Lorenzo Chavez’s solo show at Abend Gallery in Cherry Creek North celebrates his four decades as a professional artist. Titled “A Road Less Traveled,” the show opens Feb. 10 and runs through Mar. 2. For his milestone exhibit, Chavez’s 17 new landscapes are mounted in the gallery across the street from where he first showed his paintings at age 24.

“I feel I’m completing a circle,” said Chavez, who together with Dolores Chavez, his wife of 39 years, makes his home in Parker, Colo.

Since his first gallery representation in Denver 40 years ago, Chavez has participated in hundreds of art shows across the nation and has garnered many awards. He works both in oil paints and pastels. And typically he works en plein air, painting on location to capture the essence of an environment.

“It’s inspiring to see nature instead of being in a warm studio looking at a photo,” Chavez said. “Out in nature, I see the colors. I hear the water in the creek or in winter hear ice creaking. Birds are singing. Light is changing. I’m dealing with real dimension, not a photo. It’s thrilling, and it’s challenging. I find it very healing, very meditative, very spiritual to spend time appreciating nature.”

The artist’s evident appreciation and spiritual sensibilities translate to his sublime paintings. Chavez’s landscapes depict the dramatic shapes, colors and moods of the American West: majestic mountains and rock formations, stands of stately winter-bare trees and clouds drifting across wide dreamy skies.

But Chavez also has mastered less-celebrated scenery. He paints dirt roads and dribbling creeks, the violet shadows in an otherwise unremarkable arroyo, native chartreuse rabbit bush, the often-over-looked tints of snow colors and also sublime nocturnes featuring textural adobe churches with windows aglow in golden light.

“I try to find dramatic scenes like the Teton Mountains. I’m still taken aback by a grandiose landscape,” Chavez said, “but I also like the humble landscape that people might walk or jog or ride their bike by.”

Jacqueline and Ken Oldham, longtime art collectors with homes in Estes Park, Colo., and Jackson Hole, Wyo., started collecting Chavez’s paintings 20-to-25 years ago.

“We have 38 or 39 Lorenzos — several large, definitive pieces and a commissioned piece and some smaller pieces,” said Ken Oldham, himself a hobbyist pastel painter.

“The focus of my admiration for his work is that he captures the moods of nature as they really are. I think he’s the best pastelist in America,” Oldham said. “I don’t know of anybody any better than he is.” 

“The thing that sets him apart from other well-known pastelists is that his work is not stylized,” he added. “He doesn’t use colors that you really don’t see in nature like so many pastelists do.”

Chavez, born and raised in Albuquerque, honed his artistic eye early and as a boy enjoyed drawing. He recalls roads trips with his family, looking out the windows of their Rambler and taking in the impressive, expansive landscapes.

“We drove to Carlsbad Caverns and White Sands, and in the late ‘60s and ‘70s the roads were not crowded. I was peering out the windows and looking at landscape of the open country, and my mind would wander,” he said.

The artist also remembers the feel of the New Mexican soil in his hands as a boy.

“In New Mexico, I liked to rub my hands in the soil. I liked the dirt and the way it felt, the grittiness,” Chavez said. “The first time I touched pastels, I had a flashback: I felt the same earthiness.”

Chavez’s paintings draw inspiration from Hispanic and Native American cultures of the Southwest.

“As kids, we’d visit local museums in Albuquerque, and I was impressed by the abundant pueblo pottery, the Hispanic furniture, the wood carvings and santos of the churches that were a part of life,” he said. “I like that certain rawness, the unperfected beauty. An old piece of pottery has a naivete to it, a profound beauty. When I go to the Denver Art Museum, there’s a room with New Mexican santos, and it brings me home.”

For Chavez, the elemental inspires.

He added: “I see the same thing in nature. The rawness is so beautiful. It’s not polished up or perfect, but it’s profoundly gorgeous. There’s a spiritual quality to the earthiness — something I couldn’t put into words.”

For Chavez, the famous natural light of New Mexico, the “Land of Enchantment,” differs slightly from Colorado’s light: “New Mexico is slightly more intense,” he said.

Chavez moved to Denver in 1981 to attend the now-defunct Colorado Institute of Art. He completed his training in 1983, and he landed a job in a graphic design agency. He continued drawing avidly as a hobby. Though he now focuses almost exclusively on landscapes, in his early days, he drew portraits.

Chavez worked exclusively in pastels until the year 2000, when he and his wife moved to the Pacific Northwest.

“Pastels don’t work in that environment with all the moisture. I started to pick up oils to do plein air painting year-round in Oregon,” said the artist, who admitted that the transition was not effortless.

“It takes a learning curve to understand the medium,” Chavez said. “With pastels, I had multiple sticks of colors, and it’s a dry medium. With oils, I mix the colors.”

Chavez teaches both pastel and oil painting at the Denver Art Students League and elsewhere. Sandra Kaplan, another celebrated local artist and longtime instructor at Denver Art Students League, admires Chavez’s work.

“Lorenzo Chavez’s landscapes exhibit a mastery of color and evoke an intimate sense of place that eludes most other contemporary painters,” Kaplan said.

The “intimate sense of place” aptly summarizes Chavez’s process, his deep-seated love of landscapes. For Chavez, the natural world provides not only inspiration, but also a sense of belonging.

“More than anything else, I feel at home in these open spaces,” Chavez said. “The landscape becomes a living force, and I’m constantly connecting to it, grounded to it. I feel a part of it. Painting landscapes is something I’ve grown to love deeper and deeper through the years, and it doesn’t seem to be letting up. It’s from my heart.”

After 40 years of painting, does he see differently?

“I hope so,” Chavez said. “Art is observation, but it is filtered through the self — whether a still life or a portrait or a landscape. I’m trying to learn from nature. It’s much deeper than the surface, and it seems to get more profound and more and interesting and more spiritual, in ways.”

For Chavez, his process involves looking, as well as listening.

“As I’ve gone along, I am seeing more — especially in places I know. A landscape can be like a person you get to know on a deeper level by being with it and communicating. In painting, I am communicating. The landscape is telling me what it wants me to look at, the colors and values to use,” he said.

“It’s showing me the light. I’m not interjecting myself in the conversation, but it is a back-and-forth as I approach nature. I’m approaching as a beginner with my mind open to learn.”

What Chavez has learned is a reverence for the natural environment. Asked to pinpoint a primary emotion of his oeuvre, Chavez said: “Peaceful. That’s what I’m hoping shines through my work. My paintings speak of my appreciation of nature as a nourishing force for us, a way to feed us. I want to show and share that this earth is beautiful and sustaining us more than giving us air and sun and water, but also giving us spiritual nourishment. This is home.”

Chavez, a fan of Western movies and Western art, sees landscapes as the stars playing the leading roles.

“I saw the person on the horse riding out into the landscape, and the landscape engulfed them. That’s the West I see: It’s the land that’s the true West. It’s John Ford’s backdrop,” said Chavez. “We are all passing through, but the land remains.”