Why I Don't Call Myself a Western Artist (Even Though I Paint Cowboys)

The question comes up more than you'd think. At shows, in DMs, occasionally at a dinner where someone asks what I do and I have to explain oil painting to a table of people who mostly aren't thinking about oil painting.

"Are you a western artist?"

It's a fair question. I paint cowboys. I painted a bison so many times the studies got numbers. I did a series of rodeo figures, and I painted a horseman called Tethered Souls that I still think is one of the most direct things I've ever put on canvas. Two horses, an empty sky, a quality of stillness that either hits you or it doesn't.

So yes, on paper, western artist makes sense.

But then there's Lemons and Lines. A still life. Lemons and a striped cloth on a surface, painted in the same week I finished a figure on horseback. It's not western by any reasonable definition. It's just a painting. Good light, good shape, a problem worth solving in oil.

Lemons and Lines is available as an original oil painting. Prints of this work are licensed exclusively through a distributor.

And then there's LA Woman. A California figure painting. A woman in warm afternoon light that feels specifically Los Angeles in a way I can't fully explain but know when I see it.

Horses. Lemons. A woman in California light.

So what am I?

The honest answer is that I'm a California painter. And California, if you've actually spent time here, contains multitudes. There are ranches in the Santa Barbara hills where the cowboys are real and the light at dusk looks like something from 1880. There are lemon groves. There are women in perfect afternoon light that could be lifted out of a film. The coast north of Laguna Beach gets a particular fog that changes the color of everything it touches.

That's what I'm painting. Not "the West" as a concept. Not nostalgia. California, specifically. In all its contradictions.

The "western artist" label has baggage. It conjures a specific image: dusty, brown, romanticized frontier mythology. Sometimes my work is adjacent to that, sure. But more often what I'm chasing is light and shape and the specific feeling of a place at a specific hour. That's a California problem more than a western one.

I've watched this happen to other painters. The label calcifies. You become the guy who paints cowboys, and people stop seeing the still lifes, or the coastal studies, or the figure work that's been there the whole time. I'd rather resist that early.

The thread through all of it isn't subject matter. It's paint handling: direct, committed, relatively thick. Whether the subject is a horse or a lemon or a woman on a hillside, the approach is the same. Fast. Looking for the decision before it gets overworked. Chasing the thing before it goes flat.

That's probably the better answer to "what kind of artist are you."

The kind who doesn't overwork it.

Tethered Souls is available as an original oil painting ($550).

LA Woman is available as an original, or as a reproduction print starting at $24.