From classic Western paintings, woodwork and wildlife photography to contemporary art, including one artist who creates landscapes using about 100,000 flies regurgitating carefully selected colors of paint on canvas, Thursday’s downtown Cody Art Walk has wonderful surprises for every individual taste in art.

The Cody Art Walk is one of many popular activities available during the Rendezvous Royale art week, including the Friday night Buffalo Bill Art Show and Sale, the Saturday morning quick draw competition and the Buffalo Bill Center of the West’s Patrons Ball later that evening.

One new addition to the Art Walk map, which wends its way through downtown Cody exhibitions, is the Piazza Business Office across from the Stampede Rodeo headquarters. Owner Nick Piazza, with the help of The Orange Advisory owner Rob Scherer, is bringing in the work of 11 contemporary artists, including in-person presentations by internationally respected artists John Knuth and Mark Schoening. Since establishing The Orange Advisory in 2015, Scherer has brokered art acquisitions and private sales totaling more than $10 million.

Knuth constantly challenges traditional expectations of art and has created a series of landscapes by painstakingly deploying hundreds of thousands of house flies that eat a variety of carefully chosen hues of acrylic paint mixed with sugar water and then throw up on Knuth’s canvases.

“We call him our mad scientist” Piazza said. “I know it’s kind of a Western art week, but we thought we’d bring a little something fun and exciting, and a little different to Cody.”

Knuth’s work is definitely different, but undeniably beautiful despite the extremely odd flyspeck “brush strokes” he employs. Simply describing Knuth’s recent artwork makes you want to see it in person.

He promised to bring two landscapes of sunrise and sunset during a Friday interview with the Tribune, as well as 3-D pieces including flyspeck meat cleavers and Air Jordan athletic shoes.

“Landscape is clearly something I think about in my work, and I’m excited to be coming to Jackson Pollock’s birthplace,” he said. “The reason Mark (Schoening) and I are artists is we are like we believe in this idea of transcendence — taking something that’s base, whether it’s marked simple materials, and then turning them to something really magical. So what’s more base than the fly?”

Knuth’s paintings “force extreme tension between the sacred and the profane, creating stunning works by way of indelicate techniques,” according to the New York Hollis Taggart Gallery. “He has perfected his process using flyspeck.”

His works can be found in multiple private art collections and is featured in the permanent collection of the Asheville Art Museum, North Carolina. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

Mark Schoening uses multiple forms of digital fabrication and design in the production of his work and plans to bring pieces from his “Soft Focus” series.

Schoening created computer code for the series that uses various forms of wave patterns, and the waves  repeat, based on the frequency he dictates. On the surface there are thousands of little wooden fingers that come up and down that modulate with each wave.

“I use contrasting, very subtle colors to produce these very soft shadows,” Schoening said. “From a distance they look like just kind of simple color block surfaces. But as you move up close, you start to realize that there’s something optical that’s creating these shadows, creating additional colors within that surface.”

One of the most beautiful properties of his work, can kind of be dizzying and confusing to the audience, once you get up within about a foot of the surface, your peripheral vision just kind of fails, and they become just this glowing modulating surface.

Schoening goes through a few of these — in each of them the frequency changes and the surface presents something unexpected. Schoening’s work is the “keystone” piece in the family office, Piazza said.

“We thought, why not do something cool in Cody,” he said.

Piazza shared his idea with the museum in hopes of being an official part of the art walk.

“To my very pleasant surprise, we got a lot of positive feedback from the museum and the Cody County Art League,” he said. “They want to make it kind of an art week and we think that is kind of cool.”

The exhibit should be a stunning change from exhibitions at neighboring businesses.

“For Nick and I, the really exciting opportunity here was to expand viewing horizons and introduce people something that they might not have seen before,” Scherer said.