Editor’s note: Airstream will host a fine art invitational exhibit of landscape art, May 31-June 5. This is one a series of stories that will profile the artists whose work will be shown.

SIDNEY — Look at Brent Cotton’s oil paintings and you’re transported into the landscapes they depict.

That’s one reason why Kimberly Fletcher, marketing and communications director of Trailside Galleries in Jackson Hole, Wyoming and Scottsdale, Arizona, and Michael Paderewski, owner of the Sportsman’s Gallery Ltd. in Charleston, South Carolina, and Paderewski Fine Art in Beaver Creek, Colorado, include work by the Stevensville, Montana, artist in their rosters.

“I was incredibly impressed with Brent’s work the very first time I saw it,” Paderewski wrote in an email. “I consider Brent one of the top, young American tonalists. His impressive use of light creates a nostalgic narrative which draws the viewers in by both evoking emotion and exciting the eye.”

Fletcher concurs.

“(His paintings have) an etherial, atmospheric quality that allows someone who’s never been in that scene to be drawn in,” Fletcher said by phone recently. “People move through the galleries every day. But people will stop at his work and really look for awhile. You can see that people are thinking and connecting to it. You are moved by it and you want to immerse in it.”

Area residents will have the opportunity to do that, themselves, during the Airstream Fine Art Invitational Exhibit, scheduled for May 31 to June 5 at the Jackson Center facility. Cotton will be one of 19 of the country’s top landscape artists to show in the exhibit.

His work has been purchased for their private collections by Oprah Winfrey, Tom Brokaw and Brent Musberger, among others. He has been included in prestigious museum shows and is a represented by major galleries. But, he told the Sidney Daily News by phone recently, he’s excited to be part of the Airstream show.

“It’s the first year. It’s a unique show,” Cotton said. “I thought it would be fun to do a small piece that celebrates the area I live in. It’s a small exhibit, but it’s a unique opportunity for people to see my work who haven’t seen it. I’m happy to be a part of it.”

Cotton also admits to being an Airstream enthusiast. Although he doesn’t yet own one, he sees himself traveling in one with his family, painting the countryside as they go.

“Somewhere down the road, I want an Airstream. That’s a goal of mine,” he said.

Cotton, 44, grew up on an Idaho cattle ranch and in the Swedish-inspired town of Lindsborg, Kansas. He also has lived in Alaska and Hawaii. His first forays into art creation weren’t paintings, however. They were woodcarvings of game fish and songbirds.

Now he works almost exclusively in oils.

“I’ve tried all athe mediums. Eventually, I started dabbling into oils. Initially, I didn’t like them at all, but as I worked with the medium, I realized how forgiving it is. I love the fact that I can blend, work wet into wet, or I can us a palette knife and apply paint very thickly or think them down and paint washes,” Cotton said. “I can’t imagine going back to anything else.”

The painter is always looking for new subject matter.

“I have to produce work that is marketable, but I don’t want to lose the freedom to create,” he said. He experiments with techniques, too.

“There are paintings that I have a clear idea of what I want to do, but sometimes, something almost accidental will push me in a different direction. Usually, when that happens, the painting is better than what I thought. But sometimes, they’re spectacular failures,” he laughed.

Cotton’s earliest inspiration came from his grandmother, who was a successful watercolorist, and from the artwork he saw when, as a child, he visited Jackson Hole galleries with her. Largely self-taught, he studied seriously with Howard Terpning at the Cowboy Artists of America workshop and with Christine Verner.

“His work has the feeling and elements of the Old Masters, but in also works in a very contemporary setting,” Fletcher said. “There is a timeless quality to his work. His art is about the emotion of the piece and the light of his personality just shines through.”

Cotton does portraits and figurative pieces for his private collection. His models are often his two children.

“My experiemental pieces are not that much of a radical departure of what I do. Fortunately, I’ve found an audience,” he said.

His work has garnered several national awards including the prestigious Arts for the Parks Top 100 in 1997 and in 2003, where his painting, “Evensong,” won both the People’s Choice and Region 3 awards. Cotton was also the first recipient of the CM Russell Museum CEO Award at the annual CM Russell Art Auction in Montana. He was recently invited to participate in the prestigious Prix de West Invitational show in Oklahoma City, a lifelong goal for him.

Not just a painter, Cotton and his wife also collect work of other artists.

“I love to collect artists that we’ve been inspired by,” he said.

And if he could own any single piece of art that has ever been created? He’d have Michaelangelo’s “Pieta,” from St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City.

“I’ve been moved by a lot of work, but standing in front of that —” he said, awed again by the memory of it. “I’ve never had a piece of work just floor me (like that one). I don’t think human hands have created anything (else) like that on this earth.”