Albert Bierstadt (January 7, 1830 – February 18, 1902) was a German-born American oil painter best known for his lavish, sweeping landscapes of the American West. To paint the scenes, Bierstadt joined several journeys of the Westward Expansion. Though not the first artist to record these sites, Bierstadt was the foremost painter of these scenes for the remainder of the 19th century.
Having seen several of Bierstadt's breath-taking landscapes in a variety of museums and galleries, I began to wonder what more these paintings had to offer. As a digital artist and avid lover of wild and vibrant color schemes, I figured I could give Albert's beautiful work a "fresh coat of paint" or perhaps not paint at all.
The art of capturing sweeping landscapes has long been dominated by oil paints, acrylics, photography, and the like. So, in order to break the mold, I turned to a more unlikely and rather underused tool, the Sharpie Highlighter. I promptly ordered several boxes of yellow, blue, and pink highlighter markers and went to work re-creating these landscapes with my own psychedelic approach. By overlapping the three primary colors, I was able to expand my color palate to orange, purple, and green. The result is the trippiest triptych you've ever seen with a classically beautiful subject matter that harkens back to the wild untouched beauty of the Early American western frontiers.
"Spla Esenreb Eht Gnoma"
"Adaven Arreis"
"Peehs Niatnuom Ykcor"
