Surel’s Place in Boise hosts contemporary landscape painter Roxanne Everett

Photo courtesy of Christina Birkinbine

For the month of January, Boise art studio Surel’s Place hosted contemporary landscape artist Roxanne Everett.

Everett, an award winning artist, spent the month of January in Boise, applying her landscape painting skills to the beautiful scenes found in Southern Idaho.

Everett graduated from the University of Idaho with a degree in architecture, and also received a degree in forest ecology from the University of Washington, which ended up being a better fit for her professionally. 

[Contemporary landscape artist Roxanne Everett presents her artwork at Surel’s Place.]
Photo courtesy of Christina Birkinbine

Everett spent most of her professional career working as a backpack ranger for the National Parks, which greatly inspired her art journey as an environmentally centric artist.

“Becoming a backcountry ranger for the national parks exposed me to some absolutely incredible landscapes and immense beauty that just kind of blew my mind,” Everett said. “And now I’m getting a little bit older, and I can’t hike as far and I’m more prone to injuries … being able to paint some of these landscapes has been really wonderful. It’s been a really nice period of my life.” 

Some of her residencies have included South Dakota, Oregon and the Olympic National Park in Washington. Her artistic pursuits have also taken her across the globe, with previous residencies in Iceland, Australia and the Paros Island of Greece.

“[I’ve been] doing a lot of artist residencies all over the place, which exposes me to a ton of different ecosystems, you know, different kinds of woods, and prairies and just all different types of environments. And I like to explore that in my work,” Everett said. “And so I noticed that there was a residency here in Boise and it just felt right, to be in this kind of environment. Not only because it was an artist residency, but just another ecosystem for me to look at and explore a little bit through my works.”

Everett shared that her art has always focused on the environment and the land of a specific area, highlighting the details of what makes that ecosystem special and distinct.

“Sometimes I will play around with individual species, but mostly it’s landscapes,” Everett said. “And rarely do any of the landscapes have any people in them, or even any human artifacts. It’s really about the land, the environment and native species that are there.”

Everett predominantly works with acrylic paint, but often incorporates pencil, marker, charcoal, watercolor and oil painting.

Often starting with pencil sketches outside, Everett takes lots of photos of scenes she wants to paint and later works on multiple pieces at once. 

“I like having like seven or eight paintings going at once, and they’ll be at various levels of completion,” Everett said. “And that way if I mix up a lot of brown and say ‘oh, this painting needs some brown,’ I can go over and work on that painting for a while, and then I might go back to another one. So I’m kind of working on several pieces at once.”

Everett shared that the landscapes of Boise and surrounding areas are pretty different compared to other places she’s traveled, but emphasized the comparability of scenes from Wyoming and eastern Washington.

Everett hopes her art will have a greater impact on viewers and incite further appreciation for the environment we live in.

“I really hope that people will come away with just the beauty of land, and in some cases, maybe it will lead them towards better stewardship of protecting some special places that are around,” Everett said. “It’s also kind of personal to me, because I feel like I’m really in touch with the land and the plants, and I like to share my appreciation for those environments.”

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