Fantine Giap looks over the “Drawn from Nature” exhibit in the Hawn Gallery located in Hamon Arts Library. (Kathleen Strauss/The Daily Campus)

There are 27 sketchbooks on display in the Hawn Gallery in the Hamon Arts Library. Some are big and some are small.

They are turned to pages depicting mesas and mountains, valleys and oceans, trees that shoot out of the rock-like fingers clutching at heaven.

They depict immense landscapes and impossible skies lit by thousands of lights. The new exhibit, “Drawn from Nature,” is a showcase of landscape sketches and watercolors by Scott Winterrowd.

Winterrowd is currently a museum educator at the Meadows Museum. The exhibit includes his artistic interpretations of different sites in Big Bend, Yosemite, Kings Canyon, New Mexico, Colorado and Los Angeles.

The exhibit will run through May 13. Winterrowd began painting seriously in 1993.

“I did slow down a lot between 1998 and 2004 mostly because I was focused on my work in museums at that time,” Winterrowd said. “After I moved to California in 2005 I really began to paint and draw a lot again.”

Winterrowd has been interested in 19th century artist explorers like Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt, for a long time.

“I became interested in visiting sites that had been documented by these artists in the past to see how they had changed over time,” he said.

“I am also inspired to visit places that early 20th century artists have depicted. I have spent a good bit of time visiting sites that the early modernists painted in northern New Mexico, and of course the Big Bend,” Winterrowd said.

Since he returned to Dallas, Winterrowd had a renewed interest in the Dallas painters that painted these landscapes, like Jerry Bywaters and Otis Dozier. “Bywaters and Dozier visited Big Bend a number of times in the 1930s before it was a designated national park and before it was paved,” Winterrowd said. “So I think of them as slightly more modern artist explorers than Moran and Bierstadt.”

Winterrowd’s process has evolved over time. The hiking enthusiast finds scenes of interest during his excursions and he sits down and paints them with watercolor. Later, he refines the painting using pen.

He creates a more finished work when he returns from the field by using photographs and sketches. However, while he enjoys painting landscapes, they are not his only artistic interest.

“I do not only paint landscapes, but even in my other series of works, for instance the groups of paintings devoted to interpretations of nuclear tests from the late ‘40s to the late ‘60s, I still deal with landscape themes,” Winterrowd said.

Two of Winterrowd’s favorite places to paint are Yosemite and Kings Canyon in Central California. “Slogging through a bog above the valley, climbing over fallen pines and hanging out at Taft Point, where there is no rail between you and a 3,500 foot drop to the valley floor, not to mention being visited by bears in the night – there is really nothing else like it,” Winterrowd said.