Douglas Aagard is a Utah landscape painter known for his strong use of colour, texture and light, and for the way he captures the wide variety of the Utah land. His subjects move from high mountain pines and aspens to sagebrush, cedars and long stretches of farmland. He lives in a small rural community in central Utah with his wife and three kids, keeping close to the places that inspire him the most.
He enjoys fishing, camping, gardening and spending time with his family.
He also volunteers at the Senior Citizen Center and works with Boy Scouts, something he says keeps him grounded. Aagard has been a full‑time artist since 2002, building a steady career through persistence and a love for the outdoors.
His education includes general classes and drawing at Snow College and Salt Lake Community College. He also studied watercolor for a year with Utah artist Harold Peterson, an experience he says changed the way he approached art completely.
Most of his deeper learning came from studying great painters and talking with other working artists.
Aagard began as a watercolor painter, but everything shifted in 2000 when he saw a show by Gary Ernest Smith. The power of oil paint hooked him instantly. With Smith’s encouragement, he started painting with a knife instead of a brush, discovering a new sense of depth and texture. He often says he never gets bored with oil because there are endless techniques to explore, and the texture sometimes becomes more exciting than the composition itself.
His paintings have won several state and local awards and have been shown in galleries across Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming and Utah. They appear in museum, public, private and corporate collections, showing how widely his work has traveled.
He has had solo exhibitions in Park City, Alpine, Ogden and Provo in Utah, as well as Palm Desert, Ruidoso and Scottsdale. Aagard was featured in Southwest Art in Best of the West in 2005 and 2006, and later in Western Art Collector in 2007. One of his images even appeared in a Houghton‑Mifflin textbook next to a Robert Frost poem.
Q: Who is Douglas Aagard?
A: Douglas Aagard is a Utah landscape painter known for colour and texture, and Douglas Aagard paints scenes inspired by the land around him.
Q: How did Douglas Aagard develop his style?
A: Douglas Aagard shifted from watercolor to oil after seeing Gary Ernest Smith, and Douglas Aagard learned knife painting for depth and texture.
Q: Where has Douglas Aagard exhibited his work?
A: Douglas Aagard has shown in galleries across the West, and Douglas Aagard has held solo shows in Utah, California and Arizona.
“Landscape painting is just another way of breathing in the open air.”
