Inspired by the sagebrush and wide open horizons of Wyoming and Montana, Clyde Aspevig is a landscape painter who does sketches on location and finishes the work in his studio. Although he was trained to be an art educator, he has had little formal training as a painter, but has studied the work of artists he much admires including John Singer Sargent, Anders Zorn, and Winslow Homer.
His obvious talent has won him prestigious recognition including the Frederic Remington Award and the Robert M. Lougheed Memorial Award, both from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. He is a member of the Northwest Rendezvous Group, and is the first Montana artist since Charlie Russell to exhibit at Grand Central Art Galleries in New York City.
Aspevig was born in Rudyard, Montana, and raised on a small working wheat farm near the Canadian border. He became mindful of people's reliance upon the land, although he left the farm to attend Eastern Montana College in Billings. However, he dropped out to spend the winter in the Bear Paw Mountains and then returned for a degree in art education. He taught for one year in Sandy Oregon High School and then went back to Montana with his wife, artist Carol Guzman, to paint full time.
Aspevig travels widely to paint, choosing landscape subjects in the Southwest and the West including along the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers, and in foreign places such as England, Italy and the Caribbean.
Of his feelings about nature, he says: "Paintings are a spiritual communion with nature which results in my celebration of life. Toward this end, I yearn for country that has not been tainted by subdivision, power poles, billboards, and water slides. I choose to paint my pictures as if I, or the viewer, were the first person to set foot upon the landscape".
