Chris Kolupski

Chris Kolupski has a restless spirit and a love for painting outdoors. He first set up an easel as a teenager in the forests of Upstate New York and Canada, and that sense of discovery has never left him. After five years as a freelance illustrator, he moved to New York City to study painting and drawing with masters like Nelson Shanks, Everett Raymond Kinstler, and Dean Keller.

In 2004, Chris founded Boxart Street Atelier in Rochester, New York, where he taught figurative and landscape painting for a decade. But the moments that lit him up most were always outdoors—chasing light, weather, and adventure with a paintbrush. That passion evolved into Paint Out West, a program that brings the exhilaration of outdoor painting to students everywhere, whether on-site in the American West or through his popular virtual workshops.

Chris’s landscapes walk the line between realism and impressionism, alive with atmosphere and shifting light. For him, the best studio is under the open sky. “I love the clarity and immediacy of painting roaring waterfalls or sun-baked badlands. There’s nothing like the swoosh of a hawk cutting through a canyon updraft while I’m trying to catch the fleeting light.”