Aubree Snook was born in 1998 in Klamath Falls, Oregon, and grew up on a ranch in Rosebud, Montana. From a young age, she showed a strong interest in art, influenced by the landscapes and skies of the American West. Her early art practice was driven by exploring new mediums, techniques, and styles.
After high school, Aubree earned a degree in Graphic and Web Design from Miles Community College in Miles City, Montana. She spent several years designing signs across Eastern Montana, creating everything from billboards to main street signage in the Miles City area.
Now living in Powell, Wyoming, Aubree paints full time. When she is not in the studio, she enjoys camping and exploring the outdoors with her dog, often taking photographs of local landscapes to use as references for her paintings. Her love for the natural world inspires much of her work.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My paintings come out of the American West, its scale, its weather, and its particular quality of light. I work from real places and direct observation, but I'm not strictly tied to either. What interests me more than accuracy is atmosphere, and the way a landscape can carry an emotional weight that's hard to name. My goal is not to recreate a specific place, but to create an experience where land, light, and forms come together to reflect not just how the West looks, but how it feels.
Scale and vastness are central to that experience. The West has a way of making you feel both small and expansive at the same time, and I try to hold that tension in my work. By stretching or compressing space, and by placing wildlife and other imagery within it, I explore the relationship between openness and intimacy, and how that relationship shapes the way we feel inside a landscape. These elements aren't separate subjects. They're part of the same environment, ways of expressing its movement, tension, and life.
Light and color are where much of that expression happens. I'm drawn to the shifting, unpredictable light of the West, the way a storm changes everything, or how dusk can turn familiar country into something almost unrecognizable. The goal is for color to feel grounded but not literal, true to the feeling of a place more than its appearance.
I work in oils because the medium suits the way I think about painting. The layering process allows color to build slowly, with depth and luminosity that's hard to achieve any other way. I'm still finding my way as a painter, and the West shows no sign of running out of things to say.