Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2019/ No.148 i Western Art Collector

Kelly’s Collectibles and Online Art Gallery is based in Montana, but there is no storefront, physical gallery or even an office for clients to drop by at. The entirety of the gallery is based online, where collectors can browse and buy art from the convenience of their own homes. “People are getting used to buying things online,” says owner Kelly Shaeffer. “It helps that I have a lot of inventory to look through because it keeps people looking. And all of the information is right there at their fingertips.” Shaeffer primarily uses eBay for her online gallery space, and currently has more than 500 works listed there—everything from traditional Western oils to bronze and wood sculpture to ceramics and contemporary works. And even though some of the works available are…

In one of Frederic Remington’s most famous works, The Stampede, the New York painter shows the raw power and ferocity of the cowboy’s two beasts—horse and cow—as well as nature itself. The work was painted in 1908 and bought directly from Remington by Ray L. Skofield, a stock broker, horseman and aviation enthusiast from California. The image, following Remington’s death in 1909, would go on to appear in a 1911 issue of Collier’s Weekly. Today it is in the collection of the Gilcrease Museum. It will appear in the upcoming exhibition Natural Forces: Winslow Homer and Frederic Remington, opening March 15, 2020, at the Denver Art Museum.…

Ryder Gauteraux There is “next level” and then there is the level Ryder Gauteraux takes his creations. Not only does the Idaho bootmaker create magnificent works of wearable art using a variety of art forms, but he also frequently takes his clients out to hunt the desired leathers he needs to make them. “I go to extremes, that’s for sure. I want to build something that nobody else has,” he says. “In order to do that you have to go to the best sources and use unique materials.” He recently finished a pair of boots made of bullfrog skin, which required six bullfrogs roughly 8 inches across. Most frequently he uses American alligator, specifically gators from southwest Texas, because they make some of the best leathers in the country. “Nature…

In 1916, in a snow-lined canyon in Nevada, a stagecoach robbery took place that, when it was all said and done, involved one stagecoach driver (dead), three murderers (apprehended) and $4,000 in stolen money (never found). It was the last stagecoach robbery ever committed in the United States. Though it likely ended long before this event, now there was no doubt: the Wild West was over. Law and order, barb wire, train tracks, statehood, telephone lines, automobiles—the Old West simply became the West, and that spirit of adventure, of exploration, of wonder, it all was tied neatly to the past as the country grew, modernized and made cultural leaps into the 20th century. For many artists, though, the West still had a mesmerizing presence in their imaginations. The West was…

Tom Nygard is an avid outdoorsman and sportsman whose interests are reflected in his collection of art. There is Ott Jones’s bronze, Claim to Fame, modeled on his bird dog Gus and a sculpture of one of his favorite pastimes, the bronze, Bonefish, by Hollis Williford (1940-2007). The collection more importantly reflects his 43-year career as a prominent dealer in the historic art of the West. “There are noteworthy things that are the remnants of dealing,” he explains. “There are things that meant something to me, that didn’t sell, or I didn’t try hard to sell. There are goodly remnants of deals I’ve done and nice things that have stayed. “I have about 15 paintings by Donald Teague, for instance. He’s not in favor right now except in Carmel where…

Prior to heading West to depict the American frontier in paintings that would come to be the iconic imagery widely associated with the region, artists explored eastern states like Georgia, North Carolina, Florida and New York. Here, galleries like the Booth Western Art Museum in Cartersville, Georgia, display prominent collections of art capturing the natural beauty of both the Old West and Eastern landscapes. The museum is also known from its annual Southeastern Chuck Wagon Gathering, which draws in admirers of all things relating to cowboy culture from across the country. This year, the 17th annual event will kick off on March 28 and will feature Western art, music, poetry, chuck wagon cuisine and more. Georgia is also known for its wide array of art museums, including the Morris Museum…

Beginning December 12, Legacy Gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona, will be offering more than 200 new works during the 19th annual Holiday Small Works Show. The show, which runs through December 31, will feature works that are no larger than 12 by 16 inches. Artists in the show include some of the gallery’s top artists, such as Bill Anton, Glenn Dean, C. Michael Dudash, Kyle Polzin, Carrie Ballantyne, Daniel Keys, Don Oelze, Kathy Anderson, Ken Carlson and many others. David Mann’s piece Early Thaw, showing a winter scene with a Native American figure and his horse, will be in the show. “Winter’s icy grip is broken by a warm breeze that has drawn this Plains Indian to the top of a hill where the moon and the wind whisper that spring…

In the exhibition Stretching the Canvas: Eight Decades of Native Painting, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in New York City challenges the traditional definitions of what people consider Native American artwork to be. Through nearly 40 paintings by 30 artists, the show explores how artists from around 1940 through today developed their own art that broke boundaries in many ways. First, these artists moved from the more familiar mediums of jewelry, pottery and basketry to painting, and second, they found freedom in their artistic visions. “It’s really quite amazing when you think about how stereotypes of Native people and romanticized or even caricatured notions have been imposed upon and controlled so many facets of our artistic expression,” says the museum’s director Kevin Gover (Pawnee). “Ironically, however, these…

COAST-TO-COAST COVERAGE Find out what’s happening across the nation. Western Art Collector is the first magazine to provide nationwide coverage of upcoming shows and auctions showcasing Western art from coast to coast. PREVIEWS In the Preview pages we reveal new contemporary and historic Western works about to become available for sale at the country’s leading Western art galleries. AUCTION AND EVENT PREVIEWS AND REPORTS Each month we alert you to upcoming Western art auctions and events nationwide. Read our reports on prices fetched so you can stay informed and up-to-date on the market. WESTERN ART INSIGHTS Find out everything the discerning collector needs to know. Each month our panel of art consultants, museum curators and experts share their behind-the-scenes knowledge of how the Western art market works. STATE OF THE…

Scott Baxter likens a lope—a horse gait that falls between a walk and a gallop—to the old coin-operated mechanical horse rides that could be found inside shopping malls and near storefronts. “It’s just a real smooth rocking motion, a nice up and down,” he says. “They call it a hobby horse lope.” He likes the word because it begins to touch on how mobile his own career is as he travels all around the West to capture his photographic subjects. The word turns up in his new exhibition, It’s Just a Quick Lope and a Cigarette, opening December 17 at the Taos Art Museum at Fechin House in Taos, New Mexico. The exhibition, which runs through January 26, 2020, will feature around 30 pieces in a variety of sizes, as…

NOVEMBER November 21-December 25 LEGACY GALLERY Tom Browning: Santa’s Time Off Scottsdale, AZ – (480) 945-1113 www.legacygallery.com November 25-December 7 TRAILSIDE GALLERIES Deck the Walls: Holiday Miniature Show 2019 Jackson Hole, WY – (307) 733-3186 www.trailsidegalleries.com November 29-December 1 MAXWELL ALEXANDER GALLERY Black Friday Sale Los Angeles, CA – (213) 275-1060 www.maxwellalexandergallery.com November 29-December 29 29 PALMS ART GALLERY Sand and Stars Twentynine Palms, CA – (760) 367-7819 www.29palmsartgallery.com DECEMBER Through December 1 DESERT CABALLEROS WESTERN MUSEUM Trappings of the American West Wickenburg, AZ – (928) 684-2272 www.westernmuseum.org Through December 1 NATIONAL COWBOY & WESTERN HERITAGE MUSEUM Small Works, Great Wonders Oklahoma City, OK – (405) 478-2250 www.nationalcowboymuseum.org December 3-23 INSIGHT GALLERY Kyle Ma - Viewpoints Fredericksburg, TX – (830) 997-9920 www.insightgallery.com December 6-31 MOUNTAIN TRAILS GALLERY Holiday Gems &…

“I’ve always been around horses,” Jim Rey says. “I had a mustang at the age of 6 and I did a lot of cowboying at the cattle ranches in the Bay Area.” He knows the nuances of a horse’s body and its reactions in different situations. As a horseman he knows every action and response of the cowboy. Today, his studio is in the pasture of his ranch with horses right outside the door for easy reference. Bringing Back the Delinquents depicts three recalcitrant horses being directed home by a determined cowboy. The central horse is slightly to the right of the center line of the canvas, emphasizing the powerful action of their movement. It is an indeterminate time of day—the cowboy’s vigilance being called on at any time of…

Even during his distinguished career in illustration, Francis Livingston was interested in the work of the great artists of the West. He has won gold and silver medals from the New York Society of Illustrators, San Francisco Society of Illustrators, and Society of Illustrators of Los Angeles. Today, his paintings range from abstractions to scenes of the Santa Cruz boardwalk and Coney Island to scenes of the historic Southwest—all with his sense of heightened color and richly applied paint. He had discovered the work of N.C. Wyeth, Frederic Remington and the Taos Founders in the flesh on a trip with his family to the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, then known as the Cowboy Hall of Fame. “There was the best of everything. I kept going back because there…

Though his name is on the building and his art collection is featured throughout his museum, visitors have left the Sid Richardson Museum with an incomplete picture of who exactly Sid Richardson was. The museum hopes to fill in those gaps with a new exhibition, A Fortune in Oils: Sid Richardson’s Personal Collection, now on view at the museum in Fort Worth, Texas. “It’s a way to retell the story of Sid and who he was, but also put it into context with his collection and museum,” says the museum’s director Scott Winterrowd, who finished developing the exhibition after it was started by his predecessor, Mary Burke, who retired in August. “Our visitors were asking to know more about the founder, and we thought this show would be a good…

The 14th annual Cherokee Art Market, which ran from October 12 to 13, had yet another successful year of celebrating diverse Native American art. Representing tribes throughout the country, artists brought to the show works in two-dimensional art, jewelry, basketry, beadwork/quillwork and much more. The prestigious Best of Show award went to Chase Kahwinhut Earles for his elaborate pottery piece showcasing Caddo culture, titled Kee-wat: Caddo Home. The award was announced the evening of Friday, October 11, during the awards reception, which also happened to be the artist’s birthday._ In addition to Earles’ Best of Show piece, which was part of the pottery classification, the following artists were honored with Best of Class awards at the 2019 market: Karen Berry (Textiles B), Tony Tiger (Painting, Drawing, Graphics & Photography), Troy…

Opening January 11, 2020, at the Phoenix Art Museum is Ansel Adams: Performing the Print, an exhibition that will feature 60 photographs from the Ansel Adams Archive at the Center for Creative Photography, housed at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona. The exhibition will show the photographs in groups of two and three to emphasize how Adams created varying interpretations depending on the images he selected. The museum explains, “…using the same score, Adams was constantly revising the way it was performed.” The exhibition will also examine how Adams cropped and printed the image from the original negative, and how, over time, his methods evolved with his perspective. The photographs will span across Adams’ six-decade career, and many will be accompanied by quotations from his published writing. The exhibition…

Welcoming visitors into the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum’s permanent Western gallery space this December is Find Your Western. Taking over the museum’s west hallway, the micro-exhibition explores the portrayal of the West through popular media from silent films and the heydays of the Western film genre to now. Find Your Western will include a variety of media—including paper archival materials, movie posters, production booklets, film clips, costumes and even comic books—broadening the horizons of what it means to be a “Western.” “I think visitors will be surprised to see a lot of the things on display,” says Nathan Jones, the museum’s associate curator of cowboy culture. He adds that Find Your Western will not be the “traditional interpretation” of the West. While the exhibition will still feature classic Western…

Horses have always been part of Chloé Marie Gaillard’s life. She grew up in the mountains of France where her father is a farrier and was a jockey before he outgrew the ideal height for jockeys. The family also bred horses. Today she lives in Taos, New Mexico, and in Montana where she and her husband have two horses. Her husband was a bull rider for 15 years. The Montana property will allow them to have more horses. “It’s important to both of us to be surrounded by horses,” she says. “It’s a simple way of living. Horses have a simple life but you have to care for them. Even when they’re big they can be sensitive and fragile. I love taking care of another being. The horses give you…

The West calls to everyone. Not everyone answers the call. But Joshua LaRock did. The Texas painter, long admired for his work in contemporary realism, has made the plunge into Western art with a new show opening December 7 at Maxwell Alexander Gallery in Los Angeles. Austin-based LaRock—who studied art in New York after becoming enamored with European art, especially 19th-century French painting and the work of William-Adolphe Bouguereau—has been primarily occupied with commissioned portraiture and “gallery works that are an attempt at contemporary interpretations of these European influences.” “…[I]n recent years I became aware of the Western art genre in a way that was previously unknown to me. I was a huge admirer of landscape artists Thomas Moran and Albert Beirstadt, who certainly tackled Western subjects but it wasn’t…

Tis the season—Trailside Galleries in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, returns with its annual Deck the Walls: Holiday Miniature Show. The show features original small works in a range of subject matter including Western, wildlife, landscapes and more, from some of the West’s best, like Ezra Tucker, Calvin Liang, Z.S. Liang, JoAnn Peralta, Ian Ramsay, Shawn Gould, Sueellen Ross, Steve Atkinson, Thomas Blackshear II, Jhenna Quinn Lewis, Jie-Wei Zhou, Morgan Weistling, Jeremy Browne, Patricia Dobson and many others. An opening reception for the exhibition will be held on December 6 from 3 to 5 p.m. Calvin’s Fishing Boats, an impressionist-style oil, is a warm scene depicting docked boats in San Pedro Harbor in California. “I want to capture the sun setting on the fishing boats. The reflection of the water and the…

Artists, collectors and connoisseurs will descend on Santa Fe, New Mexico, this November for the Oil Painters of America’s annual Western Regional Juried Exhibition. The event, held at Sorrel Sky Gallery on the Santa Fe Plaza, will feature more than 110 juried paintings that range in style and genre. The works are painted by artists living in the Western region of North America, including locations in the United States, Mexico and Canada. Utah-based artist Kathryn Stats, known for her award-winning landscape paintings, will serve as the judge of the exhibition. She will dole out prizes in a variety of categories, including the coveted Best of Show that receives $4,000 and genre prizes for landscapes, figures, impressionistic works, seascapes and more. This array of awards provides a snapshot of the artwork…