Three Artists of the New West

Some say it's because of the light. Others credit it to an emotional and aesthetic response to the towering mountains, the rainbow canyons, the chromatic lowlands of the Sonoran Desert. Whatever the cause, Arizona holds artists in thrall.

Maynard Dixon, a painter of the Southwest whose distinctive panoramas take one's breath away, once reflected that the artist “does not start out to manufacture 'art.' He tries to tell something seen, sensed, or imagined-to state some kind of truth.” Interpretations of truth change with the times. The days when Western artists focused solely on the old frontier are gone. Today our art is as diverse as the new Southwest itself-and as the artists who portray it. Consider, for example, three profiles drawn from a writer's notebook. The painters are Howard Post, Anne Coe, and John Farnsworth. Each of these Arizona natives understands something of the truth about which Dixon spoke.

Howard Post, who recently hit the 40year mark, grew up on his family's ranch near Tucson, where the principal business was raising rodeo stock: cattle for roping, horses for riding, all bearing the HP-Bar brand. Today his impressionistic paintings of ranching and rodeo scenes bear witness to experiences as former Arizona High School All-Around Rodeo Champion, competitor on the University of Arizona's rodeo team, and card-carrying member of the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association. “Rodeo was a sport for me, like baseball or football,” he observes in a comfortable drawl. “Still, I guess it makes sense to paint what you know best.” Post avoids typecasting. “I'm not really a cowboy who paints but an artist who happens to have been a cowboy,” he maintains.

The artist lives in Mesa with his wife, Marilyn, and their five children, boys and girls ranging in age from 6 to 17. He reserves quiet time with the family and keeps his life as an artist separate from his roles as father and husband. He can be found most days at work in his studio. The organization end of his business-represented by a telephone, desk, and accumulated paperwork -occupies half the studio. Toward the back, you find the easels and paintings. Though a versatile artist who's done his share of landscapes and wildlife portraits, Post is best known for large canvases full of cows and cowboys, broncs and riders, arenas and sun-warmed sawdust, all bathed in sizzling red, purple, and orange.

Sometimes, when he's at his desk going over ideas for projectssuch as the 8-by-20-foot mural recently installed in the Glendale (Arizona) Public Library-Post's gaze wanders toward the door and a collection of toys. Among them is a yellow dump truck, one of those solid playthings from a 1950s childhood.

“When I was in third grade,” Post recalls, “I wanted to be a cowboy, like my dad. I was always drawing, and one picture showed my dad wearing a cowboy hat, hunting deer.” Post's teacher liked the sketch and entered it in a contest sponsored by a newspaper. It earned first prize: that sturdy yellow dump truck.

Since Howard Post won that little truck, he has completed bachelor's and master's degrees in fine art at the University of Arizona, experimented with-as he puts it-all the artistic 'isms,' and engaged in a demanding career that has included annual exhibitions at galleries in New York, Chicago, Santa Fe, and Scottsdale.

His art portrays Arizona, mostly the area around Tucson and Benson and the rolling San Pedro Valley. It's a region he knows well. His mother and father spent most of their lives there. She was born in a Mormon colony in Mexico near Juarez, moved to Arizona, and there met his father, who had been reared on ranches and farms around St. David. The family's roots run deep in the San Pedro country.

“My cousins still have a ranch near Benson,” Post says, placing his hands behind his head and leaning back in the chair. “It's a good place to hang your hat.” He thinks about that for a moment, smiles, and looks off-not toward the toy dump truck of yesteryear but at the canvases in the studio. It's time for Howard Post to go back to work and see what magic he can create, mingling memories of ranch and rodeo.

Anne Coe grew up on a farm near Wellton, a watering stop for the railroad in the Sonoran Desert's lower Gila Valley. "It wasn't the kind of farm with lush fields, fat Guernseys, and freshly whitewashed fences that we saw illustrated in the Dick and Jane books at school," Anne recalls.Instead, she lived in a ramshackle house beside a tin barn on a spread that not a single cow called home. The California border lay 30 miles west, the Mexican line about the same distance south. Coe remembers a childhood spent near the vast Luke Air Force Gunnery Range and the Army's sprawling Yuma Proving Ground, which wraps around Kofa National Wildlife Refuge. Out in those places, around mountains with names like Copper, Kofa, and Castle Dome, live wild creatures who have made a truce with the often forbidding desert. Like a true desert rat, Anne has made her own peace with this environment and regularly leaps to its defense.

"Those of us who live here often take the animals and plants for granted," she says. "But they're quite remarkable, marvelously adapted for living in such a demanding habitat. They've earned the right to survive."

It's good to keep those words in mind when surveying Coe's paintings. Designed to evoke smiles and provoke thought, her subjects include Godzilla-like lizards emerging as mutant refugees from technological debris littering the military impact areas surrounding her early home. They trample the power lines of encroaching civilization.

Recently, she has depicted slyly funny amalgams of coyote, wolf, and dog. "The Indians talk of the coyote as a tricksterhero representing the sublime and the ridiculous," Anne explains. "So I've come up with my own trickster, a sort of primal canine."

These merry pranksters spring to life on canvas, cavorting in the cool waters of a swimming pool in the patio of a modern home bordering a Phoenix golf course. Sometimes they race along desert highways in hot-pink Cadillacs adorned with rakish tailfins. On occasion the tricksters seem to have lost control of the vehicle. "That's because creatures of the wild probably shouldn't play around with such an extreme product of civilization as an automobile," Coe suggests. "After all, for them, it's not the wilderness but civilization that's run amok."

Recently, the Mesa Southwest Museum mounted an exhibit of photographs and paintings resulting from a trip by seven artists' into the rugged Superstition Mountains. Among those selected for the journey were Howard Post and Anne Coe. "We went in on horseback and spent five days there," she says, enjoying the memory. "For once, I wasn't looking at my feet as I walked and could really take in the country. It's forced me to deal more with landscapes as a primary element in my paintings."

Coe, recipient of an M.F.A. degree from Arizona State University in 1980, talks of a new project: writing and illustrating a book about a coyote residing in a trailer in rapidly-developing Apache Junction. If it comes to pass, she'll draw her inspiration from a neighbor. When she isn't preparing for shows at galleries in New York, Los Angeles, Palm Springs, Sun Valley, Santa Fe, Sedona, or Scottsdale, she often hikes in the Superstition Mountains near her Apache Junction home. Anne's companion on such jaunts is likely to be a pet wolf, mischievously named Virginia Woof.

During a Superstitions trek, Woof's paw was caught in a steel-toothed coyote trap. Coe, who freed the suffering animal-and was bitten by a panicked Woof in the process-thinks of the coyotes for whom the trap was intended. "All that comes of traps is furs vain people can wear to feel ostentatious. What's important, though, is the suffering that goes into it. Ultimately, everyone is injured except the trapper. That's why I'm working with friends to outlaw leg-hold traps on Arizona's public lands."

Clearly, Anne Coe's ideas about the desert that is home to her and the creatures for whom she speaks extend well beyond her canvases.

John Farnsworth entered this world at Williams, in Arizona's northern lumbering country, and grew up along the Coconino Plateau at the Grand Canyon, Ash Fork, Flagstaff, Winslow, and a little place with the jovial name of Happy Jack.

"When I look back over the last 20 years," he says, eyes alight at thoughts of his career as a painter, "I always thank Ned Danson, longtime director of Flagstaff's Museum of Northern Arizona. If he hadn't had the good sense to fire me, I don't know what I would've done."

Back in 1968, Farnsworth, then 27, worked for Danson as preparator. "But I was listening to a little voice telling me to be an artist," he recalls. "Every chance I got, I'd be out on the Navajo Indian Reservation, painting. During the week, I glued myself to the museum's front desk, sketching. One day Danson approached me and in a fatherly tone said, 'You'd rather be out painting, wouldn't you?' I allowed as how he was right, and he fired me on the spot, saying, 'Then go do it."

Farnsworth laughs. "That was the end of my career as a museum curator, the beginning of my life as a painter."

Thinking it would be good to escape the mainstream and teach himself to paint by trial and error, Farnsworth returned to a place he had worked before: Greasewood Trading Post on the Navajo reservation, south of Lukachukai and north of Canyon de Chelly. A three-month stay yielded some 20 paintings of Navajos, which Farnsworth took to Flagstaff and immediately sold. "I remained in Flagstaff another year," he says. "By then I had enough experience to make it."

Farnsworth's paintings-commanding, richly representational visions-present diverse subjects: cattle, horses, people, buildings, landscapes. He's a difficult person to fit into a category; just when you think you've got him pegged, he moves on. For example, the main terminal at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport houses Stage, a 22-by-27-foot, 30panel Farnsworth mural commissioned by Wells Fargo and Company and donated to the City of Phoenix. The oil-on-linen painting depicts a Concord stagecoach, passengers, driver, the artist himself as guard riding shotgun, and a frothing horse (the rest of the team is out of view). Farnsworth spent practically all of 1982 creating that painting. It's so large he painted it along two walls of a warehouse and never was certain the pieces would fit together until the day before the unveiling at Sky Harbor.Many people in his position would be laying plans for new murals, more oil paintings, perhaps even echoes of Stage.

But not Farnsworth.

Instead, still hearkening to that small voice, he's moving in another direction: watercolors. "Paintings of desert and forest, mountain scenes, buildings, paintings of anything," he says with the sociability that is practically a trademark. "It's like being set free."

He ponders future prospects. "It might be interesting to paint along the TransSiberian Railway. Or do more work in Mexico or Italy. One day I'd like to paint the Navajos around Greasewood again. There's a whole world out there."

But what's it all about? Farnsworth smiles thoughtfully. "It's about doing an honest job," he answers, speaking for himself, Howard Post, Anne Coe, and so many other artists. "It's about caring for a painting. It's not really important that an artist be known. But for a painting to be known and loved? Well, that's like bringing new life into the world."

Maynard Dixon, the sage of painting the Southwest and its people, once tried to explain why he was an artist: "It is not an occupation; it is a way of life," he said. "With all its disadvantages...I would not exchange it for any I know. To re-create with paint on canvas the wonder and beauty that I extract from this amazing Western world of ours is for me enough."

The writer's notebook is closed. But memories endure, and indelible impres-sions linger: of the purposeful Howard Post, from the rolling range around Tucson; of Anne Coe, an impish bearer of serious messages, influenced by a stark land; and of John Farnsworth, onetime denizen of the sky-reaching Coconino Plateau, today a lone rider along the fence lines of experience. Two sons and a daughter of the Southwest, and each an artist through whom we may experience many frontiers while celebrating creative energies as diverse as Arizona itself.