Once Upon a Time

 Hi there. My name is Mae Wyn Schantz . I'm a Denver based artist and I work in oil on stainless steel doing landscape paintings of nature and wildlife here in Colorado. As you'll note, one of the most interesting things about my work is the exposed metal background. I started experimenting on stainless steel quite a few years ago.

In my quest to find a really smooth surface to paint on, and what I discovered is that if I left areas of the metal exposed, it created this really interesting contrast to my nature subject matter. This painting is called "Once Upon a Time" and it's really a new series that I started in 2023.

This painting's from 2024, it's inspired by my daughter who's seven years old and her love of rainbows. And so you can kind of see this exaggerated sort of rainbow arc that creates a kind of dramatic geometry in the painting. And it's where the stainless steel is exposed in the negative spaces.

 She loves rainbows and one of the things we love to do together is, you know, look at the clouds, and I'm a landscape painter at heart, and so painting clouds is one of my favorite things. And so this series is all about cloudscapes. and the drama of them and just watching color shifts happen. And even though there isn't the striped rainbow that we're used to seeing, there is a gradient of rainbow in the background and in the shifting colors in the clouds. 

 It's been really fun to do this series and to see her get really excited about the paintings as I do them. And I hope you enjoy it too.