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Born and raised in rural southeastern Colorado, Michael Ome Untiedt maintains a studio in Denver. Traveling extensively, he is known as a painter of the world who sees with a westerner’s eye. Through the color, brush strokes, and symbolic subject matter of his paintings, he attempts to examine the human predicament and its connections to the landscape and history of the American West. He is driven to portray twenty-first-century psychology on a nineteenth-century saddle! Untiedt has participated in numerous shows including the Western Masters Art Show and Sale, Settler’s West Miniatures Show and  Art of the American West Show, the Booth Museum’s Art South of the Sweet Tea Line Show, Master’s of Montana, CM Russell Art Show and Auction, The Russell, The Briscoe Museum Night of the Artists, and the Buffalo Bill Art Show and Auction. He received the 2005 Ralph Tuffy Berg Award at the CM Russell Show in Great Falls, MT, and  2014 Art Committee’s Choice Award at the Briscoe Museum in San Antonio, Best of Show at the 2014 Western Masters Art Show and Sale and The Wells Fargo Gold Award at the 2014 Buffalo Bill Art Show and Auction. In 2016 he was awarded the North Star Award at the Heart of the West Contemporary Western Art Show in Bozeman, Montana.

Study of Ranch House and Approaching Storm

​I paint this house often.  It was the home of my Aunt Betty Lou and her husband Jesse Lee Musick.  Uncle Jess was born in this house in 1922.  His mother’s family, the Vanderpools, came out to Colorado from the Burned Ground in Missouri in 1906.  They came by wagon on the Santa Fe trail.  The house already existed, rumored to have been built in the 1860’s as a line shack for the expanding John Prowers Ranch.  I crawled into the narrow crawl space years ago to fix a sagging floor, and discovered that the foundation was adobe blocks.  I was in my teens when Dad and I helped Jess modernize their home by putting in running water and a bathroom.  Up until that time they used a crank hand pump to draw water from a cistern. Once, during the 1920’s, Jess’s dad, Old Jess, from the front porch, shot down a passing goose flying over the house, meat to feed a needy family.  There are so many heartfelt, wonderful stories tied to this old place.  Unfortunately a distant cousin feels the old house not worth the trouble of maintenance and is tearing it down. to be replaced by a manufactured double wide. Nothing I can do about that, except listen for Old Jess’s shotgun, and paint the memories before they are forgotten.