The Cowboy Artists Freshman Class

Hey, Remington & Russell. Look Out for the Cowboy Artists Freshman Class!

Under the warm lights of the Phoenix Art Museum, a cool million dollars exchanged hands last autumn in a frenzied 45 minutes. When the excitement of the Cowboy Artists of America (CAA) annual exhibition subsided, a member of the press zeroed in on a youngish, bearded, compactly built stranger and examined his lapel badge.

"Your name tag says you're a member of the Cowboy Artists. M-e-h-l L-a-ws-o-n of Bonita, California. Have you ever had a one-man show?"

"No."

"What galleries handle your art?"

"None, yet."

"Well, can I see some of your things here tonight?"

"I'm sorry, but...."

The newsman folded up his notebook and moved off in the direction of a Joe Beeler or a John Clymer or a Jim Boren. Such is the pain of a tenderfoot in the Cowboy Artists of America. Mehl Lawson, a member only two days, and in common with four other newcomers, had no chance to prepare exhibits.

But this year! Look out for the CAA freshman class!

One is an Arizonan-Ken Riley of Tucson. He will have his drama-filled paintings on view at the 18th CAA Exhibition, October 21 through November 20, at the Phoenix Art Museum.

To reach Fort Bowie National Historic Site, you park your car and walk. Along the Butterfield Trail. Near the rifle range. Within sight of crumbling adobe ruins. If the day is hot in Southeastern Arizona, you'll arrive thirsty at a shaded pool of cool water: Apache Spring. You'll drink where they drank. Cochise and Geronimo. Generals Phil Sheridan and George Crook. Outlaws Curly Bill and Billy the Kid.

By Don Dedera

That's a Ken Riley kind of place. Riley will set up his easel and compose a painting in nature's intense light. Done, the piece will revive that moment a century ago when soldier and brave slaked their thirst at Apache Spring.

Missouri born, Kansas raised, Riley took his boyhood interest in drawing to the Kansas City Art Institute and the Art Students League in New York. His mentors included Thomas Hart Benton, Frank Vincent Dumond, and Harvey Dunn. It was Dunn who told him at a Saturday night critique: "If you get something good in a picture, get down on your knees, thank God, and don't touch it!" Riley follows that advice.

Riley's armament in World War II was a pencil. His orders: to chronicle the saga of a Coast Guard troopship in South Pacific amphibious assaults. He says he ducked and drew at the same time. Those works today hang in the Coast Guard Academy and the Smithsonian Institution.

Home from the war, he became a first-rank illustrator. He painted for Reader's Digest, Life, National Geographic, and The Saturday Evening Post. Remember his Horatio Hornblower series? He also illustrated books for John Steinbeck and A. B. Guthrie, Jr. In 1967 a National Park Service assignment took him on a swing through the American West. The result: "I decided to paint the West full-time. I love the enthusiasm of the country, the colorful landscape, and background."

Riley works in oil and acrylics. Like many CAA members, Riley's interests go beyond cowboy scenes. He contrives historical episodes, and if the tales include cowboys, so be it. He strives for authenticity in fact. He goes to a storied spot, makes thumbnail drawings and photographs, and gets the color and mood of the place.

More and more, Riley paints outdoors, in Cochise County, Arizona. From his Tucson studio he ventures out to Tombstone, Wonderland of Rocks (Chiricahua National Monument), Fort Huachuca, Cochise Stronghold, and Apache Pass. He says, "In the studio I can never seem to catch the immediacy I see outside in natural light. Only nature can truly show color

Gary Carter (Below) Steam Heat, by Gary Carter, 20 x 43 inches, oil. No time for a Flash in the Pan, left, below, is also a Carter oil, 14 x 26 inches.

Robert Duncan (Left) Icy Morning, by Robert Duncan, 20 x 40 inches, oil. Dusk, far left, is also by Duncan, 24 x 40 inches, oil. Courtesy of Trailside Galleries.

relationships. There's the requirement to work quickly, and this tends to infuse a work with vitality. Bob Lougheed was such a fine painter, and he always painted out-of-doors. In one period of two months, I did more than 50 paintings out in the open. I painted every day, and it only made me paint more."

Of the Western art movement, he says, "I think it's snowballing in popularity, but it is only a part of a general stampede in art appreciation. I went to a show of El Greco, in Dallas, and there were mobs of people there. I'm not sure Dallas would have turned out for El Greco 20 years ago.

"This interest is enlightened, and genuine, regarding Western art because Americans today seem freshly proud of their heritage. They certainly have every right to be. The settlement and development of our West ranks among the grand epics of civilization. It's a marvelous story, and telling it keeps me young."

Among Robert Duncan's Scottish ancestors were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) who pulled handcarts from Illinois to Utah, to escape persecution. To that bitter, brave heritage, Duncan was born in Salt Lake City, in 1932.

His grandmother gave him his first paints, and he began using them at age 11. He took inspiration from Norman Rockwell, and enrolled in the art department of the University of Utah.

"Not a very wise choice for me," Duncan recalls. "The art department was strongly biased toward modern art. I painted modern art, got good grades, and quit."

Duncan then sought direction from artists he admired. An early influence was a Utah neighbor, Edward J. Fraughton, celebrated for his bronze Where the Trail Ends.

Fraughton lectured Duncan on the survival struggles of early Westerners. Duncan also won the encouragement of Wyoming's John Clymer. Duncan painted with Clymer and Lougheed. In search of realistic masters, Duncan traveled far afield, to England, Spain, Holland, France, and Belgium.

Duncan makes his home and studio on acreage in the mountains east of Salt Lake City. In oil, he paints farm and ranch people; Crow, Ute, and Blackfoot Indians; mountain men; draft horses; landscapes. With realism, he tries "to show how people work and cope in their environment. At the same time, I try to project an emotion respectful of the courage of human beings prevailing over the elements, over fate, over enormous obstacles.

"There's much to be said in behalf of the human race. Life isn't easy for a lot of people, even today. But just a generation or two ago in the West, life for many

Tom Ryan

(Right) Monday Morning Blues, by Tom Ryan, 30 x 40 inches, pencil.

simply was an exercise in day-to-day survival.

"And I don't mean those classic confrontations between red men and white, cowmen and sheepmen, riders and horses. The women and children of the West were involved in endless tragedy."

Poet Octavio Paz put Duncan's creed another way: "Much more than to victory, we thrill to fortitude in the face of adversity."

Gary Carter, artist, is also Gary Carter, collector. He collects military gear, flyfishing outfits, longhorn steers, Indian beadwork, and automobiles, including a 1932 Ford Phaeton "which takes a week to polish-underneath." He also maintains a 12-passenger snow coach for touring friends around West Yellowstone, Montana, where he lives and paints. A native Kansan, he was taken as a boy to California. Beginning at age five, he roamed the High Sierras and fell in with elderly packers and experienced broncbusters. So he took those images with him to the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Out of school a year, he held his first one-man show, in 1971, at Tucson. It sold out. Since, he has devoted all his creative time to painting and sculpting. Now 43 years of age, he is frank about himself, his art, and the Western art movement: "I've been in business 11 years. I thought by the time I was 40, I might learn to paint. Now I'm hoping, by the time I'm 50. It's not that I'm unsure of myself, or modest; it's just that the target keeps moving away almost as fast as I can improve." Some of the wheeling and dealing in the world of art just drives me crazy. Now, mentally, I can come to grips with the commercial necessities, and, of course, I am one of the beneficiaries. But I truly do not paint for money, not primarily, and it doesn't seem proper that many of my pieces are traded around like hog-belly futures.

"Oh, I do care about people. Maybe too much. I'm as loyal as a dog. Try to please everybody.... I've had to stop com-missions altogether. It was putting too much pressure on me.

"I feel about as comfortable in watercolor as acrylic. I think a lot of so-called cowboy art has pretty much covered the subject matter. Myself, I'm seeking Western subjects that add a dash of originalitysuch as my treatment of happenings along the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad.

"The rare quality in a work of art is the idea. The idea is everything. I wish I had more time-free time-to concentrate on the idea. And you cannot think up those rare ideas by sitting around the studio, no No matter how many artifacts you surround yourself with. I have to get out there on my snow tractor or a cow horse, or maybe wet a fly in the Madison."

Life is full of awkward passages. But as outdoor Westerners know, there is no more difficult muster in creation than that of an old-time chuck wagon cook.

Typically reed-thin, arms floured to the elbow, down in the back, and cranky from "rasslin' pots 'n' pans," range chefs often are mixtures of impeccable courtesy and you-be-damned integrity, painful self-reliance, and fanatical faith in the work ethic. There comes a moment in Dean Krakel's book, Tom Ryan, A Painter of the Four Sixes Country, when Ryan introduces himself to the roundup cook as a painter of horses, roundups, cowboys, and even cooks.

"What color?" the cook demands. Ryan fetches some sketches from his saddlebags and hands them to the chef. And to Ryan's everlasting satisfaction, the cook blurts out, "Why hell, here's the boss! You can tell him a mile away. There's Bigun and the windmill on the lower place.

Why did you picture Doyle's place? And there's Porter! There's an old scamp for you! This is nothing but ole West Texas mesquite, and here's a set of Sixes spurs....

"Hell fire, Ryan, this is all right...."

In some eyes, Ryan is the best draftsmanartist currently active in the West. His paintings are invariably celebrated. He completes only three or four major pieces a year.

Born in Illinois in 1922, his artistic talents gained him admission to the St. Louis School of Fine Arts. World War II interrupted his formal training, but he sketched his Coast Guard activities in the South Pacific. Back home he studied at the American Academy of Art in Chicago and at the Art Students League in New York. He drew inspiration from the works of N. C. Wyeth and Howard Pyle. He took direction from Antoine Sturba, William Mosby, Frank Reilly, Dean Cornwell, Harold Von Schmidt, and Harvey Dunn.

Still in school, Ryan won a contest with a painting called The Outlaw, which later was chosen for the cover of an Ernest Haycox novel of the same name. Thereafter, Ryan made nearly 300 paintings for book jackets. The assignments brought him West and eventually to his favorite Texas ranch, the 6666 outfit, outside Guthrie, Oklahoma.

Ryan's pieces are praised for craftsmanship, ship, coloration, and classical presentation. They are also popular. His Sharing an Apple, of a cowboy slipping a slice offruit to his pony, was the people's choice at a CAA exhibition. On the walls of bunkhouses, country kitchens, and roadside garages are Brown & Bigelow calendar reproductions of such Ryan favorites as Split Decision, of a horse and rider going in separate directions after a pair of calves.

A former member of the Cowboy Artists, Ryan rejoined the group in 1982. Some of his admirers think his realistic, meticulously detailed sketches rival his accomplishments in oil. He sketches from life, outdoors, with the approval of the cow camp cook.

In the year Mehl Lawson has been a CAA member, he has worked like a mule: "I push myself from five to nine. I have no idea what I can accomplish, but I think I'll stick around and see...."

The usual preparation for an aspiring sculptor of horses would be attendance at a school of art. Mehl's approach was a degree in animal husbandry from Orange Coast College, not far from his birthplace, Santa Ana, California. After graduation, for 15 years, he bought, sold, trained, rode, and showed horses in everything from reining to jumping competitions. World champions and state champions munched hay and oats in Lawson's barn. Financially, he did well.

A casual admirer of Western art, in 1971 Lawson treated himself to a trip to the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City.

"That was the turning point," he says. "I can never forget it, and to this day, I can remember the first painting I saw when I walked in. It was Tom Ryan's moment of a cowboy sharing an apple with his horse."

He was about 30 at the time, with scarcely any training as an artist, and yet he believed he could say something important through Western art, out of love of the subject matter. Largely self-taught, Lawson did absorb painting techniques at the Alexander School of Painting, in San Diego. Lawson credits Director Alex Chidichimo with cramming important art principles into him quickly. Chidichimo says of his late-bloomer: "We teach that success in the field of art requires three things. One, great desire. Two, good instruction. Three, willingness to work like hell. Mehl came to us with an abundance of the first and last elements. We also teach our students to think. Mehl is a splendid thinker."

Today, although still fond of painting, he limits his serious efforts almost exclusively to sculptures for bronze reproduction, in a variety of sizes. He does sell his bronzes at horse shows. His clients are some of the leading collectors in America. He packs his art off to one horse show at Reno, Nevada, and returns home with enough money to carry him most of a year. Mehl says maybe all those years of swapping full-size horses has honed his ability to sell the little metal ones.

Mel Lawson seems to fit the term unspoiled. He hasn't received great honors. Yet. He hasn't been fawned over at cocktail parties, and he hasn't heard his name announced at a banquet.

"Everything's so new to me," he says. "My course is to remain an academically sound artist, a practitioner of good techniques."

So there are thumbnails of the new members of the Cowboy Artists. The organization began with a nucleus of four artists, in a saloon in Sedona, Arizona, in 1965. The first CAA exhibition of a dozen charter artists sold a total of $49,000 in works. Some of the artists were so financially poor they slept in their vehicles during the show. Byron Wolfe sold a watercolor to a college student for $50 down, $25 a month.

Now the 25 active members see their works go for six figure prices. Western art is accepted as fine art by many critics. The Cowboy Artists of America new $5 million museum is open in Kerrville, Texas.

And who knows: among the five fresh members may be the next Frederic Remington or Charlie Russell.