Don Rantz has devoted his career to capturing the subtleties of light found in the skies and land of the West. He was raised in Williams, Arizona, and spent his boyhood exploring the forests and mountains behind his home. From an early age, he grew to appreciate the land, water and sky of his native Arizona.

     He studied oil painting and figure drawing at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff in the Eighties, preferring realism at a time when the prevailing winds blew in the direction of anything but representational accuracy. After college, he worked a great number of different jobs, traveling and living throughout the West, studying its many faces and adding to his vocabulary of shape and light.

     In 1994, he married the artist, Beth Neely, and together they returned to Prescott, Arizona, her home town. They started a design firm and in 1998 they illustrated together two award winning children’s books, Don’t Call me Pig-A Javelina’s Story, and Lizards for Lunch-A Roadrunner’s Tale.

     He first started working with pastels in 2003, and quickly developed the ability to capture light in the style he had always dreamed of; a style he could never quite capture in oil. He found that pastels’ extensive range of dark and light colors enabled him to convey the realistic feeling of the land in an exciting new way.

     In 2006, he won the Ruth Richeson Award for Excellence in the Pastel Journal 100 competition, sponsored by Pastel Journal magazine, for his piece Desert Vista. The following year he received Honorable Mention in the same competition for his painting Desert Backlight, which was featured on the cover of the Pastel Journal Magazine. Desert Backlight also won second place overall in the 2007 New Mexico Pastel Society National Show.