Lydia Gatzow Bio

Lydia Gatzow is a contemporary impressionistic landscape oil painter inspired by wilderness and wildness. Born and raised on Lake Michigan in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, she was always drawn to making art and being in the great outdoors. In high school she backpacked in the Colorado Rockies one summer and spent another abroad in the south of France studying art at Oxbridge Academy . Lydia then moved to Pasadena, California, where the call of the desert first planted its seed. She graduated from Pratt Institute of Art & Design, Brooklyn, New York, in 2015 with a BFA in painting and minor in Art History and Ceramics.

Many of her paintings are completed outdoors on site, drawing direct inspiration from nature; these plein air sessions inform her studio work. She sees her paintings as expressions of the beautiful and sacred energies that always surround us. She has a background in organic farming in Sweden and Vermont and is passionate about wilderness conservation, meditation, and yoga. Lydia arrived in Sedona in 2019, where she now lives and paints, after traveling across North America in her 1982 VW bus with her partner Charles, where she painted in over 12 National Parks, Forests, and Heritage Sites.

Lydia is both inspired by the work of French and American Impressionists, as well as Abstract Expressionists. These traditional and modern sensibilities inform her unique style. Lydia is an associate member of Oil Painters of America and The American Impressionist Society and has won numerous awards for her work.

​Artist Statement

"My paintings are currently focused on the grandeur and the impermanence of the Southwestern landscape. I am fascinated by how wind and water have carved rocks, shaped canyons, and determined the fate of its inhabitants through its appearance or absence. Weather and Land collide in my paintings to create Heaven on Earth, and I am here to express this beauty through its many forms.”_L.G.

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