Hill Country Landscapes

Austin-based painter Alyssa Dawn Galloway presents an intimate series of landscape paintings in the Westcave Visitor Center, celebrating the land and waters that shaped her as both an artist and a person.

Galloway is a child of the Hill Country, having grown up just moments from Westcave, "as the crow flies, no distance at all." This proximity fostered a profound kindredness with the streams and rivers of this unique pocket of the Hill Country, a relationship that flows through every painting in this exhibition. For Galloway, the Hill Country embodies a maternal presence: pastoral, nurturing, and endlessly captivating.

Working in acrylic, she captures the quality of light as it moves across the land, translating her sense of wonder into scenes that pulse with softness, familiarity, and childlike enchantment. Her paintings are born from reverence, a deep respect for the natural world, and an urgent recognition of its fragility.

As an avid environmentalist, Galloway views the ecological crisis as integrally bound to human rights work. Her art is informed by issues of access and displacement, seeking to transmute longings for a more harmonious world where wilderness spaces are fiercely protected. While she currently draws inspiration from the Chihuahuan Desert of West Texas for an ongoing landscape series, this body of work returns to her roots and to the waters that raised her.

Displaying her paintings at Westcave, a space dedicated to learning and preservation, holds special significance for Galloway. It's a homecoming of sorts, an opportunity to share her artistic devotion with the community that protects what she holds most dear.