The
Cowboy Life as Art
The
Cowboy is indeed a piece of work, and that work can
be a work of art.
By Cathy Orr
To
capture on canvas the life of a cowboy is no small
task. His life is, simply put,
so big. He lives primarily outdoors, so the painted
images of his life are as varied and vast as the
landscape on which he rides.
But
let’s be clear. Without the cowboy on it,
a landscape is a totally different painting. Gone
are the romance, the mythology, and the drama of
lives led by real cowboys, dimensions that do not
lend themselves to paint and brush easily. If
it’s difficult to portray the realities
of cowboy life in paint, it’s doubly hard
to do it in words, so that what we tend to do with
both
a painting and the written word is fill in the
blanks, and perhaps that’s where the romance
lives on in our minds.
No
matter how the cowboy life comes to us, its
authenticity startles the audience. No one can
pretend to ride
a horse or rope a cow. That takes experience.
We see that experience on display in Owen Rose’s
Out to Gather, Chris Owen’s Doin’ His
Job, and Bruce Greene’s Between Sun
and Sod. It’s a job that’s always demanded
much—a
fact clearly documented even in the earliest
days of cowboy art in such works as Charles Russell’s
Cowpunching Sometimes Spells Trouble, created
in 1889...
Find
the rest of this exciting article and more in the
May/June 2005 issue of American Cowboy magazine...
|
|
Cowpunching Sometimes Spells Trouble, CHARLES RUSSELL, COURTESY OF SOMERSET HOUSE PUBLISHING, HOUSTON, TX. |
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Off the Rimrock, BILL ANTON, COURTESY OF SOMERSET HOUSE PUBLISHING, HOUSTON, TX. |
"Rooted
in
the spirit of
the cowboy
is a
can-do
attitude..."
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