24x24" acrylic on board painting by Utah artist Mark Knudsen, featuring the critically endangered California Condor cruising over the Grand Canyon.

Artist Biography
Mark Kundsen studied fine art at the University of Utah in '69 and '70. In the early '70's he took a position in the Art department at the Salt Lake Tribune and became Head of Design Features in 1989. In 2004 he retired to become a full time artist. He now spends his days in his studio painting alongside his wife/fellow artist, Leslie Thomas.

"It is my feeling that the desert country of the American West is too large, too wild, too gorgeous to be encompassed by traditional landscape painting. Our inherited aesthetic defines beauty in landscape as green and arable land or grand, breathtaking places. I feel the need to expand that definition. I want to portray the desert as it is right now, to dispense with the limitations of what has come before, to quietly point out the beauty of places that are harsh and forbidding to habitation, but express an aesthetic of the wild. I would strive go beyond the sentimentality that often defines our images of the West. The scale of many of my pieces (an extreme horizontal two feet by seven or eight feet) is a compositional strategy to capture the vastness of these places." -M. Knudsen

Acrylic on board
24" x 24"