Regionalist painter William Lester developed an iconography of the Southwest that reached far beyond simple observation of nature. Rejecting impressionistic interpretations of Texas’ landscape, filled with rolling hills of bluebonnets and restrained to a pastel palette, Lester’s landscapes are instead at the stylistic crossroads of surrealism, expressionism, abstraction, and regionalism.

Excerpt from

Erin Pinon, Early Texas Art Research Associate, DMA label copy (1940.17), June 2016