The Woman in the Hat: What I Was Really After With "Cowgirl"
There's a version of western art that's all performance. Cowboys mid-lasso, high drama, everything leaning toward the theatrical. Nothing wrong with it. But it's never been the kind of work I want to make.
Cowgirl is quieter than that.
She's a female figure with a wide-brim hat. And the thing I was going for, the real challenge in this painting, is that she's not performing. She's just there. The kind of quiet confidence that doesn't announce itself.
That's harder to paint than it sounds.
When you're working on a figure and trying to capture confidence, the natural instinct is to over-explain it. Too much tension in the jaw, too deliberate a posture, too posed. You end up painting a character instead of a person. So with Cowgirl, I kept pulling back. Any time something felt too intentional, I'd soften it. Lose an edge, break an outline, let the mark breathe a little.
The palette is doing a lot of the work here. I kept the color rich, because this is oil paint and you're allowed to use it. But the goal was keeping the warmth consistent and unhurried. There's no single spot that demands your attention. Your eye settles into the painting, which is exactly what you want if you're trying to paint someone who's comfortable in their own skin.
The color leans toward warm ochres and burnt sienna, with deeper tones in the shadows. Nothing jarring. The light reads like late afternoon, that particular California afternoon light that makes everything feel slightly more golden than it probably is. I've spent a lot of time chasing that light. It keeps moving.
The California West thing in this painting is specific. I don't mean rattlesnakes and dust storms. I mean the place where cowboy culture and California culture actually overlap: parts of the Central Valley, the high desert, stretches of the coast that are more ranch than beach. There's a woman in that world who wears a wide-brim hat without thinking about it, who's equally at ease at a stockyard or a gallery opening. Cowgirl is painted into that sensibility. She's not trying to be a symbol. She just is what she is.
The brushwork is visible, and I wanted it that way. I'm not interested in painting hair that looks digitally generated, every strand mapped out, edges dissolved into smoothness. Oil paint has a physical quality, and I want you to feel the mark. There's life in a loose stroke that a heavily blended surface doesn't have. The figure is rendered but not polished, and I think that's part of what makes her feel like a person rather than a reference image.
There's a lot of female figurative painting happening in the western and contemporary spaces right now. A lot of it leans toward mythology, the idealized woman, the frontier symbol, something slightly larger than human. That's not what I was after here. Cowgirl is a specific person with a specific mood. She's thinking about something that has nothing to do with you looking at the painting.
What I'm usually chasing when I paint figures is a feeling, not a story. One question: what does it feel like to be in the room with this painting? With Cowgirl, the answer I wanted was something like settled. Calm. An easiness you can't fake and can't force.
Whether I got there is for whoever hangs it to decide.
Cowgirl is available as a reproduction print, unframed or ready-to-hang in a solid wood frame, in several sizes. If you've been looking for something that brings that California West energy into a room without being heavy about it, this is the one.
Shop Cowgirl prints → Shop framed Cowgirl prints →