Rodger Bechtold

Rodger Bechtold was born in 1945 in Michigan was raised in central Illinois and has lived in and around Chicago since age eighteen. He nurtured his interests in the visual arts at the American Academy of Art, Chicago and the School Of The Art institute of Chicago. Involved in commercial art illustration for many years he abandoned that pursuit some thirty years ago in favor of painting landscapes full time.

What really ignited this passion for painting was his exposure to mentor Wolf Kahn through the Santa Fe Institute Of Fine Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico as part of the Masters Art Program.

Over time Bechtold has built a solid reputation for being a major contributor to the on going dialog in contemporary landscape painting in the mid west and beyond. His work is expressed with energy, painted with seemingly effortless brushwork and charged with color. All connected by place and moment.

His paintings, some monumental in size, have been seen in solo and featured exhibitions in museums and prominent galleries as well as public and private collections across the United States. Also they have been included in periodicals and books:

• The Artist and the American Landscape: Two Centuries of American Landscape Painting, by John Driscoll, Director of the Babcock Gallery, New York, NY
• Landscape Painting: Essential Concepts and Techniques for Plein Air and Studio Practice, by Mitchell Albala
• 100 Artists of the Midwest by E. Ashley Rooney

Rodger Bechtold and his wife, botanical illustrator Glory Bechtold, live and work near Chicago and in Door County Wisconsin.