Mary-Austin Klein (born 1964 in San Bernardino, California) is an American landscape painter best known for her small-scaled and highly detailed paintings of the southwestern United States. Klein's work continues the Impressionist tradition of early California fine artists like William Wendt and George Gardner who explored the west at the behest of the Southern Pacific Railroad Company, exchanging paintings for rides. Like these early California artists, Klein’s oil paintings celebrate the bright, colorful light of the southwest. In his blog, Made in Frogtown, the artist and former newsman William Lagattuta notes her “ability to... reduce enormous, powerful landscapes into small, extraordinarily detailed paintings”. The paintings often include evidence of man’s impact on these landscapes,