Outlaws, Riders, and the Myth We Keep Painting
The first painting I ever sold was a landscape. No figures, no people — just light on rock and the suggestion of heat. It moved fast, and I thought I understood something about what people wanted from Western art. Then I painted El Bandito.
That changed my thinking about almost everything.
Why the Figure Changes Everything
A landscape, at its best, creates atmosphere. It puts you inside a place and makes you feel the temperature of the air. But it doesn't ask anything of you. The moment you put a figure in that landscape — one person, alone, with the horizon stretching behind them — something shifts. Now there's a question. Where are they going? What did they leave behind? Are they free, or running?
That's what the figure does that pure landscape can't. It turns scenery into story.
The American West as a place is extraordinary to paint. The quality of the light, the scale of the land, the way the desert absorbs color and gives it back differently at dusk — I could spend a career working through that alone. But the mythology of the West lives in its people. The lone rider. The outlaw. The woman who rode out on her own terms before anyone told her she could. Each painting tells a story that is completely unique to each viewer. That's what I keep coming back to in my western figurative oil paintings. Not the land itself, but the people who moved through it.
How I Paint the Lone Rider
El Bandito started as a question: what's the minimum amount of paint you need to suggest a human being? The answer, it turns out, is not much.
I worked the sky first — that wide, unbroken horizon that's the real subject of the painting — and laid in ultramarine blue mixed with burnt sienna for the near-blacks at the base. Then the figure. Just silhouette and suggestion. A shape moving through a space that could swallow it whole but doesn't. That's the feeling I was after: small figure, enormous freedom.
The palette knife was the star of the show on this piece. Short, decisive strokes that force you to commit. You can't second-guess a palette knife, which is something I've written about at length in why the palette knife changed how I paint. The painting either works or you scrape it off and try again. What I learned painting El Bandito is that the face doesn't matter. What matters is posture — the set of the shoulders, the angle of the body against the light. Attitude before anatomy.
The Cowgirl, Ol' Tex , and a Different Kind of Western Story
The portraits I paint come from a different corner of the myth.
Cowgirl isn't riding into anything. She's just there — present, confident, holding her ground in the frame. I painted her in the warm, loose energy that California light tends to pull out of my palette. Rich color, visible brushwork. The kind of painting where you can see every decision, where nothing is smoothed over. She's a portrait more than a narrative, and that stillness is the point.
Ol' Tex is something else entirely. Still, more atmospheric, slightly mythological. If Cowgirl is a portrait, Ol' Tex is closer to a feeling. I built him in layers over a dark underpinning, working lighter and lighter until something emerged that felt right — a palette that sits somewhere between the wild and the dreamlike. The style is looser, almost conveying a dreamlike figure. There's no clear narrative in that painting, its just a weathered old cowboy looking out over the plains he has traveled for years.
Together these three — El Bandito, Cowgirl, Ol' Tex — represent what keeps pulling me back to figurative western painting. Not the land itself, but the people who lived in it, or could have, or should have. The ones who didn't ask permission from the horizon.
The Myth Is Still Being Written
The mythology of the American West is older than the photographs and newer than the movies. Every generation repaints it in its own image. I paint it in oil, on canvas, with the particular light of Los Angeles pressing through my studio windows.
There's something specific about painting these figures — these outlaws and riders and women — that feels different from painting a mesa or a palm tree. The landscape is about where we are. The figure is about who we are, or who we want to be. That question is as alive now as it ever was. Probably more so.
If any of these figures have caught your eye, prints of El Bandito, Cowgirl, and Ol' Tex are available in the shop — or browse the full prints collection.