Penny Otwell

Painter of the Yosemite Sierra · Vogelsang alumna

The paintings that appear on these pages are hers — sixty years of oils, watercolors and drawings of the park, made outdoors in the country the High Sierra Camps sit in. They are shown here with her permission.

Painting: Fall Aspens, Eastern Sierra, Penny Otwell

Penny Otwell has painted Yosemite for more than sixty years — in her own words, "the rhythms of nature, the rocks, water courses, and forests" of the Sierra Nevada — from a studio in Mariposa, in the foothills below the park. She came to the park in 1964, at eighteen, for a summer job at The Ahwahnee with the Yosemite Park & Curry Co. — the company that ran the High Sierra Camps — and ten years later spent a season as the cook at Vogelsang, the highest of the five camps. A High Camp alumna herself, she spent her early seasons backpacking the high country that fills her canvases.

Vogelsang, 1974

In the summer of 1974 Penny worked at Vogelsang as the camp's cook, alongside her husband, Greg Otwell. She calls it the highlight of her Yosemite years, and remembers the kitchen's neighbors:

We had a family of marmots who lived under our tent, which I got to see every day when I got up at 4:30am to start cooking the bacon! I did a lot of solo hiking above the camp, and this is where I learned about geology and botany!

The high country she learned on foot that summer — the lakes, the granite above Vogelsang, the plants and rock she taught herself to read — is the country in her paintings.

A life in the park

Penny Otwell smiling through a fan of paint-stained brushes held up in front of her face — Penny Otwell

She later worked for the Yosemite Natural History Association (today's Yosemite Conservancy) and sat on the founding board of Yosemite Renaissance, the park's long-running art program. From 2012 to 2022 she showed regularly in solo exhibitions at The Ansel Adams Gallery in Yosemite Valley; her work has appeared in Art of the National Parks (2013), on Patagonia tee designs (2014), and in a 2016 Subaru Yosemite collaboration. Four of her large watercolors hang in the park's hotels.

Her work on this site

We asked Penny whether some of her art could appear here, with credit and a link to her studio, and she said yes. The pieces we chose are the high-country ones — Tenaya Peak, the Tuolumne, Mount Dana, the Sierra crest, alpine lakes under tan granite — the landscape the camps were built to put within a day's walk.

The paintings remain © Penny Otwell. They are not licensed for reuse — to buy or license her work, please go to pennyotwell.com.