Golden Hour
Nine paintings built as one collection.
Bailey Burton's Golden Hour opens September 25
at Cassens Fine Art.
Bailey Burton. September 25 through October 31, 2026. Opening reception Friday, September 25, 5-7 PM.
Bailey Burton's art studio catches the light twice a day. She noticed it almost as soon as she moved to the Bitterroot Valley. The ponderosa pines around her home in Darby go orange in the last hour of the afternoon and again in the first hour of the morning. The light comes through them sideways and lays down long shadows.
"It was just so soul-refreshing," she says. "I just felt like I was coming back into myself. I hadn't been in the trees in so long, and I missed that so much."
Golden Hour is nine new oil paintings on panels built around that specific light. It is the largest body of work Bailey has brought us. We were her first gallery when she began with us in 2022, and she has been one of our top artists since her first year. It is also the first collection she has built as one thing rather than as a group of finished paintings. Three decisions made it that way, and they are the story of the show.
The Three Decisions
Bailey has painted full-time since 2021. If you put a painting from that first year next to one from this show, in her words, everything is different: the technique, the paint, the surface, the palette, the way she reads a photograph. "As you keep going, change things up," she says. "Never act like you know everything. There's always more to learn."
Ahead of this show, she changed two things. She moved onto panel, and she took a color mixing course that convinced her to cut her palette to nine colors. The question behind both was simple: "What can I change that's going to level up my work?"
The palette is the change you notice first. She now reaches for a turquoise where she used to use ultramarine, and a quinacridone violet that puts a shimmer of dark purple through the whole painting. Orange against purple is the color of golden hour, and it is why these nine paintings all come together as one collection.
"That changed everything for me," she says. "You get so much depth and detail with only nine colors."
The third decision came with the show itself. She painted it as a set, all at once, instead of one finished painting at a time. She blocked in every subject before she finished any of them, each against blank backgrounds, finalizing all together as one.
"If I have them all blocked in, then I can see where the show and my ideas are going," she says. "If I don't have them all started, I think, oh my God, I still have to figure out six more pieces." Once the later pieces were down, she could look back at the first ones and see what they needed: more of the oranges and purples, pulled through so the set read as one.
The First Layer
The panel did more than she expected. It rewrote how her painting begins. Her block-in used to be thin. Get the color down, move on, build the detail on top. In May, with the subjects blocked in and the backgrounds still white, she described the new first layer:
"The foundation I'm building right now is bolder. It's more saturated than I normally would have. There's more body to it, right away."
A heavier first layer means fewer detail layers on top. It also changes what to look for. Stand in front of In the Amber Glow, the grizzly, and look at the grass in front of the bear. It fades into the animal and nothing stops your eye. When asked about Bailey Burton and her new work, Michelle Cassens, owner and curator, said, "This is the show she has been building toward. She has always known exactly what she is looking at when she paints wildlife. What is new here is how much of each painting happens around the animal, the environment she builds for them. You can see her intention and the animals' story in every piece. That's something really special, and we are very proud of her for that."
A Real Moment
Every painting in this show starts from a photograph, taken by Bailey or by wildlife photographers she has worked with for years, always with permission. The owl in Golden Eyes lives in her neighborhood. It was a dream sighting of hers for years, and she now sees it every week. Artists who work this closely get told to loosen up, and that they would be faster. Bailey has heard it.
"That drives me crazy. Why does art have to be fast? Why can't it take time? This was an actual moment caught by an actual person in the wild," she says. "There's no teetering with it in any sort of way. This is real, and I can bring it to the canvas."
Her degree is in fisheries and wildlife from Michigan State, and you can sense it in the work as true anatomy. Her proportions, structure, and even expressions and personality are right because she would notice if they were not. She knows that the people who can notice the difference are the same people who would most likely love a painting of an owl.
"There are going to be birders, and they're going to know if something's not right," she says. "And I want to make something they would be proud of."
With her growing success, Bailey Burton has been given the label of ‘self-taught.’ "I don't really think anybody's really self-taught," she says. She studies process videos from various artists she follows, has bought a course or two, and talks technique with the artists she started alongside in Great Falls. "I like to think that maybe I'm artist-taught."
Her Why
The quote on Bailey's website is Aldo Leopold: "There are some of us who can live without wild things, and some who cannot." She picked it up from a college professor who kept it on the board, and it is one of the reasons she lives in Montana.
For several years, she has helped support conservation events and programs, such as putting her fish paintings into Trout Unlimited auctions, where the money goes to river restoration. We asked her what someone walking into the gallery on September 25 should understand about the work. She did not talk about technique.
"I want them to see the passion. Without having to talk to me, I want them to know there was passion that went into the work. None of this is about the sale. I have this gift, and I don't want to waste it. This is what I feel like I was made to do, and I'm getting to do it."
Come meet Bailey and see Golden Hour this fall in Hamilton, MT. The opening reception is Friday, September 25, from 5-7 PM at Cassens Fine Art, 215 West Main Street in Hamilton, and hangs through October 31.
Golden hour
in print
In this feature, Western Art Collector sat down with Bailey to talk about her fifth year of full-time painting and the collection she built around it. If you are interested in hearing more about the show and what you are looking at when you walk into Golden Hour, this is a great read.