Here is a wonderful action painting by our friend, Charles
Marion Russell (1864-1926), the Cowboy Artist. I have been trying to get a
sense of the man and his philosophy through his pictures.
We can start with the obvious: the title of this work, Loops
and Swift Horses are Surer Than Lead. In all the Western Art I have looked
at over the years, I have had occasion to look at several pictures that include
bears in an attitude of menace. In fact, after Native Americans, bandits
and over-zealous lawmen, perhaps the bear is the most frequently represented
foeman in Western Art.
However, most any of Charlie’s contemporaries would take
the obvious route, and paint a picture of Western figures shooting and killing
the bear. (Or, reaching for their rifles to do so, or putting them down
after they have done so.) Not Charlie. His cowboy heroes, though
obviously well-armed, rope and scare the bear away to safer climes. Always
more Roy Rogers than Clint Eastwood, Charlie didn’t see the West
as a vast panorama of hardship and cruelty, but, rather, a boyish paradise of
freedom and fun.
This is where Charlie differs most significantly from the
artist frequently associated with him, Frederic Remington
(1861-1909). For Remington, the West was unending hardship, merciless
desert and physical exertion, a battle for survival to be won or lost. It
is Remington, of course, who created in his work the now-familiar Western trope
of the bleached steer skull that can still be seen in countless depictions of
the West. Make a wrong move, Remington implied, and you’ll end up the
same.
If this picture is any indication, perhaps Charlie’s vision
was the truer one. Loops and Swift Horses now hangs in the Amon Carter
Museum of American Art, and is based on a true-life incident. This
painting came about by way of his friends, the Coburn brothers of the famous
Circle C Ranch in eastern Montana, where they described the roping of a giant
brown bear. Artistic license was taken when Charlie turned the bruin into a
Grizzly, but the rest of the story was true right down to the landscape in the
background: the scenic Coburn Buttes.
The dominant color of the picture is blue, but Charlie
manages to mute or pop shades of it to represent everything from trees to sky
to mountains, to foreground scrub. Yes, the color never becomes monotonous
or gimmicky.
Charlie was also the master of figures in motion. His
horses move. Many of our greatest artists have been able to depict
horses of majesty, of size, of monumentality, but Charlie’s horses are seen in
dramatic action, twisting or jumping with a febrile life of their own. I
can think of no finer painter of American horses than Charlie Russell
Finally, Charlie underscores the tumultuous action of the
picture with a rainstorm in the middle-distant horizon. Like all Western
landscape pictures, the view-horizon is vast, going on for miles. Thus
the far-off rain storm underscores the ‘storm’ of action going on between
cowboys, horses and bear.
Speaking of movement, take a moment to look at the
bear. It twists and pivots on unsteady ground … you can almost feel the
weight of the animal as it is pulled and slides down the natural incline. The
cowboys, too, move as if in motion, alternately pulling or swinging their
lariats. And notice the cowboy on the right, looking over his right
shoulder, with right leg raised as counter weight to keep in saddle.
This is a really good picture, and something mysteriously
akin to the essence of Charlie – not only is his West a world of action,
freedom and camaraderie, but it can be a fairly bloodless one, too. Charlie
loved the animals he found out West (when visiting cities, he always went to
the local zoo, where he said he felt most at home), and it’s not surprising
that he would depict his heroes scaring away the threat of a grizzly, rather
than killing it.
Perhaps we should all take a page from Russell’s notebook,
and produce work that preserves the best parts of ourselves (or, at least, the
myth of the best part of ourselves). The more I look at Charlie’s work,
the more convinced I become that we need more artists like him now.
