Hello There!
First off, I wanted to thank everyone for the kind words! I am a Western Writers of America Finalist for Best Western Juvenile Fiction for my book, Tom Mix and The Wild West Christmas. This is, simply, the most exciting thing that has ever happened to me, and I am thrilled beyond words. Thanks to everyone at Western Fictioneers who sent best wishes.
This month, I wanted to look at a painting by cowboy artist Charles Marion Russell.
We can start with the obvious: the
title of this work, Loops and Swift
Horses are Surer Than Lead. In my study of Western Art 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. Yet, 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.
