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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.

The Midwife

My great grandmother Stuller was a mid wife out on the prairies in the late 19th century.  She would take a wagon and a daughter out on the vast plains to aid lone homestead women giving birth.  My grandmother spoke of one such occasion when the baby was still born once delivered.  Grandma washed the baby while her mother sewed a burial shroud from a flour sack in which to wrap the baby in.  When completed the father carried the tiny body and a shovel up on a near by hill, burying the child alone in a vast empty land.  No trace of their home or the grave exists today. WhI was a boy my father knew a woman living in Denver who had been aided at birth by my great grandmother.  Her name was Goldy, and she had a very large family.  The continuity of the great circle of life.  I have a large photo of great grandmother Stuller, and an autograph book from her friends written in 1882.  She was born just after the Civil War, her father Henry Toland given a land patent to prove up on the Nebraska frontier, for services and wounds incurred while in Lincoln’s Army.  I hope this story stays with this painting, as once I am gone from this earth there will be no human memory of this dear child given to the earth of a vast unending prairie.