To Joe Wayne, painting is like a good poem: Neither reveals all its secrets at once. "You come back to a poem time and again; sometimes you find something new and beautiful that you didn‚t see before. It‚s the same with agood painting. You should be able to find something interesting in it year after year."

Whether he's focused on a back country cabin or the bend in a snow-crusted river, Wayne paints scenes that keep asking for another viewing. In the process of creating one of the impressionistic landscapes that he shows in Jackson and Bozeman galleries, he paints with broad lines, never using two brush strokes when one will do, it's an approach that he necessarily applies to other aspects of his life as well. From...