, chose his painting for its official poster twice, first in 2014 and again for the rodeo’s landmark 125th anniversary, each selection carrying a purchase award and a coveted trophy buckle. The American Royal named him its featured artist. He has been recognized as a Master Painter of the World, and he effectively wrote the book on his subject, authoring a two-hundred-year history of Western watercolor that spans more than forty painters. Southwest Art, Western Art Collector, and International Artist have all carried his work in print. For collectors who read institutional recognition as a market signal, and the serious ones do, Rotach’s file is deep and still growing.

The Collector’s Opportunity

Rotach arrives at a revealing moment. Western watercolor of this caliber has long traded at a discount to oil of comparable stature and provenance, a gap driven far more by convention than by connoisseurship. That gap is narrowing. When a museum sale that moved more than 1.3 million dollars in a single weekend chooses to introduce a watercolorist to its collector base, it signals where informed attention is heading. Rotach is not an emerging name catching that wave. He is an established master whose pricing has not yet fully caught up to his institutional standing, and that lag is exactly the kind of opening that rewards early conviction.

His collection at Sorrel Sky offers meaningful entry points alongside significant statement pieces. Intimate approachably scaled watercolors such as Summer Splendor, MiLady, MiLord, and Basking in the Glory give newer collectors a way in, while major paintings like For Spacious Skies, Team Spirit, and Riders of the Red Cliffs anchor a serious collection. A collector can begin at one level and grow into another, a range that makes Rotach as welcoming to first-time buyers as he is to seasoned patrons.

Scarcity is built into the medium itself. Rotach paints no editions and cannot reproduce a lost passage, which makes every finished watercolor a genuine one-of-a-kind. His sold wall tells that story plainly. Deep Shadows on the Mesa, Court of the Pale Queen, Light of the Lost Canyon, and Elegance in White have already passed into private hands, and works like these do not return.

Light That Holds Still

A Rotach watercolor resists reproduction. The paintings shift as the viewer moves, their reserved highlights catching and releasing light the way a Colorado afternoon does, and no photograph or printed page fully carries that effect. This is work meant to be seen in person, whether in Indianapolis this fall, where Beneath the Azure Sky will hang among the best of contemporary Western art, or on the walls at Sorrel Sky, where paintings such as Exclamation!, Focus, and My First Saddle wait to be discovered.

That is finally the case Marlin Rotach makes, painting after painting. With nothing more than pigment, water, and the nerve to leave the paper alone, he proves that watercolor can hold as much light, drama, and lasting value as any medium in the room.

 

For more information about Marlin Rotach https://sorrelsky.com/collections/marlin-rotach.

All images are courtesy of Marlin Rotach for Sorrel Sky Gallery. For more information https://sorrelsky.com/.

There is a particular kind of beauty that belongs to speed. The blur of a racing car at Silverstone. A woman in silk at the rail of a Riva on the Riviera. The curve of a vintage Porsche against a wall of Mediterranean blue. These are the images that populate Alan Walsh’s paintings, and they carry within them an entire visual autobiography, one that began not in a studio, but on the side of a racing circuit.

Walsh, a British artist based in Monaco, has built one of the most distinctive bodies of work in contemporary European painting. His acrylic and oil compositions, rendered in bold, clean strokes with a palette as saturated as a summer afternoon on the Côte d’Azur, occupy a genuinely singular space: immediately recognizable, joyful without frivolity, luxurious without pretension. He calls it “art with playful elegance.” Sorrel Sky Gallery, which represents Walsh across its Durango, Santa Fe, SoHo, and East Hampton locations, recognized in that phrase exactly the kind of artist its collectors have been waiting for.

Raised at the Circuit

 

To understand Walsh’s work, you must understand where he spent his childhood. His father worked in motorsport, which meant weekends at Silverstone, Monaco, Monza, and Paul Ricard rather than the parks and back gardens of his native North Yorkshire. On the long drives to and from circuits, young Walsh entertained himself with a pad of paper and a collection of pens, sketching racing cars from his father’s copies of Autosport and fashion figures from his mother’s issues of Vogue. Those two visual vocabularies, the aerodynamic precision of a racing machine and the graceful poise of high fashion, never left him. They remain the twin poles of his work today.

He raced competitively himself as a teenager, joining the elite Zip Young Guns karting team, the same program that developed Formula One World Champion Lewis Hamilton. The experience deepened his instinctive feel for speed as a visual concept, and it gave him entree into a world of drivers, team owners, and collectors who would later become among his most loyal patrons. Past and present racing legends count themselves among his regular clients.

From Advertising to the Atelier

Walsh left secondary school early, by mutual agreement, he notes, having attended only his art lessons, then spent a period at art college before pivoting into advertising. The career that followed was genuinely impressive. His illustrations appeared on billboards for Aston Martin, Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, Grey Goose Vodka, and Coca-Cola. He co-founded the award-winning Artisan Drinks Company, bringing his characters to life across bottle labels and global advertising campaigns. The discipline of commercial work gave his line its characteristic confidence: clean, deliberate, with nothing extraneous.

A formative moment arrived early in his advertising career, when a creative director at a London agency observed a teenage Walsh still laboring over the facial features of a storyboard character an hour into an assignment. The instruction he received that day shaped everything that followed: don’t worry about faces, express emotion and movement through body language instead. Walsh has not drawn a face since. The result is one of the most recognizable signatures in contemporary painting. His figures convey feeling entirely through posture, gesture, and the tilt of a head, leaving space for the viewer’s imagination to complete the picture.

In 2012, Walsh decided to leave the agency world entirely and commit fully to painting. Solo exhibitions followed in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Cannes, and beyond. By 2016, he owned two galleries in Australia, one in Sydney and one in the regional town of Bowral. In 2020, he opened Walsh Gallery Monaco, positioning himself at the epicenter of the luxury art market he had spent a decade capturing on canvas.

Monaco, the Martinez, and an A-List Clientele

Walsh’s base in Monaco is not incidental to his work — it is its natural habitat. The gallery, located in La Condamine, the district where the Grand Prix circuit runs through the streets, sits precisely at the intersection of motorsport, fashion, and Mediterranean glamour that defines its aesthetic. His works hang in the homes of royalty, Hollywood stars, chart-topping musicians, and global sports stars. He served as resident artist at the legendary Hôtel Martinez in Cannes, sharing its lobby with fellow British artist Damien Hirst.

The subjects that populate his canvases read like a love letter to an idealized version of the French Riviera: vintage racing cars, impossibly poised women in chic French fashion, champagne-drenched afternoons on Riva boats, the bold geometric branding of luxury sponsors. His color work is a particular achievement — saturated but never garish, inspired by the vivid palette of vintage motorsport advertising from the 1970s and 80s.

A Cultural Bridge

When Sorrel Sky Gallery founder Shanan Campbell first encountered Walsh’s work, she identified something that transcended geography. “Alan Walsh paints the feeling of speed and sophistication,” Campbell says. “His work speaks to collectors who appreciate both the elegance of the Riviera and the adventurous spirit of the West.”

The observation is astute. Walsh’s paintings share with the best Western art a certain quality of light: luminous, expansive, unambiguous. The wide-open feeling of his compositions, with their clean backgrounds and breathing room around each subject, translates naturally to a collecting audience accustomed to the particular clarity of light found in Colorado and New Mexico. The Côte d’Azur and the American Southwest are separated by an ocean and a continent, but both traditions prize immediacy of vision and confidence of execution.

His arrival at Sorrel Sky represents a carefully considered expansion of the gallery’s contemporary offerings, extending its reach from the American West to include one of Europe’s most compelling voices in figurative painting. For collectors who move fluidly between Manhattan, the Mediterranean, and the mountain West, Walsh offers a point of connection across all three.

The Work Itself

Walsh works exclusively by hand in his Monaco studio; each painting built in acrylic and oil with a technique that owes as much to his advertising background as to his fine art training. His compositions are architectural in their clarity: bold blocks of color establish a ground, against which his subjects, who are always faceless, always poised, command the frame with authority. Limited-edition screen prints and serigraphs offer collectors additional entry points into his visual world, while his original paintings represent significant investments in a market that has rewarded his work with consistent, growing collector demand.

The range of subjects available through Sorrel Sky spans his signature themes: vintage racing imagery, Riviera lifestyle scenes, and the luxury brand references that connect his commercial origins to his fine art present. Each piece rewards time spent with it, revealing, in its apparently effortless execution, the full weight of the discipline Walsh has brought to bear over more than a decade of dedicated studio practice.

For collectors who have found contemporary Western art to be a natural expression of their values and aesthetic sensibilities, Alan Walsh offers an unexpected but entirely coherent extension of that conversation. Speed, elegance, and the particular pleasure of a beautifully made thing. The Riviera, it turns out, has always been closer than it appeared.

For much of my career, creativity existed through the structure of the fashion industry. For over two decades, I worked within a world built around movement, collaboration, deadlines, textiles, color stories, fittings, production teams, and the challenge of transforming an idea into something physical that people could live in. Fashion became part of how I observed the world—how color affects emotion, how texture changes perception, and how a garment can alter the confidence and experience of the person wearing it.

Then, a few years ago, after a move to the desert near Joshua Tree, my creative life began to shift.

The quiet and expansive landscape gave me the space to reconnect with creativity in a completely different way. The stillness of the desert, the changing atmosphere, and the muted yet powerful color shifts across the sky and land inspired me to begin creating work rooted in observation, emotion, and texture. There was something about the openness of the landscape that encouraged reflection and experimentation. The desert became more than a location; it became part of the creative process itself.

At the time, I didn’t know exactly where that path would lead or whether it would permanently replace fashion in my life. I wondered if focusing on painting and textile artwork meant leaving one creative identity behind for another. I questioned whether trying to do both would divide my focus too much, causing one side to suffer.

Instead, something unexpected happened.

The deeper I moved into fine art, the more it began to reshape the way I approached fashion. And eventually, when fashion re-entered my life again, I realized both worlds had quietly started informing each other in ways I never anticipated. What once felt separate became a blended creative life—one where art and fashion constantly exchange ideas, emotion, process, and inspiration.

That blending has become one of the most rewarding parts of my creative journey.

One of the biggest differences between fashion and fine art is the number of people involved in bringing something to life. In fashion, there are countless hands shaping the final product. Designers, patternmakers, textile developers, technical designers, sewers, production teams, factories, craftsmen, merchandisers, marketers—each person affects the final outcome. A garment evolves through many stages, and each stage can significantly change the direction of the product.

You rarely see the final result clearly from the beginning.

The process becomes a winding path filled with pivots, adjustments, reactions, and problem-solving. One fabric behaves differently than expected. A silhouette changes during fittings. A wash alters the mood of the color. A technical issue creates a completely new opportunity. Every stage becomes reactive and collaborative.

There is an unpredictability to it that I’ve always found inspiring.

Artwork creation, although often more solitary, contains a similar unpredictability. While the work is primarily in my own hands, the surface itself begins to participate in the process. Paint reacts unexpectedly. Layers shift the atmosphere of a piece. Texture changes the emotion of color. One brushstroke suddenly redirects the entire composition. Sometimes the work begins to reveal something I did not originally intend to create.

Again, you cannot always see the ending. You respond to what is happening in front of you. That reaction—that openness to process—is something fashion and fine art deeply share.

For me, creativity has become less about controlling every outcome and more about learning how to observe, react, and evolve with the work itself. Both disciplines continuously remind me that uncertainty can be one of the most valuable parts of the creative process.

I have also become increasingly fascinated by the way both fashion and art affect people emotionally and psychologically.

With art, I’ve had conversations with collectors and viewers who describe seeing something deeply personal inside a painting or textile work. Sometimes a piece reminds them of a landscape they once experienced. Other times it evokes a memory, a feeling, or even a place they long to return to emotionally. Watching someone connect to a work on that level is incredibly meaningful.

There is a quiet moment that happens when a viewer stops in front of a piece and becomes fully present with it. You can often see the emotional shift happen across their face before they even speak. As an artist, those moments are priceless because they remind you that art exists beyond decoration. It becomes part of the human experience.

Art gives people a place to pause, to reflect, and to feel something.

Fashion creates emotional experiences differently, but with equal impact. Seeing someone wearing something you helped create out in the world carries its own kind of energy. In activewear especially, clothing often becomes connected to movement, motivation, and self-transformation. A garment may encourage someone to go outside, exercise, join a community, improve their health, or simply feel more confident in themselves.

That confidence affects how they move through the world. It changes interactions, posture, and presence. Something as simple as color, fit, texture, or silhouette can influence the emotional experience of the person wearing it—and even affect the people around them.

Fashion and fine art may appear very different externally, but both ultimately influence human experience. Both shape atmosphere, emotion, perception, memory, and identity in subtle ways. The blending of those ideas has become central to my own creative practice.

Now my art practice rotates between playful desert scenes, atmospheric seascapes, and layered forest landscapes—all deeply impacted by the outdoor spaces where I spend time hiking and exploring. Each landscape carries a different emotional energy, and I often bring those observations back into both my paintings and textile works. The outdoors has become an essential part of my creative rhythm, influencing not only the visual direction of the work but also the sense of movement, stillness, and reflection within it.

My artwork often begins with observing landscapes, texture, atmosphere, and light in the natural world. I spend a great deal of time paying attention to subtle color shifts, movement across the sky, weathered surfaces, and the emotional feeling a place carries. Those observations eventually move into painting, textile processes, and layered surfaces.

At the same time, fashion continues to influence how I think about proportion, movement, material, and the physical relationship between the body and design. My years in apparel taught me to think about construction, tactile experience, and functionality alongside beauty.

Now those influences constantly move back and forth between each other. A painting may inspire a textile direction; a fabric texture may influence a painting surface. An atmospheric landscape may evolve into a color palette for apparel, while a garment silhouette may inspire compositional balance inside an artwork. The boundaries between disciplines have become increasingly fluid.

That fluidity has allowed me to embrace creativity in a much broader way than I once imagined possible. For a long time, I thought creative careers required choosing a single direction. But I no longer believe creativity works that way. Some creative lives are built through specialization, while others are built through exploration and blending multiple forms of expression together over time.

There is beauty in allowing your creative identity to evolve, in not always knowing exactly where the process will lead, and in realizing that different disciplines can strengthen each other rather than compete.

I feel incredibly fortunate to experience both worlds. Fashion continues to inspire me through collaboration, craftsmanship, and movement, while fine art inspires me through

observation, emotion, and storytelling. Both encourage me to remain curious and to bring all my experiences back into the creative process.

At this point in my life, I no longer see fashion and art as separate identities. Instead, they have become part of one blended creative life—constantly evolving and pushing me toward new ways of seeing and building. I may not always know exactly where the path is leading, but I’ve learned to trust the process of discovery. Sometimes the most meaningful creative work happens while navigating the unknown and weaving it into daily existence.

 

Author Bio

After immersing herself in the action sports design world for several years, Sherri took the opportunity to explore her artistic side in painting and illustration.  Driven by a deep passion for the arts, she enjoys experimenting with various traditional and contemporary media in her paintings.  Inspired by her exploration of the outdoors, she finds inspiration in both the picturesque landscapes and captivating elements of land and sea.  A versatile artist and designer, with a strong background in designing for brands including her own successful apparel line, she brings a unique perspective to her designs.  Her technical design skills and creative vision blend seamlessly to create her work.  Today her deep appreciation shines through in her artwork, she continues to push boundaries and explore new artistic horizons.

For more information, visit www.sherriscottstudios.com

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All images courtesy of Sherri Scott.

When the world stood still in 2020, Andy Katz kept moving with his camera in hand. For more than five decades, Katz has traveled to over a hundred countries, capturing images that celebrate both the grandeur of landscapes and the intimacy of human connection. Yet, during the pandemic, his gaze turned inward. Grounded from international travel, Katz saw a rare opportunity: to embark on a photographic pilgrimage through his own country, visiting the national parks that together tell the story of America’s wild, unspoiled beauty.

That sense of refuge permeates the book. From a sunrise spilling over Yosemite Valley to the haunting stillness of the Everglades, the photographs seem to whisper that beauty, even in turbulent times, remains constant.

Throughout A Walk in the Park, light plays as much a role as the landscapes themselves. For Katz, light has always been the truest subject of his work. In Yellowstone, early morning mist becomes an ethereal veil. In Arches, the last rays of daylight ignite sandstone into a glowing monument.

“Light is nature’s paintbrush,” Katz reflects. “The parks gave me an endless palette. Every moment was fleeting, and that’s what made it extraordinary.”

This devotion to capturing the perfect balance of light and shadow recalls Ansel Adams, yet Katz’s work feels more intimate, more personal—less about monumentality and more about connection.

Beyond its visual power, A Walk in the Park carries a mission. A percentage of book sales benefits America’s National Parks, directly supporting preservation efforts. Katz sees this not as charity, but as reciprocity.

“These landscapes have given me so much,” he says. “It’s only right that the work gives back.”

In this way, the book serves as both inspiration and call to action. It reminds readers that the parks are not static museums but living ecosystems—fragile, threatened, and worth protecting.

 

The result is A Walk in the Park, a new book that is both a stunning visual chronicle and a profoundly personal narrative. Featuring images from 65 national parks, the collection is more than a coffee-table book: it is a testament to resilience, wonder, and the healing power of nature. This book feels less like an assignment and more like a calling. “I wanted to create something that wasn’t a guidebook, but a love letter,” Katz explains. “A reminder of what we have—and what we need to protect.”

The project took Katz from Acadia’s granite cliffs to the volcanic wilderness of Hawai‘i Volcanoes, from the crimson canyons of Zion to the glacial majesty of Denali. Each image is composed with Katz’s signature mastery of light, a luminous quality that transforms a familiar landscape into something timeless and transcendent.

As Will Shafroth, President and CEO of the National Park Foundation, writes in the book’s foreword:

“Andy Katz’s photography captures the light and beauty of America’s national parks, inspiring wonder through images that are singularly powerful and personal, yet always within reach of our understanding, always inspiring us to connect and to search. Begin your national park exploration here.”

The timing of the project gave it a weight beyond aesthetics. In 2020, the pandemic forced many of us to reconsider our relationship with the natural world. For Katz, the national parks became both sanctuary and stage. “They reminded me of what’s essential,” he says. “In a time of fear and uncertainty, the parks offered peace, perspective, and resilience. I wanted to translate that into images that others could hold onto.”

What sets A Walk in the Park apart is its intimacy. Rather than presenting the parks as distant marvels, Katz invites viewers to walk alongside him. His photographs feel accessible, moments anyone might stumble upon, if only they had Katz’s eye for light and patience for timing.

There are no people in the frames, yet the images are profoundly human. They reflect solitude, reverence, and awe—emotions that readers inevitably carry back into their own lives.

In an age of rapid consumption and fleeting digital imagery, A Walk in the Park asks us to slow down. To linger on a page. To notice the way a shadow bends across a canyon wall or the way sunlight pools on a forest floor.

The book reminds us that photography, at its best, is not about freezing time but about deepening it. Each image is an invitation to pause, breathe, and reconnect with a world larger than ourselves.

For Katz, this project also feels like a culmination. After decades of assignments around the world, he has distilled his artistry into something deeply personal. “These parks belong to all of us,” he says. “But they also became a part of me. This book is my way of giving that back.”

In many ways, A Walk in the Park is not just about America’s landscapes—it is about the American spirit itself. It celebrates resilience, unity, and beauty that transcends division. It is a reminder that while our lives may feel fragile, nature endures, and in its endurance, we find our own strength.

Ultimately, A Walk in the Park is more than a collection of photographs. It is a journey through wonder, a meditation on beauty, and a plea for preservation. It is art that asks us not only to look, but to see. As readers turn its pages, they are not simply observers of landscapes; they become participants in a shared inheritance. And in a time when so much feels uncertain, Andy Katz’s images offer something rare and enduring: hope, illuminated by light.

 

ABOUT ANDY KATZ

Andy Katz is an internationally recognized photographer based in the United States. With a career spanning four decades and travels to over 90 countries, Katz’s signature style is rich in texture, contrast, and composition, earning him a devoted following and a place among the elite Sony Artisans of Imagery. One of the world’s most collected photographers, with 14 books published, his work featured in museums and galleries around the world. Katz’s portfolio spans landscapes and cultures, and his deep connection to nature continue to push the boundaries of his photographic storytelling. For additional details and to view his photography and explore exhibitions, please visit www.andykatzphotography.com.

A Walk in the Park retails for $65 and is available to purchase at andykatzphotography.com.

We first met artist Rebecca Fairfax at Art Santa Fe in 2024 and were intrigued with her expressive use of oil and cold wax to create each of her works of art. We wanted to know more about this artist and how this interesting medium became her choice. Let’s see what she has to say.

ABN: Introduce yourself — who you are and what is your vision as an artist is?

RF: I am an intuitive, abstract, realist and expressionist artist. A bit of a mouthful, I know, but each one describes my particular mix of abstract techniques with recognizable forms and my focus on expressing some small yet universal aspect of our complex human experience.

Only with oil and cold wax medium can I create so many multiple layers of contrasting thicknesses and colors – cool and warm, dark and light, opaque and transparent – that express energy, thought, mood and emotion. I seek to explore the interplay between the physical and metaphysical, where figures emerge and recede from and into the background and foreground, often as in a dream. I invite the viewer to enjoy the subtle yet often playful, quirky and whimsical narratives as well as the deeper meanings in each painting.

ABN: What is your background?

RF: I grew up in suburban Boston surrounded by the bold colors and textures of my mother’s finely crafted quilts and hooked rugs – she often exhibited them in local shows and even museums.

Still, my first career was as a public radio reporter and TV scriptwriter, magazine and newspaper journalist and children’s book author, all while supporting my daughter as a single mother. Working mostly freelance, I was able to live, work and extensively travel abroad — from Europe to Asia and South America. I also speak fluent French, good Spanish and some German and Russian. During those fascinating years, I wrote on pretty much everything — from Art to the Zuni.

In time, though, with a desire to express myself through the visual arts, I traded in my keyboard for a palette and canvas, experimenting with acrylic and oil until I discovered the challenges, delights and power of oil and cold wax.

ABN: What is your work philosophy and how does that impact your work?

RF: As with my writing career, I’m a bit of a workaholic – the creative process is so rich and exciting that it rarely sleeps, and I try to keep up with it. Time in my home studio opens new worlds every day – I can hardly wait to see what awaits. Paintings call from every easel and on my worktable, letting me know what they want to become. It’s a collaboration – I listen to the paint and cold wax, and we work together to bring images, ideas, and stories to life.

Each piece takes weeks or longer to complete – from the initial layers of gesso through the drying or semi-drying of each layer to the drawing of each image and excavating into the paint to the final application of stain on the sanded canvas cradles. There is always so much to do in preparing my work for shows and collectors.

ABN: What artist(s) inspire you?

RF: So many inspire me – from the early cave people to the latest wave of creatives seeking new modes of visual expression with digital art. That said, I have been most influenced by Renaissance figure drawings, and the colors, textures and creative courage of Manet, Van Gogh, Sargent, Turner, Toulouse-Lautrec, Whistler and so many others – I’m both a traditionalist and modernist in this 21^st century.

Outside of the visual arts, my great inspirations have been the mother of modern dance, Isadora Duncan, the avant-garde filmmaker, Maya Deren, the inimitable Bob Dylan and so many of the great early rock ‘n roll songwriters/poets. I often find ways to incorporate their images and vision into my work.

ABN: What is the best advice you’ve received?

RF: Stay true to your vision. This can be so challenging for so many artists as they work to find and maintain their unique style and voice. There are many ups and downs that come with following one’s own creative journey, and while we should always be open to new ideas and influences, we must primarily remain true to our creative self.

ABN: When you are not working, where can we find you?

RF: Taking a daily morning walk with my husband in our rural Santa Fe neighborhood; enjoying time with friends and other artists; attending concerts, gallery and museum openings; and traveling to the ocean, the only thing missing in our beautiful New Mexico landscape. Having spent my summers on Cape Cod, I always long for the sound of waves while walking on a beach.

ABN: Any plans for 2025? Where will your creativity take you? I

RF: This year, after a long, wonderful winter of hibernating and painting in my studio, I will be unveiling and exhibiting a new series, “Emerging and Receding,” at both the Santa Fe Studio Tour during the last two weekends of June, and Art Santa Fe in mid-July.

This is a huge and exciting step forward in my artistic evolution; I’ll have up to 25 paintings that bring together all that I have been working toward since embarking on my artistic journey. While I will be showing all of those works during the Studio Tour, a small selection will be available during Art Santa Fe. And my next step is gallery representation – stay tuned!

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Learn more about Rebecca at https://rebeccafairfax.com

And see her at Art Santa Fe, July 11-13, in Booth 300.