In 2024, an oil painting by Raj Chaudhuri won the Best in Show award at the Coors Western Art Exhibit & Sale. The honor would have been unimaginable to the artist as an Eastern Indian boy growing up in Calcutta, yet even during his childhood in India, Chaudhuri was drawn to images of the American West.

“I loved the Marlboro man. Growing up in India, I drew cowboys and Indians,” said the painter, 57, in his Denver studio. “I didn’t have exposure to much art. We had hardly any TV. We had the cinema, and we had Time magazine, and I loved copying the Marlboro ads.”

In his fifth year at the 2025 Coors show, on opening night, Chaudhuri sold three of his six paintings in the Exhibit Hall at the National Western Stock Show until Jan. 26. For the show, Chaudhuri painted ranchers, saddled horses and working dogs backdropped by mountains, buttes and vast Colorado skies.

“I’ve always loved painting horses,” said Chaudhuri whose 2024 Best in Show painting titled “Colorado Daybreak” is a realist composition of horses at a trough outside a barn, dramatic bluish shadows contrasting with white snow.

The Coors show recognition was a high point in Chaudhuri’s career.

“It was my first Best in Show. The Coors show is one of the top two national Western art shows in the country, so it’s a big deal,” he said. “I got a lot of exposure from the award.”

Chaudhuri both studied at, and now teaches at, the Art Students League of Denver.

“I teach a class called ‘The Traveling Painter,’ and it’s fun,” he said.

When Chaudhuri travels, he prioritizes painting en plein air — a painter’s French phrase meaning to work outdoors on location. He and his wife of 33 years — Christy Chaudhuri, a physician — and their 18-year-old daughter, Bela — awarded an academic scholarship to study microbiology at University of Colorado-Boulder — recently returned from California. He spent considerable time on the beach, painting the Pacific Ocean.

“Waves don’t hold still,” Chaudhuri said, “but I’m not trying to copy everything exactly as it is. I am trying to be accurate, moving things around to get design right. Design supersedes everything else. I’m trying to understand what’s happening rather than blindly copying it. All painting is abstraction: a two-dimensional representation.”

The artist emphasized the importance of working en plein air: “Painting from life is absolutely critical. Photographs are misleading, especially now with the new phones that make colors too vivid. Blues are too blue. Reds too red. And this biases the way we see things, so painting from life is critical.”

Chaudhuri regularly paints live models with a group of up to 30 artists who meet weekly at the Denver studio of the painter Daniel Sprick, whom Chaudhuri considers a close friend and mentor.

In turn, Sprick said he learns from Chaudhuri.

“I don’t need AI. That’s because I rely on Raj Chaudhuri’s super-intelligence. He’s an encyclopedia of economics, history and mathematics, in addition to the art of painting,” Sprick said. “Before immersing himself in a career of painting, he engineered a way of mapping highway traffic on to your phone’s GPS. He is fluent in the Hindi and Bengali languages, which is miraculous to me.” 

“I love his work. He’s relentless at it — an impressive artistic talent always showing me new ways of seeing, always insightful, always hungry for growth,” Sprick added.

In addition to painting from life, Chaudhuri often paints from multiple photographs, especially when he includes people in his paintings.

“I’m people-oriented, and I like to see how they interact with the land and make a living,” said Chaudhuri, who visits the ranches of friends in Colorado to immerse himself in subject matter for his Western art.

“I like painting the female character in the ranch environments because some of the workers are women,” the artist said. “The Western art market is a new audience for me. I am trying to be honest and treat these paintings with dignity but not over-romanticize them.”

In Denver, Saks Galleries, with a longstanding presence in Cherry Creek North, represents Chaudhuri. In December, Saks hosted Chaudhuri for a painting demonstration with another of their Denver artists — Chaudhuri’s friend and peer, Ann Gargotto.

“Raj is a generous teacher, wonderful soul and fearless painter,” Gargatto said. “I simple adore his work and watching him skyrocket to great heights in the art world.”

Chaudhuri also is represented by Jack Meier Gallery in Houston.

Asked which historic painter he’d most like to take an art class from, Chaudhuri said: “It has to be [John Singer] Sargent. I’d love to see him paint. His plein air work is so bright and so beautiful. His plein air work influences me more than his portraits.”

For Chaudhuri, painting is a second career. He came to the United States to study ecomonics at the University of Mississippi.

“Growing up in India, I had no role models of artists who made a living as painters. Here, I was seeing painters making beautiful paintings and being paid for it. There’s much more opportunity here, and you can be successful at whatever you work at,” he said.

“Work,” for Chaudhuri is a keyword. He paints almost every day above his home’s detached garage in his spacious studio designed with expansive windows letting in the painter’s gold-standard north light.

“There’s no guarantee that you will be successful if you work your tail off,” he said, “but if you don’t work your tail off it is guaranteed you won’t be successful, no matter how much talent.”

Along with bins of paintings, shelves of art books, and numerous containers stuffed with dozens of paintbrushes, Chaudhuri’s studio includes large and small sculptures of Hindu deities. He was preparing to make a trip to India to visit his mother and friends. And, naturally, to do some painting.

“I’m multicultural. I have my feet in two worlds, and I embrace that instead of hiding one versus the other. I like painting the markets in India,” he said. “I’m always asking ‘What is your sense of beauty?’ And ‘What do you love?’ And ‘What am I doing with my life? Is this worth it?’ It motivates me to get better. I am trying to paint with the love and dignity I find in beauty.”

And though as a painter he has his keen eyes on the outer world, Chaudhuri said, “It’s an inward search.”

For more about another Denver painter exhibiting works at the Coors Show, Daniel Sprick.