It’s probably pretty obvious, me being a painter, that I’m a big visual thinker. I want to see things come alive. Ideas that live in my head eventually need to become visible. One of these ideas I’ve been working on in my free time is creating a map of the events that make up the first chapter of Windows into the West. Once I started putting everything on a map, I could actually see the story developing. You can see the idea of performing the West popping up almost spontaneou

Windows into the West began with questions. One of my earliest questions was why Western artists paint hollyhocks. It sounds like a simple question, but it led to many more. When did certain flowers become associated with the West? What did they mean to the people who planted, wore and decorated with them? Which photographers, artists, advertisers and craftspeople carried those flowers into the imagery of the West? I am not interested in using flowers simply because they ar

This Saturday, I wound my way down from the north to Pendleton. I’d never traveled that way before, and the road took me through old ranches and miles of wheat fields. What I saw more than anything was a lot of hard work. I couldn’t help but think about the people who took those same roads into Pendleton more than a hundred years ago, coming to town to show off what they could do. I went straight to the rodeo grounds and the Pendleton Round-Up & Happy Canyon Hall of Fame Muse