In the canon of American art, the landscape has long served as a vehicle for awe, narrative, and national identity. From sweeping mountain vistas to sun-bleached mesas, the Western terrain has captivated artists for centuries. But in today’s New West art movement, a bold and contemporary reimagining of traditional Western themes, landscape painting has undergone a dramatic shift. One of its most dynamic subgenres is Abstract Landscape, where the land is no longer just depicted, but interpreted through the lens of Modernist aesthetics such as Abstract Expressionism, Impressionism, Futurism, and beyond.
This isn’t about capturing a postcard-perfect view. It’s about channeling energy, light, form, and emotion. The aim is to display the essence of place rather than its literal likeness.
The Roots: O’Keeffe and Dixon
The seeds of abstracted landscape in the West were sown by two titans of early modern American art: Georgia O’Keeffe and Maynard Dixon.
O’Keeffe, with her sinuous lines and distilled desert motifs, elevated New Mexico’s landscapes into near-mystical visions. Her works often hovered between representation and abstraction; bones, flowers, and mesas rendered with such simplicity and scale that they became almost otherworldly.
Photo: Georgia O’Keeffe. Black Mesa Landscape, New Mexico / Out Back of Marie’s II, 1930. Oil on canvas, 24 1/4 x 36 1/4 inches. Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Gift of The Burnett Foundation. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. [1997.6.15]
Dixon, known for his moody color palettes and stylized forms, brought a graphic clarity to Western scenes. Though rooted in realism, his compositions leaned toward design and emotion over strict documentation.
Photo: Maynard Dixon (1875-1946), 'Mesas in Shadow,' 1926, oil on canvas, 30 1/4 x40 inches. Brigham Young University Museum of Art, 1937.
Together, O’Keeffe and Dixon laid the conceptual groundwork for artists who would embrace abstraction as a language for the Western experience.
The Modernist Bridge: Ed Mell and John Fincher
If O’Keeffe and Dixon built the foundation, Ed Mell became the architect of the modern Abstract Western landscape. With his sharply faceted forms, desert hues, and dynamic compositions, Mell translated the Southwest into something powerful and geometric—an echo of both Futurism and Cubism. Mell’s jagged mountains and stylized clouds convey motion and monumentality, bridging the organic with the architectural. His influence can be seen in a generation of artists who view landscape as not just a subject, but a structure—one to be deconstructed, reimagined, and emotionally charged.
John Fincher stands alongside Mell as a vital conduit between classic Western motifs and modernist abstraction. Deeply rooted in the Southwest, Fincher’s work embraces painterly distortion, symbolic forms, and stylized realism. His landscapes and botanicals are often stripped down to bold shapes and visceral texture, emphasizing the psychological intensity of place rather than its literal form. Through dramatic compositions and an expressive hand, Fincher repositions the Western landscape as a stage for existential and aesthetic inquiry—pushing the viewer beyond the horizon into more philosophical terrain. His role in bridging tradition with innovation cements him as a key figure in the evolution of New West abstraction.
The Contemporary Vanguard
Today’s New West is rich with landscape artists who embrace abstraction in diverse and expressive ways. Their work moves beyond scenic depiction into realms of mood, memory, and motion.
Jivan Lee is a force of nature, both literally and stylistically. His plein air paintings explode with thick, impasto brushwork and bold color. His landscapes are alive with gesture and immediacy, often painted in one sitting with urgency and devotion. Influenced by Abstract Expressionism, Lee’s canvases radiate the energy of place — from high desert monsoons to alpine dawns — rather than its precise details.
Robert Moore works with an expressionistic fervor, balancing color, texture, and scale to capture the feeling of vastness. Painting on wood panels with custom-blended oils, Moore often tackles forests, river valleys, and rural Idaho landscapes. His use of bold strokes and vivid chroma evokes Impressionism, Expressionism, and Fauvism, imbuing each piece with vibrant life.
With a tighter palette and minimalist approach, Jared Sanders distills the land into meditative scenes. His surfaces are often flat and textured, almost abstract in their simplicity. There’s a Zen-like quality to his work, where space and silence are as important as color and form. His paintings feel like whispered memories of the West; soft, luminous, and introspective.
David Grossmann brings a poetic restraint to abstract landscape. His work is quiet and contemplative, his hazy horizons, atmospheric fields, and minimalist silhouettes speak to solitude and timelessness. A master of subtle gradation and nuance, Grossmann’s paintings often feel like visual haikus: simple on the surface, profound in resonance.
Douglas Fryer brings an intimate, pastoral sensibility to the New West’s abstract landscape tradition. His works blend realism and abstraction in soft, atmospheric passages that feel both ancient and contemporary. Characterized by muted palettes, fractured surfaces, and lyrical brushwork, Fryer’s paintings often resemble landscapes remembered rather than observed.
Why Abstract Landscape Matters in the New West
In the era of satellite imagery and infinite photographic vistas, traditional landscape realism no longer holds the same urgency. Instead, abstract landscape in the New West speaks to how we feel in these spaces: overwhelmed, awed, grounded, or even disconnected.
These artists invite us to reconsider what the Western landscape means today. It’s no longer just about manifest destiny or rugged individualism. It’s about energy, atmosphere, and inner topography. Through abstraction, they offer new ways of seeing and sensing the land, less as an object and more as an experience.