Cowboy Art, Rodeo Paintings, Art of the West

Collecting Resource Guide
Cowboy Art,
Rodeo Paintings,
Art of the West
and
the
Jim Carson, Meeting with Pontiac, oil, 30 x 64.
The work of skilled and notable painters who delve into historic
Americana and the heart of the Old West for their subject matter.
A Good Hand
Watercolorist Teal Blake draws on his experiences
as a cowboy, rodeo rider, and son of the West
B y N o r m a n K o l pa s
teal blake
Soap Creek Cattle Co., watercolor, 14 x 10.
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 memories. Teal Blake, by contrast, has to cast
his thoughts only as far back as last May.
“Joncee and I had gone to the Phippen show, where I had a booth,” says the
30-year-old painter, recounting the journey 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 Diamonds awards ceremony and gala, the
Blakes shared a table with three moreestablished 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 category, 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.”
www.SouthwestArt.com 2
The Outlaw Diamond Joe, watercolor, 16 x 20.
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 collected artist Buckeye Blake, whose classic
western images appear not only on paper and canvas but also on items ranging from clothing to handbags, furniture 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 Buckeye 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 dedication 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 enjoyed 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 grizzlies really caught my eye. The feeling he
could get with a few lines is just incredible,” Blake says.
Western subjects portrayed realistically held the greatest appeal for young
Teal, not least because real-life horses
were quickly becoming his primary passion. Indeed, horses were part of his heritage. 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 Valley, ID, so Teal could get a broader education 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 benches, and in 10 years my mom never could
watch one single ride.” He even went pro
for a couple of years.
www.SouthwestArt.com 3
Along the way, Blake also spent some
time in college, first at Montana State
University in Bozeman and later at California Polytechnic State University in San
Luis Obispo, CA. “To tell you the truth,”
he says, “I flunked all my art classes because 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 painting 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 crippled 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 decision to stop. “She had a great little cutting 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 longhorn cows and started raising cattle.
Meanwhile, he began competing professionally in team roping.
But, with increasing frequency, Blake
felt himself drawn to art. He quit entering 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 during spring brandings or fall gathers, es-
Tap Dance, watercolor, 16 x 12.
pecially at the 165,000-acre Pitchfork
Ranch in West Texas. “Besides cowboying, 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 20thcentury cowboy artists like Charlie Russell. Blake’s favorite subjects include
working ranch hands and bucking horses.
“If I enter a gallery and there’s a bucking 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.”
www.SouthwestArt.com 4
Easley as She Goes, watercolor, 18 x 22.
Capturing the essence of the West is
Blake’s goal. With that in mind, he’ll continue to visit the Pitchfork Ranch, next
time with his fellow cowboy artists. “I
spoke with the new foreman there and arranged 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.
This content has been abridged from an original article written by Norman Kolpas. © F+W. All rights
reserved. F+W grants permission for any or all pages in this premium to be copied for personal use.
www.SouthwestArt.com 5
Cardinal Number III, oil, 60 x 120.
Tom Gilleon paints iconic
images of the old west
B y m ark b e d o r
tom gilleon
The West
That Was
It’s such a seemingly simple subject: 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 somewhat impressionistic. His teepee paintings have become popular with collectors
throughout the West. “Many of my collectors 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
www.SouthwestArt.com 6
a similar composition, with a single teepee or small grouping of teepees dominating the canvas, yet no two are alike.
And while no human figures are seen,
each teepee nonetheless has its own story. You can readily imagine a family inside, 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 observes. “When I started painting teepees,
I thought ‘circle, triangle, square … that’s
pretty basic,’ and then I chose a redyellow-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 painting 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 Gilleon’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 19thcentury 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 website for an online company. “In the process of designing it, I was looking at all
these Andy Warhol images and observing
how he did things, especially his multiples,” says Gilleon. “I thought it would
be dynamite to do something similar
with Native Americans.” These paintings
have proved equally as popular with collectors. “I’ve got some pretty heavy hitters 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 grandfather, a Scottish immigrant who made
his living as a cabinet maker. “In the evenings he would draw. He drew pictures
of sharks, whales, and sailing ships. He
drew all kinds of things that were really 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 reminds him of those days on the ball field.
“I lift a brush and it hurts,” says the artist, 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.
Red Tide Receding, oil, 60 x 60.
www.SouthwestArt.com 7
Blood Lines, oil, 60 x 72.
Skin the Sun Shines Through, oil, 30 x 30.
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 allowed 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 example, 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 program. 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 freelancing for local advertising agencies. This
was at the same time that Disney began
buying up property for what would become Disney World. Disney soon became
Gilleon’s primary client. When the company 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 successful 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 unchanging ranchland, the wildlife, and
the rich history of the region clearly inspire their work.
www.SouthwestArt.com 8
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 complete 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 Disney,” 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 finishing 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 elevator 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
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.
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 creating. “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.
www.SouthwestArt.com 9
The Cowgirl Way
Donna Howell-Sickles paints modern cowgirls who
embody the joyous spirit of the West
B y N o r m a n K o l pa s
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 appealed to me completely, taking me back
to my childhood,” recalls Donna HowellSickles 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 cowgirl 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 popular western artists living today, known
for mixed-media contemporary figurative paintings that define the modern,
strong, confident, independent, sometimes brash, and always femininely appealing American cowgirl in all her redlipped glory.
Indeed, so iconic have her images become, 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 illustrious western women, living and deceased.
Her fellow inductees include artists Glenna 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 Evans; Cherokee Chief Wilma Mankiller;
As the Story Grows, mixed media, 50 x 40.
www.SouthwestArt.com 10
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 contribution, 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 validating 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 continued 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 altered 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 supportive 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, however, 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.
www.SouthwestArt.com 11
“All my cowgirls
reflect the joys life
can provide: Run!
Laugh! Jump!
Ride!”
college, continuing to paint while supporting 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 example, going on to note that one of those
sketches grew into “a loosely painted image 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, common to denim jeans and jackets, cotton
bandanas, flannel shirts, Indian blankets, 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 endow her body of work with an almost
mythic quality.
Her signature cowgirls “are the costumed figures that take the story being
told half a step away from reality,” she observes. “The beauty of imagery in paintings is that it speaks a very vague language, and people can fill in the blanks,”
she continues. “Yet all of my cowgirls
Ravens of the Five Paths, acrylic, 12 x 12.
Roller Coaster: High Heels, acrylic, 57 x 70.
www.SouthwestArt.com 12
Fancy Friends, mixed media, 50 x 40.
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 working animal of the West, she deems “beautiful 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 Australian shepherd, and Shiner Bark, her
mixed-breed “big black happy dog.” Bulls
also sometimes appear, not just embodying the very essence of ranching but also
because “there’s nothing like an unbelievably muscled bull to speak of the masculine, 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 engineering projects. She hitched his name to her
own after their daughter Katie was born
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.
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, HowellSickles set up her dream studio one block
off the town square in a 1909 brick building, 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 selfdeprecation. Meanwhile, John “works
physically harder than ever before,”
restoring and reclaiming a ranch just
outside of town where the couple is moving 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 admits 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 selfportraits, 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.
www.SouthwestArt.com 13
Out of Independence, oil, 44 x 64.
Jim Carson's grand canvases capture the
western narrative in glorious images.
B y m ark m u s s ar i
jim carson
An Affinity
for Allegory
Jim Carson has a confession to make:
His art career began with a theft. Born
in Little Rock, AR, and raised in Memphis, TN, Carson grew up in a strict religious 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,
www.SouthwestArt.com 14
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 picture 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 accomplished 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 immediately 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.
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Before Sunset, oil, 32 x 48.u
Carson at first pursued studies in molecular 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 graduate school, Carson traveled to Florence to
see works by Michelangelo. “I came across
one of his pietàs, and I sat there sketching it,” remembers Carson. “It was the first
time I drew something realistically.”
While pursuing his graduate studies,
Carson also took classes at the Art Students League of New York. After completing his Ph.D. and publishing his dissertation 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 career from science to art. He started working as an agent for illustrators and, concurrently, began illustrating covers for
western novels.
Within two years Carson had founded
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 galleries in Scottsdale.” The folks at May Gallery liked what they saw, and Carson began to participate in group shows there.
While Carson feels a strong affinity for the allegorical nature of Renaissance 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 storyteller,” says Carson, who admits that a
strong narrative motivates him more than
any other element in painting. “I consider
myself more allegorical than most western 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.
“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 BITTERROOTS, 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 unfolds 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 furtively 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 depiction. “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
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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 landscapes “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 driving 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 proffering his rifle to a group of Native Americans as a gesture of trust. “It’s a romantic
interpretation, not historically accurate,
but it speaks its own story.”
Since 1997 Carson has participated regularly in the prestigious American Miniatures 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, Marguerite (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 admits. “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 contemporary and deceased western artists,”
he says. He also possesses a huge collection of period costumes, which informs
his careful eye for detail. “And when I’m
out west, I photograph innumerable landscapes and horses.”
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 directly to his work’s thematic nature. Carson 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 portage around the falls,” he explains. Despite
its historical allusion, the painting speaks
more about the human capacity to overcome 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
Mark Mussari writes frequently about art & design.
Lewis and Clark at the Great Falls, oil, 36 x 54.
This content has been abridged from an original article written by Mark Mussari. © F+W. All rights reserved.
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