Mark Maggiori, b. 1977. Live in Los Angeles, California

Mark Maggiori’s first views of America were framed within the front windshield of a car making its way from New York to San Francisco. That month-long trip, filled with majestic views of the national parks and timeless glimpses of the West, was made when Mark was only 15 years old and on vacation far from his home in France, but its impact would ripple throughout his life and set into motion his great fascination with the West.

Years later, back in Paris, he would enroll at the famous Academie Jullian, where Western greats Ernest L. Blumenschein, Burt Geer Phillips and Joseph Henry Sharp had also studied before they helped form the Taos Society of Artists.

After being formally trained in academic drawing, Mark’s life would take an important detour through music after he formed a successful band that led to many opportunities in Europe, including into other artistic disciplines such as animation, photography and film making—each one informing his artistic creativity in unique ways.

After great success in the music industry, Mark was lured back to the United States thanks to his muse, creative equal and wife Petecia Lefawnhawk. They journeyed through the West and their trips immediately took him back to that original road trip two decades earlier, the trip that opened his eyes to the beauty of American West. It was then, at the age of 36, he made the decision to paint Western art. They staked temporary claims in out-of-the-way places such as Chloride and Kingman, Arizona, where the desert offered its stunning inspiration and where Mark quickly began to produce some of the most audacious Western paintings of a new generation—audacious because Mark was still brand new to the Western art world, and also because he was an outsider, a Frenchman, with a profoundly unique view of the American cowboy. In the space of just a few short years Mark rose through the ranks to become one of the premier Western artists working today.

His work brought many new opportunities, including important solo and group shows, and a significant showing at the 2017Night of Artists at the Briscoe Western Art Museum, where he won the Sam Houston award. He also began to expand more artistically: he started to work more in plein air, he spent time on ranches with cowboys and on horseback to acquaint himself more with the Western way of life. He spent time in New Mexico, Arizona and Wyoming and began adding additional figures to his works and new kinds of compositions to his growing arsenal.

Like Henry Farny, another Frenchman who made his way to the Southwest to paint its interesting inhabitants, Mark has carved a unique place for himself within Western art, a place where his work—part Frank Tenney Johnson, part Herbert “Buck” Dunton, with shades of Tom Ryan and Bill Owen—continues to provoke the minds of young and old Western collectors alike.

Selected Exhibitions:

• Two-artist show with Brett James Smith, Maxwell Alexander Gallery, October 2014

• Mark Maggiori: Alone in the Wild, Maxwell Alexander Gallery, October 2015

• Night of Artists, Briscoe Western Art Museum, 2016

• Logan Maxwell Hagege, Mark Maggiori and G. Russell Case: The Wild Bunch, Gerald Peters Gallery, July 2016

• Night of Artists, Briscoe Western Art Museum, 2017

• Quest for the West, Eitlejorg Museum, Indianapolis.

• Mark Maggiori, Lonesome Souls, Maxwell Alexander Gallery, December 2017.

Selected Press:

• Southwest Art, cover, October 2015

• Western Art Collector, “Trailblazer,” October 2015

• Western Horseman, cover, April 2016

• Western Art Collector, cover, August 2016

• Western Art Collector, “The Wild Bunch,” August 2016

• Art of the West, cover, August 2016

• Western Art Collector, December 2017.

Awards:

• Night of Artists, William B. Travis Awards for Patrons Choice, Briscoe Western Art Museum, 2016

• Night of Artists, Sam Houston Awards for Best Painting, Briscoe Western Art Museum, 2017

Source/Submitted by: Ande Rasmussen

Mark Maggiori is a French artist who paints modern cowboys of the nostalgic American West. His approach is realistic and academically tuned. The artist is a graduate from the Academie Julian in Paris, France, and has lived in the United States since 2010.

At the age of 15, Maggiori visited the United States and drove cross-country with his uncle; it was love at first sight. Ever since that trip, he dreamed of returning to live in the American West.

After graduating Academie Julian in 2000, he was recruited by Disney Studios for an Art Director position in Los Angeles. However, Maggiori declined the offer so that he could stay in Paris. There he could be free to excel in various types of art including photography, animation, and music video directing, all while heading the rock band Pleymo as their lead singer.

In 2001 Pleymo signed with Sony records and toured the globe for 10 solid years. Still, the dream of the American West never left his imagination.

With his desire to discover America, he returned to the USA with a film camera and lost himself in the rural South for months. Through directing music videos in the U.S., he had the opportunity to wander the country, including a trip to Los Angeles that changed his life.

Petecia Lefawnhawk, was a talented and very creative artist living in L.A. Maggiori was lucky enough to work with her in one of his music videos; this encounter changed the course of his life forever. Lefawnhawk introduced Maggiori to the ghost towns of the West, including Chloride, Arizona where she grew up.

It was in this setting that Maggiori directed a feature film Johnny Christ in 2010. Soon after they visited the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City…and it was that day that Maggiori decided he would stop everything and dedicate his life to documenting the American West.

Today, Maggiori lives in Los Angeles with his wife Petecia and paints images of the American West full time.

“I love to paint and dream about the good old times, Cowboys always represented, for me, a time when America was still a promise land…a huge dream for whoever wanted it, before corporations and plastic…

I am trying to paint pieces that will tell a story itself and bring to the viewer certain nostalgia, a moment to remember what it felt to be riding a horse on a wide-open range. I am so fascinated by the era 1860 to 1910 in Europe and in America. Those were some golden ages.” – Mark Maggiori