cowboy art, rodeo paintings, art of the west and the · cowboy art, rodeo paintings, art of the...

Cowboy Art, Rodeo Paintings, Art of the West

ColleCting ResouRCe guide

the work of skilled and notable painters who delve into historic Americana and the heart of the old West for their subject matter.

Jim Carson, Meeting with Pontiac, oil, 30 x 64.

And the

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A good handWatercolorist Teal Blake draws on his experiences as a cowboy, rodeo rider, and son of the West

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When most accomplished artists talk about the moment they first knew they had a solid career ahead of them, they reach far back into rich troves of memo-ries. Teal Blake, by contrast, has to cast his thoughts only as far back as last May.

“Joncee and I had gone to the Phip-pen show, where I had a booth,” says the 30-year-old painter, recounting the jour-ney he and his recent bride made from their home in Weatherford, TX, to the 34th annual Western Art Show and Sale at the Phippen Museum in Prescott, AZ. “If you want to enter a piece to be judged, you just walk it in and drop it off.” Blake entered TEXAS HALF-TOP, a watercolor of a horse being loaded onto a weathered red trailer.

At the Saturday night Denim to Dia-monds awards ceremony and gala, the Blakes shared a table with three more-established western artists Teal had only recently befriended: watercolorist J. Mark Kohler and sculptors Jason Scull and Greg Kelsey. “They’re all super-good guys and good ranch hands, and there was a real camaraderie,” says Blake.

“When they got to the watercolor cat-egory, they announced that I got first place. I couldn’t believe it. I went up on stage and just kept my head down under my hat,” he continues. “I went to leave, but they told me to stay up there. Turns out I’d won best of show, too. That kind of made my notch in the art world and got my name out there a bit.”Soap Creek Cattle Co., watercolor, 14 x 10.


It’s a mark of Blake’s modesty that part of his name is already “out there,” and more than just a bit. He is the only child of well-respected, widely collect-ed artist Buckeye Blake, whose classic western images appear not only on pa-per and canvas but also on items rang-ing from clothing to handbags, furni-ture to pottery.

Blake the younger, however, avoids capitalizing on that connection. “I don’t want people to necessarily know about it at first,” he says. “I want them to see my work and think, ‘He’s a good artist,’ and only then maybe realize, ‘Oh, he’s Buck-eye Blake’s son!’

“And Dad has been real good about it, too. He’s careful not to go too far when I call him to come look and help,” says Blake, whose father’s studio is just 5 miles away. “Mostly, I like to just sit down and solve problems myself.”

That sort of inner drive and dedica-tion has been Blake’s approach from the start. His earliest artistic memories

are of sitting on the floor of his father’s studio on the ranch where they lived in remote Augusta, MT, north of Helena. “He’d hand me scraps of matte board to draw on,” says Blake. “That’s where I was when I wasn’t out messing around with the horses or dogs or out hiking, looking for critters.”

Young Teal also hung around when Buckeye’s artist friends came calling. Early on, he became familiar with the likes of Gary Carter, William Matthews, Vel Miller, and Dave Powell. He also en-joyed accompanying his mom and dad on visits to the C.M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, MT. “I remember when I was about 5 years old, looking at exhibits of Russell’s letters, which he illustrated with watercolors. His wolves and griz-zlies really caught my eye. The feeling he could get with a few lines is just incred-ible,” Blake says.

Western subjects portrayed realisti-cally held the greatest appeal for young Teal, not least because real-life horses

were quickly becoming his primary pas-sion. Indeed, horses were part of his heri-tage. His great-grandfather, Samuel Coke Blake, was one of the founding breeders of the American Quarter Horse. When Teal was 7 or 8, his mom started raising and training the breed for cutting and roping. “The horse habit got pretty thick around our place,” he says.

Then, at the start of his junior year in high school, his family moved to Sun Val-ley, ID, so Teal could get a broader educa-tion than he would in rural Montana and also so Buckeye could be in closer touch with his audience. “That’s when I started riding bulls,” says Blake.

His school had a rodeo team, and he signed up for a bull-riding clinic. “I didn’t fall off of anything,” he says. “And then I started winning.” Success in the ring translated into endless anxiety for his parents. “My dad would pace the bench-es, and in 10 years my mom never could watch one single ride.” He even went pro for a couple of years.

The Outlaw Diamond Joe, watercolor, 16 x 20.


Along the way, Blake also spent some time in college, first at Montana State University in Bozeman and later at Cali-fornia Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, CA. “To tell you the truth,” he says, “I flunked all my art classes be-cause I was gone rodeoing so much. Plus, the assignments made me feel like they’d given me a coloring book and told me to color inside the lines.” That didn’t stop him, however, from sketching and paint-ing when not on the road. “I asked my dad if I could take one of his spare easels. I set it up in my apartment, and I’d catch myself there once or twice a week doing little rodeo and riding pieces.”

Blake’s rambling rodeo life changed in the summer of 2001. He was invited to participate in an amateur bull-riding event in Swan Valley, near Idaho Falls. “I got on this big, strong bull I’d seen before, and I rode him,” he says. “Then, when I got off, he came back at me and ripped up my shoulder and broke three or four ribs.”

It took Blake several months to heal, during which time he fly-fished from dawn to dark, pondering his future. “I knew too many guys who got crip-pled from rodeo. I didn’t want to take the chance of getting hurt so bad that I couldn’t ride horses or sketch again.”

An offer from his mom clinched his de-cision to stop. “She had a great little cut-ting horse I’d been in love with forever,” he says. “And she said, ‘If you don’t get on a bull again, I’ll give you this horse.’ Winter was coming on. I took the horse and came down to Texas.”

Blake bought 15 acres in Weatherford, northwest of Fort Worth. He painted a mural in exchange for four Texas long-horn cows and started raising cattle. Meanwhile, he began competing profes-sionally in team roping.

But, with increasing frequency, Blake felt himself drawn to art. He quit enter-ing roping competitions, set up his easel in a corner of the living room, ordered some watercolor paper, “and just ran with it,” he says. “I’d had my time to play. Now was the time to paint.”

By his reckoning, he now paints about three weeks of every month. “And the other week or so, I’ll go mend fences or check the cattle,” he says. He also finds inspiration helping out on ranches dur-ing spring brandings or fall gathers, es-

Tap Dance, watercolor, 16 x 12.

pecially at the 165,000-acre Pitchfork Ranch in West Texas. “Besides cowboy-ing, I take a lot of pictures. When I get back home, I’ll look at them and do a nice little sketch in a 2B pencil, to where I feel I have everything correct.” Finally, Blake lays in the watercolors, taking three to four hours—sometimes as long as five “to get the shadows just right”—until a painting is done.

The results of this process are works he describes as “traditionalist” and “faith-

fully realistic” to western subjects that, although very much of today, capture an enduring spirit tracing its roots back to the 19th century and to early 20th- century cowboy artists like Charlie Rus-sell. Blake’s favorite subjects include working ranch hands and bucking horses. “If I enter a gallery and there’s a buck-ing horse painting, I’ll go straight to it,” he says. “I’ve been drawn to them since I was little. To me, they’re the spirit of the West.”

Easley as She Goes, watercolor, 18 x 22.

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Capturing the essence of the West is Blake’s goal. With that in mind, he’ll con-tinue to visit the Pitchfork Ranch, next time with his fellow cowboy artists. “I spoke with the new foreman there and ar-ranged to go for the spring branding and stay in the bunkhouse along with Mark Kohler and Jason Scull. We’ll go in late March or early April, right after the C.M. Russell show.”

No doubt, even more prize-winning works of art will result. But, with his typical modesty, Blake sees it all as mere steps in a long journey. “I’m happy with how I’ve been progressing daily,” he says. “If I just keep doing what I feel is honest, and stick to my subject matter, I think I’ll be okay.” F

Norman Kolpas is a Los Angeles-based freelancer who writes for Mountain Living and Colorado Homes & Lifestyles as well as Southwest Art. Cool Water, watercolor, 9 x 14.


the West that WasTom Gilleon paints iconic images of the old west

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It’s such a seemIngly simple sub-ject: a lone teepee. Yet Montana artist Tom Gilleon makes this iconic dwelling of the Plains Indians a mesmerizing sight to behold. He takes this classic symbol of the American West and paints it in a way that is strikingly authentic and yet some-what impressionistic. His teepee paint-ings have become popular with collectors throughout the West. “Many of my col-lectors want western, but they don’t want ‘Charlie Russell western,’” says Gilleon. “So I give them the Old West with a more contemporary feel.”

Most of Gilleon’s teepee paintings have

Cardinal Number III, oil, 60 x 120.


Red Tide Receding, oil, 60 x 60.

a similar composition, with a single tee-pee or small grouping of teepees domi-nating the canvas, yet no two are alike. And while no human figures are seen, each teepee nonetheless has its own sto-ry. You can readily imagine a family in-side, warm in their buffalo robes and safe from the weather.

The compositional elements of his teepee paintings are strikingly simple: a triangular teepee with its circular base, both framed on a square canvas. “To me, the teepee has always been intriguing because of its primary shapes,” he ob-serves. “When I started painting teepees, I thought ‘circle, triangle, square … that’s pretty basic,’ and then I chose a red- yellow-blue palette. And people really liked the paintings. I think it’s something psychological—people are attracted to primary shapes and colors.”

Still, Gilleon never imagined his teepee paintings would be as popular as they have turned out to be. “I had been paint-ing landscapes, but I was getting tired of that, so I painted a big teepee. I liked it, but the whole time I was working on it I was thinking, ‘What a waste of time. Nobody is going to want to buy this!’” he recalls. “Well, I sold it to the owner of a resort in Montana, who hung it in the lodge. And I’ve been painting teepees ever since.”

That was about six years ago, and Gil-leon’s teepee paintings have since graced a number of magazine covers, including Southwest Art’s in January 2006. More recently, Gilleon has started a series he calls “niners.” He divides a 60-by-60-inch canvas into nine equal squares, each with its own subject. RED TIDE RECEDING, for example, features portraits of six 19th-century Indian chiefs, a buffalo skull, a war shield, and, in the center, a teepee.

Gilleon says the idea for niners came to him while he was working on a web-site for an online company. “In the pro-cess of designing it, I was looking at all these Andy Warhol images and observing how he did things, especially his mul-tiples,” says Gilleon. “I thought it would be dynamite to do something similar with Native Americans.” These paintings have proved equally as popular with col-lectors. “I’ve got some pretty heavy hit-ters that go for the niners,” says Gilleon, citing, among others, the Booth Western Art Museum in Georgia, which commis-

sioned one for its permanent collection.

gIlleon’s current work is the latest chapter in a remarkably productive and creative career, sparked perhaps by the example of his grandfather. When Gilleon was just a toddler, his sister was stricken with polio. Preoccupied with caring for a sick child, Tom’s parents sent him to live with his grandparents in the small Florida town of Starke. “He was quite an artist,” Gilleon says of his grand-father, a Scottish immigrant who made his living as a cabinet maker. “In the eve-nings he would draw. He drew pictures of sharks, whales, and sailing ships. He drew all kinds of things that were re-ally interesting to me.” Young Tom, only about 4 years old, was soon following

his grandfather’s example. “Instead of a lawn, their yard was white sand. Using a stick, I would draw for hours and hours in that sand.” By the time he entered grade school and returned to his parents’ house in Orlando, his interest in art was firmly instilled.

Gilleon was also a good baseball player, and in high school his pitching earned him a scholarship to the University of Florida. His shoulder still painfully re-minds him of those days on the ball field. “I lift a brush and it hurts,” says the art-ist, who turns 68 this year. “I can feel every curve ball I threw.” But accepting the scholarship meant Gilleon would have been required to study architecture, which didn’t interest him. So he joined the navy instead.

Blood Lines, oil, 60 x 72.


After four years in the navy, he went back to Florida, where he attended the Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota. When Elliott McMurrough, his favorite instructor, left to start his own school, Gilleon followed. “I’d say he’s probably the one person that I learned the most from,” says Gilleon. “He forced us to skip the details. In fact, for the first two years, we were not al-lowed to use a brush. We had to paint with a palette knife.”

Why? “Because there’s a tendency for beginning artists to get caught up in the details. If you’re painting a face, for ex-ample, you start thinking about the eyes, the eyelashes—all of the minute details that don’t mean anything if you don’t have the basic forms and shapes right,” he explains. “It’s almost like painting racing stripes on a car before it’s built.”

Gilleon never did earn a degree. But he did learn his craft. He landed his first job as an illustrator for NASA’s Apollo pro-gram. A year later, a better offer took him to New York to work as an illustrator for a computer company. Gilleon eventually returned to Orlando and started freelanc-ing for local advertising agencies. This was at the same time that Disney began buying up property for what would be-come Disney World. Disney soon became Gilleon’s primary client. When the com-pany made him a highly attractive offer as a full-time employee, he accepted and moved to California.

At Disney’s Burbank studios, he worked alongside what he calls “old era” art directors and illustrators. “They had an amazing ability to pick up a brush and quickly and simply tell a story or convey a feeling,” he recalls. “Especially Herb Ryman, a legendary Disney artist.” Ryman believed strongly in simplicity —an influence that is evident today in Gilleon’s artwork.

It was at Disney studios that Gilleon met his wife, Laurie Stevens, a success-ful artist in her own right. Today, the couple and their two children live on a secluded ranch about 25 miles outside of Great Falls, MT. Tom and Laurie share a studio on the upper level of their home, a contemporary western-style house. Outside their studio windows, the un-changing ranchland, the wildlife, and the rich history of the region clearly in-spire their work.Skin the Sun Shines Through, oil, 30 x 30.


American West,” he muses. “And it’s that single image set against the sky.”

Collectors and fans of Gilleon’s art will be happy to know that he is hard at work. He likes to keep busy, intent on his oil paintings as well as on a steady stream of other projects, including a book on the art of illustration. He seems mostly to be motivated by the simple pleasure of creat-ing. “It’s just fun,” he says with a smile. F

Mark Bedor’s stories on the American West have been published in American Cowboy, Cowboys & Indians, and many other magazines.

this content has been abridged from an original article written by mark Bedor. © F+W. All rights reserved. F+W grants permission for any or all pages in this premium to be copied for personal use.

Little Star People, oil, 24 x 30.

The Gilleons relocated to Montana while Tom was still working full time for Disney. He would fly to California for a day to discuss projects and receive assignments, which he would then com-plete back home. The Disney job was so lucrative that Gilleon says he never really thought about pursuing a fine art career. “I would do my own paintings on the side, but it was never really a big focus for me because I was doing so well at Dis-ney,” he explains.

Then a gallery owner opened his eyes to the possibilities: “He said, ‘If you paint full time, I can guarantee you will make

more than at Disney.’ I didn’t believe him, but sure enough, that’s what happened. And I haven’t looked back since.” That transition began just as Gilleon was fin-ishing his first teepee painting, the one he thought would never sell.

Today he is also working on another series of western paintings—pictures of grain elevators. While a solitary grain el-evator may seem an unlikely choice for a fine art painting, Gilleon has transformed that lonely tower of the Montana prairie into intriguing works of art, perhaps as engaging as his teepee paintings. “If you think about it, they are both icons of the


As the Story Grows, mixed media, 50 x 40.

the bIg red-lIpstIck smIle all but leapt off the postcard, which featured a 1930s black-and-white photo of a woman in full cowgirl regalia, garishly colorized and printed slightly off-register. “She ap-pealed to me completely, taking me back to my childhood,” recalls Donna Howell-Sickles of that image she found more than 30 years ago in “a boxful of goodies” that a potter friend offered her in trade for one of her canvases. “I grew up on a ranch with horses and cows, and every Sunday after church, playing with my friends, I had pretended to be this red-lipped cow-girl heroine who saved the world.”

Count that postcard moment as a key turning point in the career of a woman who has become one of the most popu-lar western artists living today, known for mixed-media contemporary figura-tive paintings that define the modern, strong, confident, independent, some-times brash, and always femininely ap-pealing American cowgirl in all her red-lipped glory.

Indeed, so iconic have her images be-come, and so masterly is the style and spirit in which they are created, that two years ago Howell-Sickles was inducted into the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame in Fort Worth, TX, joining 189 other illustri-ous western women, living and deceased. Her fellow inductees include artists Glen-na Goodacre and Pamela Harr Rattey; Pueblo potter Maria Martinez; authors Willa Cather and Laura Ingalls Wilder; rodeo riders and Wild West performers Mildred Douglas Chrisman, Prairie Rose Henderson, and Lulu Bell Parr; singer Patsy Cline; TV and movie star Dale Ev-ans; Cherokee Chief Wilma Mankiller;

the Cowgirl WayDonna Howell-Sickles paints modern cowgirls who embody the joyous spirit of the West

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and even Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who grew up on a cattle ranch in Arizona and learned to shoot and ride by the time she was 8 years old.

Howell-Sickles’ unique contribu-tion, the Hall of Fame notes, is the way in which she creates “images of women that are both real and myth” in artwork that “encapsulates the camaraderie and the timelessness of the cowgirl spirit.” Such heady recognition, Howell-Sickles reflects, was “probably the most validat-ing thing that has ever happened about my artwork.” She speaks those words with the unforced modesty of someone who “could always draw, but didn’t ever realize it was a talent you could build a life around. I always thought it was just a bonus.”

Born in 1949 and raised on a ranch in the small rural community of Sivells Bend, TX, about 90 miles north of Dallas, young Donna Howell began her education in a small two-room schoolhouse that had two teachers and about 30 students. Back then her talent expressed itself mostly in such tasks as illustrating fellow students’ book reports. The family later moved to Lovington, NM, where she attended junior and senior high school and con-tinued to keep her artistic light under a bushel. She went on to enter Texas Tech University in Lubbock as an education major, planning to become a teacher.

But her plans were dramatically al-tered during her junior year by the most mundane of things: an academic course requirement. “I had to take an art class,” she says, “and suddenly I found myself around people who were more like me than anyone I had ever met before. It was a huge discovery. Everybody was so sup-portive of how well I drew.” By the end of the semester, she had decided to change her major to art.

She couldn’t bring herself, howev-er, to tell her parents. “I waited until after the drop/add date for classes,” she says. “When I finally did tell them, they were worried that I was headed for a life of poverty.” But, Howell-Sickles quickly adds, “I proved them wrong by persevering.”

She kept doing precisely that after

You Can Lead a Horse to Laughter, mixed media, 60 x 40.


Ravens of the Five Paths, acrylic, 12 x 12.

college, continuing to paint while sup-porting herself with everyday jobs like cashiering in a diner. The subjects of her artwork at the time tended toward the working people who surrounded her. “I did some sketches of the restaurant’s short-order cooks with tongs and steaks and big aprons,” she offers by way of ex-ample, going on to note that one of those sketches grew into “a loosely painted im-age of a guy at the stove”—the very canvas she traded one fateful day for the boxful of goodies that contained the postcard of the red-lipped cowgirl.

In such early paintings, you can see her strong use of charcoal lines amid bold fields of red and blue, which is still typical of her style today. “My work is pretty energetic,” she says, “and though I haven’t really analyzed my color choices, I like the energy between the red and the blue. I like my figures best when it feels like they’re about to move, and red and blue seem to accentuate that feeling.”

They also, it bears pointing out, just happen to be iconic western hues, com-mon to denim jeans and jackets, cotton bandanas, flannel shirts, Indian blan-kets, finely tooled and dyed boots, and, yes, painted mouths. In that regard, the colors form a tonal foundation that Howell-Sickles has evolved over the course of more than three decades—a personal palette that has come to en-dow her body of work with an almost mythic quality.

Her signature cowgirls “are the cos-tumed figures that take the story being told half a step away from reality,” she ob-serves. “The beauty of imagery in paint-ings is that it speaks a very vague lan-guage, and people can fill in the blanks,” she continues. “Yet all of my cowgirls Roller Coaster: High Heels, acrylic, 57 x 70.

“All my cowgirls reflect the joys life can provide: Run!

Laugh! Jump! Ride!”


reflect the strengths and goals we all share and the joys that life can provide: Run! Laugh! Jump! Ride!”

One can also see such joyous emotion in the animals she loves to add to her works. Horses, the indispensable work-ing animal of the West, she deems “beau-tiful and elegant.” Dogs “are loved ones and companions. I can’t even imagine life without them,” she notes, speaking with special fondness of Sweet Lillie, her Aus-tralian shepherd, and Shiner Bark, her mixed-breed “big black happy dog.” Bulls

also sometimes appear, not just embody-ing the very essence of ranching but also because “there’s nothing like an unbeliev-ably muscled bull to speak of the mascu-line, and I sometimes like to include that to show that the women in my paintings are involved in that kind of partnership.”

Howell-Sickles certainly enjoys such a partnership with her husband, John Sickles, a retired creator of models and prototypes for architecture and engineer-ing projects. She hitched his name to her own after their daughter Katie was born

28 years ago. In 2000 Donna and John moved from their home in Frisco, near Dallas, to the little town of Saint Jo in the Texas Hill Country. There, Howell-Sickles set up her dream studio one block off the town square in a 1909 brick build-ing, a former Presbyterian church with twin steeples and big windows bordered by bands of stained glass. You’ll find her painting there most days at any of the seven easels she has set up with works in various stages of progress. “I have the attention span of a gnat, so that works well for me,” she says with mocking self- deprecation. Meanwhile, John “works physically harder than ever before,” restoring and reclaiming a ranch just outside of town where the couple is mov-ing soon.

Today Howell-Sickles finds herself more joyously at work than ever before. She’s looking forward confidently to her 60th birthday in September. And she’s adding more and more women of her own generation to her paintings. “I think my cowgirls have aged as I have,” she says. “I still do all ages, but I consistently do better at drawing whatever age I am.” The crinkles around the eyes and smiles in recent works like FANCY FRIENDS seem only to enhance the mythic quality of the tales they tell. At the same time, she’s enjoying including more of her personal friends in her paintings, rather than working with models. What you won’t see much of, however, is the artist herself, at least intentionally. “Though I don’t set out to depict myself,” she ad-mits with a laugh, “it’s sometimes hard not to, especially around the eyes. I have been accused before of having an entire show of self-portraits!”

Though they may not be true self- portraits, every one of Howell-Sickles’ paintings nonetheless can be described as an inner portrait of an artist who has found the stories she was meant to tell. “Any story that touches on who we are expresses the boundless potential we have as humans. The bottom line I always get to,” she says, “is that these stories tell a big enough piece of who we are as women that they’re worth telling again and again.” F

Norman Kolpas is a Los Angeles-based freelancer who writes for Mountain Living and Colorado Homes & Lifestyles as well as Southwest Art.

this content has been abridged from an original article written by norman Kolpas. © F+W media, inc. All rights reserved. F+W media grants permission for any or all pages in this premium to be copied for personal use.

Fancy Friends, mixed media, 50 x 40.


An Affinity for AllegoryJim Carson's grand canvases capture the western narrative in glorious images.

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JIm carson has a confession to make: His art career began with a theft. Born in Little Rock, AR, and raised in Mem-phis, TN, Carson grew up in a strict re-ligious family that offered little support for his creative side. “I had a passion for painting,” explains Carson, “but I had an older brother who was always drawing.” Although the family had determined that his brother was destined for an art career,

Out of Independence, oil, 44 x 64.


young Jim—at the age of 6—stole more than his brother’s thunder.

“He was in fourth grade and I was in first when he brought home a book on the history of art for a report he was writing,” recalls Carson. One night, he absconded with his brother’s book. “I opened it up and flipped to a painting by the French painter [Jean-Honoré] Fragonard, a pic-ture of a woman in stark light, and I was just electrified,” says Carson. “I hid the

book so he couldn’t take it back to the library—in fact, I still have it.” In time, Carson’s older brother lost interest in art, but the childhood transgression proved to be prophetic. Today Carson is an accom-plished western painter, renowned for his mammoth canvases of detailed, highly narrative historical scenes.

Exposure to western scenery came early for Carson. At the age of 12, he took his first trip out west for a stay at the

Philmont Scout Ranch in Cimarron, NM, where he spent two months hiking through the Rocky Mountains. “I immedi-ately fell in love with the landscape,” he says. Carson’s family kept horses, which also fostered his interest in all things western. “And I watched a lot of B-grade western movies,” he adds. Still, the road to his career as a painter of western scenes was anything but direct.

Excelling in math and science in school,

In the Bitterroots, oil, 54 x 60.


“Technically, I’m an historical painter—not an historical illustrator,” he observes. “I consider myself a romantic, interpretive historical painter.” While his stories may be invented, narrative constructs, they are based on historical accuracy.

Carson’s majestic piece IN THE BITTER-ROOTS, depicting a scene of the Lewis and Clark expedition, offers a prime example of this hybrid of narrative and history. An impressionistic landscape of a snowy mountain pass serves as the painting’s background; the narrative un-folds in the figures wending their way through this winter world. The figure of Meriwether Lewis walks directly toward the viewer while a smaller story takes place behind him. The Shoshone guide Sacagawea, wrapped in red, glances fur-tively at William Clark, who is looking back to check on the rest of the party. The artist relied on speculation about a clandestine romance between these two historical figures as the basis for this de-piction. “I think I’m the only artist who would bother to show it,” Carson says.

The figures—along with some animals and blankets—provide the only warm tones in an otherwise icy canvas as the viewer follows the travelers through the

his own agency, which he ran for the next 21 years, while he continued to paint at night and on weekends. In 1984, he was nominated for a coveted Spur Award for one of his cover illustrations. “Eventually, I heard about the prevalence of western art in Arizona,” he comments. “So I showed transparencies of my work to some galler-ies in Scottsdale.” The folks at May Gal-lery liked what they saw, and Carson be-gan to participate in group shows there.

WhIle carson feels a strong af-finity for the allegorical nature of Re-naissance art—and for such masters as Rembrandt, Raphael, and da Vinci—he also cites some of the giants of western art among his influences. He mentions Charles Russell frequently. “Russell was a true genius, a consummate western sto-ryteller,” says Carson, who admits that a strong narrative motivates him more than any other element in painting. “I consider myself more allegorical than most west-ern artists,” he notes. “My paintings have a broader context.”

They are also undeniably broad in size—up to 5 feet wide—yet Carson’s paintings seem to necessitate such large sizes to contain the variegated stories they tell.

Carson at first pursued studies in molecu-lar physics, ultimately earning a Ph.D. from New York University. Along the way, his passion for art kept resurfacing. “I chose to be in New York City so that I could be closer to the art museums,” he now admits. “It was a conscious decision—I wanted to be as close to art as I could get.” During his first summer break from gradu-ate school, Carson traveled to Florence to see works by Michelangelo. “I came across one of his pietàs, and I sat there sketch-ing it,” remembers Carson. “It was the first time I drew something realistically.”

While pursuing his graduate studies, Carson also took classes at the Art Stu-dents League of New York. After complet-ing his Ph.D. and publishing his disser-tation and a number of other scientific articles, he became a doctoral fellow at Princeton University. Still, art continued to haunt him: “Every night I would drive from Princeton back to New York City and paint at the Art Students League.” Carson finally decided to switch his ca-reer from science to art. He started work-ing as an agent for illustrators and, con-currently, began illustrating covers for western novels.

Within two years Carson had founded

Before Sunset, oil, 32 x 48.u


Lewis and Clark at the Great Falls, oil, 36 x 54.

Carson hopes that his artwork imparts a strong allegorical sense: “My paintings are mostly about mankind and its struggles—stories about good and evil, stories about humanity.” One of his pieces, LEWIS AND CLARK AT THE GREAT FALLS, speaks di-rectly to his work’s thematic nature. Car-son based this powerful painting with its sweeping views of the falls on drawings and accounts by Lewis. It’s a rare scene in Carson’s oeuvre, because the falls, not the human figures, take center stage. “It took months for Lewis and Clark to find por-tage around the falls,” he explains. Despite its historical allusion, the painting speaks more about the human capacity to over-come obstacles, no matter how great, and ultimately to find a way. Its grandeur—like that characterizing all of Carson’s work—is merely a vehicle to impart that most human of all messages. F

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snowy pass. “In my mind’s eye I could see the expedition coming down the hill. It seemed like a good setting for the story,” explains Carson, who says he paints land-scapes “broadly and quickly” but “slows down to render details” in the figures.

Carson’s background in illustration still influences his painting. “You naturally think in terms of the narrative, and you truly learn to tell the story,” he explains. Those stories occupy the central place in Carson’s canvases and remain the driv-ing force in his work. “Compared to most western artists, I’m more of a storyteller,” he says. A piece entitled THE GESTURE finds its narrative in a mountain man prof-fering his rifle to a group of Native Ameri-cans as a gesture of trust. “It’s a romantic interpretation, not historically accurate, but it speaks its own story.”

Since 1997 Carson has participated reg-ularly in the prestigious American Min-iatures Show at Settlers West Galleries

in Tucson, AZ. In 2000 he had his first solo show at May Gallery, and it has since become an annual event. His paintings are in a number of private collections—including that of the late historian and biographer Stephen Ambrose—and in the Pearce Western Art Collection in Corsicana, TX.

In 2001, Carson and his wife, Mar-guerite (who is also a painter), moved to Saluda, NC; he maintains a studio there and also at their second home in Cave Creek, AZ. “I’m a hard worker,” he ad-mits. “I usually spend about nine hours a day in the studio.” For reference, Carson keeps extensive personal libraries in both homes. “I own many books on both con-temporary and deceased western artists,” he says. He also possesses a huge collec-tion of period costumes, which informs his careful eye for detail. “And when I’m out west, I photograph innumerable land-scapes and horses.”

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