Porcupine Creek, 12" x 16" original oil on panel by Bye Bitney

ART TALK MAGAZINE, December 1989: Bye Bitney, one of the hottest young artists in the traditional world.Often called 'the young genius', Bye Bitney makes his home on the west shore of Flathead Lake in Kalispell, Montana where he completed his three story home/studio in 1993. After he made the decision to become a professional artist, it took very little time for his work to gain notice in the art world.

Bye began showing in major galleries at the age of 22. Art critics praised both his keen draftsman's eye and expert use of muted colors, and his career has been on the rise ever since. In a region where the majority of artwork depicts cowboys and ranch life, Bye's still lifes, landscapes and portraits are a bold departure. Although he resists categorization of any kind, Bye acknowledges that he is not a cowboy artist. "I'm a western artist because I live in the West. But definitions of western and cowboy art are subject to many different interpretations." Many subjects appear in Bye's paintings, including ocean and sky, people and animals, flowers and still life - all beginning with a visual treat, a moment experienced either in the studio, on a drive through the mountains or from his trip to Spain and Portugal.

Unless he's planning a very complex subject, Bye rarely blocks anything on canvas. To that end, he almost studiously avoids any hard preconceptions of how a painting will turn out. "I start off with a very general idea because it's much less stressful to keep the initial concepts vague and have it evolve from the process "Bye's painting schedule is not a conventional one. He can often be found fine tuning a painting a month after he started it. In the meantime, he sometimes has up to a dozen other paintings in the works.

Bye has been mostly influenced through his studies of the interpretive realism of Delbert Gish, John Singer Sargent, Joaquin Sorolla and Nicolai Fechin. Of Fechin's work Bye notes, "There are a lot of loose abstract passages in his paintings, but his craftsmanship is impeccable. I find this genre painting to be a challenge because inherent looseness gives an artist room to flow with whatever happens on the canvas."Bye's paintings continue to receive rave reviews, but modesty prevents him from dwelling too long on the subject. Gazing over a mug of tea cradled in his hands, Bye Bitney comes as close as he ever will to blowing his own horn."All of my works seem to sell equally well," he says quietly. "That's reassuring.".