Why Windows into the West?

For about a decade, I’ve painted the subjects I saw around me, one painting at a time.

Animals. Flowers. Portraits.

I often wondered why my work seemed so disconnected. Other artists appeared to have a clear subject or recognizable path, while I kept moving between the people, animals, objects, and details of Western life.

Now I realize I wasn’t moving without direction. I was exploring each element of the West individually.

Over time, those subjects gave me a visual language. They taught me how I wanted to paint the West, what I was drawn to, and which questions continued to follow me from one painting to the next.

What once seemed like my greatest problem has become my greatest asset and the structure for my life’s work.

Windows into the West is a long-term, chronological body of work centered on the people who shaped the American West: both the familiar figures who became legends and the lesser known people whose lives helped form it.

Portraits will be the foundation. But people do not exist apart from their world. Their clothing, horses, tack, firearms, equipment, craftsmanship, flowers, and everyday belongings can tell us something about who they were and how they lived.

I’ve painted many of these subjects separately.

Now I’ll begin bringing them together.

At the heart of the project is a desire to portray the people of the West in a new way. I don’t want to simply reproduce the same familiar photographs that have been painted for generations. I want to study multiple photographs, written accounts, artifacts, clothing, and the world surrounding each person, then use that research to create an original portrait rather than a painted copy of a single image.

Accuracy matters to me because details carry meaning.

The shape of a coat, the construction of a saddle, the engraving on a firearm, or the flowers growing beside a home can reveal something about a person, a place, and a particular moment in time.

The way we picture the West also shapes which people we remember, which stories endure, and what history eventually becomes legend.

I’m interested in why certain people and objects remain so deeply rooted in our collective imagination. Why do Western artists return again and again to horses, firearms, hats, saddles, flowers, and the human face? Who were the photographers, illustrators, painters, and image-makers who first shaped the way we see the West?

Decorative arts will also become part of the visual language of the project. Engraved firearms, saddlery, silverwork, leather carving, textiles, and ornament will influence the borders, frames, patterns, and presentation of the paintings.

Flowers will move through the chapters as both a visual and narrative thread. They carry their own history. The history of home, survival, beauty, memory, and the lives built alongside the legends and events of the West.

I never anticipated creating a lifetime body of work. But this project resonates with me so deeply that I can no longer separate myself from it.

Windows into the West is the journey I didn’t know I had been preparing for all along.

— Kim Randleas