SERIES: Mother Lode Cowboys

Original Oil Paintings and Drawings of cowboy, rodeo and ranch life in California's Mother Lode (Gold Rush) Country.  Both historic and contemporary.

* * *

Cowboys in the Mother Lode?  Thought that place was all about the Gold Rush.  Wrong.  Ranch life has been there from the beginning.  Ranching families since the 1850's.  Cattle drives then, and now.

We paint and draw the life of it - especially its annual highlight, the Mother Lode Roundup (Sonora).  Our inaugural piece in this series is an epic (!) painting of the Roundup titled "Cowboy, Clown & Bull".  Will be executed in two versions.  Subject from an extraordinary image taken by local photographer, Rich Miller.  Version #2 will be truly epic.

Check here or under the "Projected Paintings" PAGE for works completed or in-the-works.

* * *

NOTES

  • It was in the working out of Rich Miller's stunning photo image that the Artist settled on his painterly way.
  • Some say those ways and methods are "muddy"  (thick mud, really).  But the palette selected fits Cowboys.  One could tag the fit "earthy", but why trivialize?
  • The Palette was elected out of delight - sheer cascades of it.  The oils, when fingered, registered.  This inter-coursing of oils bred such a lively brood of hues and tones its last sibling has yet to be born.  Doubt if my working life will be around long enough to be introduced.
  • Affection for the elected palette bumps into the always there one for the land, and man's work upon it.  This fit of affections is the best muse by which to explore Cowboy life and the flesh of imagination.

* * *

   SOURCES

  • My own snapping photos.
  • On site sketching (combined with above).
  • Use of others (authorized).  There's insight in the looking-about of others.  This is not passive or second-hand imagination.  If anything, there  is humility, and with it the expansion and maturity of one's own vision.
  • VINTAGE PHOTOGRAPHY.   Another oner's vision removed by time.  Vintage photography is too often dismissed due to its truncated eye: its inability (except for the rare attempt) to capture spontaneity or action.
  • The tags "stilted" and "poised" are lazy ways of viewing them.  In vintage photography action is coiled within as inaction.  The task of the artist is to paint that tension out, to manifest it, to decode by oils and brush.
  • Once again, its about humility.

* * *

NOW AND THEN, FOLKS ASK FOR MY "PHILOSOPHY" ABOUT ART (that is, about painting pictures).  DOUBT IF I'LL EVER ESSAY ON THAT.  YET, IF YOU MUST, YOU CAN BROWSE MY REMARKS ON PAINTING COWBOYS  BELOW.  OR, BETTER YET, GO TO THE "MUHAMMAD PAINTINGS COLLECTION" PAGE AND CLICK ON THE LINK TO THE COMPANION SITE TO THIS ONE.  YOU'LL PICK UP A PHILOSOPHICAL CLUE OR TWO.

* * *

WHY MOTHER LODE COWBOYS?

  • Why "Mother Lode"?  Because the Artist lives here.  Why "Cowboys"?  Because mankind is the Crown of Creation - let alone the beast - and the Cowboy can stand-in for everyman as well as anyone.
  • Why?  Because the Artist's nature yields (like God to the Virgin's womb) to the human body:  ts glory, its fall, its being snatched up by redeeming grace.  The Cowboy falls and glories imn being taken up as well as anyone.
  • Why?  Because man works out his fellowship with God through his body.  And who is more at home in his body than the Cowboy?
  • Why?  Because this is the West.
  • Why?  Because any myth of the West is not mythology.
  • Why?  Because there is in Cowboy life a humility.
  • Why?  Because the Artist must, like God, call human flesh good; and, damn it, love it to the point of becoming it.  Cowboy flesh is as good as any other..

* * *

IF YOU GET THE DRIFT, NO NEED TO READ FURTHER.  BUT, THE . . .

Are our Cowboys Westerns?  Though homage is given a nod, what's happening here is outside the genre.
Don't read to much into why our Cowboys are not Westerns.  Classic Western Art stays close to the detailing of details, the reportage of what makes up the lived lives of the West.  Even when the subject is an event (the snatching up of movement) it is the components, the massing of details, that matter.
What matters in our Cowboys is the interior life of such lives made manifest (that is, the West itself).
What animates?  What binds parts to the whole of it?  What is it about Cowboy life that resists the temptation to become the myth that others have of it?  How does the interiority of the West snakebite all those other myths?
The West (that is, Cowboys) is secure in its singular solidity - assured of what it is, of its "itness".  The West, therefore, is fearless when the call goes out to be taken up by another, something that, maybe, is truly greater.
Whatever that greater be, it'sa being taken up which respects and preserves the "itness" of the West - and Cowboys.
Our graphite pencils and hog bristle brush, in their own taking up, respects and preserves the interiority of Cowboy life on our paper and canvas.
The greater respects and preserves the "what is" of the West - and Cowboys.
* * *
Myth-making is the civil war of cannibals, of the particular (the singular) against itself, against its own "what is".  Myth-making refuses, dismisses the liberating restraints of its own given nature, the freedom within its boundaries.  On its way to dethrone the greater, the myth-maker unseats its own voice.
* * *
So how do we paint them up, these Cowboys of ours?  We take them as they are - or were; of course, as our eyes takes them in.  But that's OK, for our look-about is a wide ranging one.
In looking at the whole our eye takes in the fullness of the Cowboy's enfleshment.   (Are we myth-making ourselves here?!)  What we witness is the fleshing out of the Cowboy's unencumbered, unpretentious ease with place, work and purpose.
Few working lives take to such ease as the Cowboy's: the combat soldier may be one, comrade with him.
The Cowboy's work is the putting on of the flesh (the work, in truth, of all men) - easing his larger duty as son, husband, father, friend and patriot.  Being fearsome in this singularity, putting on bodily form as no other, prepares the Cowboy to heed any greater calling.  Yet (and here lies the mystery) the Cowboy heeds the greater by staying put upon the particular.
It is that that stave's off rebellion - the war against nature, against "what-is".
What glory is man's!
Even to do his will, God does not ask us to disrobe our flesh, or the land that is the ease of our bodily self.

* * *

AS WE PAINT UP OUR OWN WORK, KEEP IN MIND:

  • That in painting our pictures, it is the enfleshment of Cowboy life that is (always) the subject.
  • That the ease which unifies the subject with the painterly mood and method is the same that settles the Cowboy into his own work upon land and beast.
  • That, like Cowboys in their singular rest, our works settle into the confines of bodily flesh and, as with God, call it good . . . in short, why go beyond created goodness?
The desire (especially from an artist) to dismantle creation's goodness (meaning the boundaries of its "itness") is a failure of nerve and reason.  Materiality then becomes a denial of the flesh.  The imagination is thwarted.
This is what sent Jesus to the cross.  Our sin against why God made man flesh,
To dismiss or belittle the flesh, with all its bodily fullness, is the unforgivable sin against the Spirit - yes, that one!  Cowboys know.  Their flesh on beast and upon the land testifies.
Like soldiers.  Like men, at the birth of their firstborn, being born into fatherhood; the Cowboy heeds the knowing, the fucking do, that there is a point to both working and dying.
Here, within their lived lives, is the fleshly reason for our own taking up the hog bristle brush to paint the Cowboy's incarnating purpose.

* * *

ON DETAILING DETAIL

Above, we noted how our approach frowns a brow at painterly detailing, of the obsessive sort.  Reportage in painting has its place.  In the best of works all that piled up detail is a portal into past times, places, and, above all, once lived lives, past and present.  Details right placed never overwhelm.
But if not rightly imagined and reported all those atomized this-and-thats is nothing but a pile of hissy-fits.
Am I dumping-on due to my particular, peculiar painterly habits?  Habits of the palette:  ways of my methods that refuse to yield to the giddy oppression of details..
The method of those ways?  Our habit of painting straight from the tube; a severe limited palette; wet on (almost) wet, laid thick and heavy on the hog bristle brush.
Obsessive detailing exhausts the work, the artist and the viewer.  It exhausts because the scrimmage to bend election to will always fails.
In contrasts, our chosen way triumphs.  Our elected ways and methods grounds and roots the chosen way into true flesh (always the truest of revealers) and resurrects the "what-is", the "itness" of Cowboy life - and ascends.
This defeats the trickery of flesh-hating detailing in its rebellion to override Art's larger purpose. At day's bloody end all those this-and-hats (that heaping pile of details) are restored to their truer, more modest nature - things as they are in themselves.
Obsessive, possessive detailing is the barbwire slung about - can we say - strangling the story of the West.
* * *
Cowboy/Western painting, they say, is of little account.  It's out there, so it can't be denied its territorial claim on our attention.  It can, but only if Western Art does not stray from the roped off field assigned to it.  Fenced in by the art world's betters!
What's needed is a hard-eyed look at that corralling fence, that jailing rope of posts and barbwire flung about and around the art.
Is obsessive, possessive detailing one of those posts, a string f barbwire?  That's all that's being asked?
Though the flung up jail imprisons, Western Art must resist the temptation to walk right in, cuff itself and shut the door against its true nature.  So jailed, the art would take to the roping off of its deformed, imposed defining perimeter.
That's all.
* * *
Am I being to harsh?  To protective, possessive of my own ways and methods?
It is never about this-and-that being here-or-there in the picture plane.  The work of oils, brush and canvas must exhaust itself in telling of the story of the West - and of Cowboys.
Here in the Mother Lode, nothing more is asked.

* * *


Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)