Rachel Stavrowsky Hurst

I grew up in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, the daughter of Western artist Oleg Stavrowsky, so in many ways the American West has always been part of my visual vocabulary. I grew up surrounded by world class paintings, horses, wildlife, old photographs, and stories of the people who made their lives in the West.

As an artist, I’ve become especially fascinated by the women who were part of that story.

We tend to picture the West through its cowboys, lawmen, soldiers and outlaws. But women were there too—building homes and businesses, raising families, working ranches, traveling across country, caring for communities, and figuring out how to make lives for themselves under circumstances that could be extraordinarily difficult. Some followed very traditional paths. Others most definitely did not.

Those are the stories I find myself wanting to know more about.

I’m interested not only in what these women endured or accomplished, but in who they were as individuals. What did they love? What made them laugh? What did they want for themselves? What did an ordinary Tuesday look like? The farther I dig into their lives, the more interested I become in the distance between the romantic West we inherited and the complicated, surprising lives of the people who actually lived there.

That curiosity is increasingly finding its way into my paintings.

Animals are the other great constant in my work. I’ve painted them for years, and I doubt I’ll ever stop. Horses and wildlife are naturally part of the Western landscape, but I’m just as likely to become fascinated by a cow, a dog, a donkey—or anything else with enough personality to demand a painting. I’m less interested in painting an ideal example of an animal than I am in painting that particular animal.

In that sense, my paintings of people and animals really aren't so different. I’m looking for individuality—the gesture, expression, posture or small detail that makes a subject feel like somebody rather than something.

I work primarily in water-based mediums, particularly acrylics, combining representational painting with looser, more abstract passages. I love layers, transparent glazes, unexpected color and the process of allowing parts of a painting to remain suggestive rather than explaining everything.

More and more, I think of my work as an exploration of the West I grew up with and the West I’m still discovering: its animals, its landscape, and especially the women whose stories deserve a larger place in the picture.

My work is represented by Legends of the West Fine Art Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and has been selected for juried exhibitions throughout the western United States.