Artists to Watch | Doyle Hostetler

Fresh takes on classic subjects

Doyle Hostetler, Into Cover, oil, 21 x 38.

Doyle Hostetler doesn’t think of himself as a wildlife artist per se. True, his oeuvre does include numerous portrayals of western fauna that are attracting the attention of art collectors and galleries alike. But the Phoenix, AZ, artist has also been garnering recognition for his depictions of working cowboys and their horses. One such piece received the Phippen Family Award at the Phippen Museum’s Western Art Show & Sale earlier this year. More recently, an enamored collector snapped up a pair of works by Hostetler portraying longhorns against his signature pale backgrounds—faintly delineated and seemingly washed out—that make his leading subjects pop with presence and vitality.

Yet Hostetler can’t deny his passion for wildlife, an interest harking back to his boyhood days in Colorado, where he moved with his family from a small Amish town in Ohio when he was about 8 years old. The geographic change was eye-opening for the young Hostetler, who regarded the region’s towering pines, big cats, and other mountain life with awe. Ever since then, he says, “That imagery has always been deep in my heart.”

Today the artist routinely portrays the wilderness scenery and wildlife that so profoundly impressed him as a boy. He frequently crisscrosses the western half of the country on road trips to visit family in Colorado, Montana, Idaho, and Oregon. On these journeys he’ll snap reference photographs and file scenes away in his memory bank, “trying, as much as possible, to soak in everything,” he enthuses.

Hostetler’s paintings themselves feel like eloquent memories, capable of stirring a range of emotions in viewers. Bolstered by 35 years of professional design and illustration experience, the artist explores elements of realism, impressionism, and abstraction on his canvases with proficiency and creative vigor. By capturing his backgrounds with a barely-there touch, for example, he suggests hints of his subject’s environment, thus creating an air of mystery, he explains. By contrast, Hostetler depicts his animals and figures prominently in the foreground with convincing detail. Yet there, too, he asserts his artistic freedom through painterly brushwork and sometimes bold color choices, applying swipes of lavender to a moose’s shaggy coat, for instance. When the artist first started painting a few years ago, he notes, “the hardest thing was separating my mind from my hand.” Now, adds Hostetler, “I’m feeling more courage in just painting instinctually and not overthinking it.” —Kim Agricola

representation
Sorrel Sky Gallery, Durango, CO, and Santa Fe, NM; Mockingbird Gallery, Bend, OR; Mountain Trails Gallery, Sedona, AZ; Lovetts Gallery, Tulsa, OK; Phinney Gallery of Fine Art, Joseph, OR.

This story appeared in the December 2020/January 2021 issue of Southwest Art magazine.