Friends in the field: Painters Phyllis Shafer and Ahren Hertel see the same landscapes through different lenses

Friends in the field: Painters Phyllis Shafer and Ahren Hertel see the same landscapes through different lenses

Have you ever happened upon the perfect colleague or collaborator—and heard your world expand with a cosmic click? That’s exactly what happened to two well-known local landscape painters, Phyllis Shafer and Ahren Hertel.   Shafer, who lives in South Lake Tahoe, has been painting Sierra scenes—the less-traveled ones that local outdoorsy types know, not so much the picture-perfect influencer haunts—since she arrived in the West in 1994, already an…