Fred Harman was the most widely known living western artist when the Cowboy Artists of America was organized in June 1965. While Harman was unable to join Charlie Dye, John Hampton, Joe Beeler and George Phippen in the meeting where the CAA was officially founded, he held the special designation of “charter member.”

Harman was born in Missouri but moved to a ranch in Colorado at two months old. The west was not only in his blood but his soul. The future would take him to distant locales, but he would always return to the ranch setting in Colorado.

While in his teens, Harman moved to Kansas City, where he his appetite for drawing was whetted. He worked as an illustrator for years on various projects such as Red Ryder and Little Beaver, the comic strip. He worked as a commercial illustrator by day and painted at night.

Harman also completed many assignments from government agencies, such as goodwill missions on behalf of the United States. He was a member of the Society of Illustrators and a founding member of the National Cartoonist Society.

In 1962, Harman retired from drawing Red Ryder and painted Western American art until his death in 1982.

Robert William Meyers was born in New York City in 1919. The son of strict parenting, his parents had hopes of another accountant in the family. It must have caused some stir when he turned his direction to his artwork. His art career was focused on the West, thanks to movies he enjoyed as a boy.

Meyers studied at the Grand Central Art School, the National Academy of Design with Ivan Olinsky and the Traphagen School of Fashion. A review of his work shows his true mastering of figures. After World War II, he began illustrating for children's books and western paperbacks.

In December 1950, Meyers began his employment with the Charles E. Cooper Studios of New York, NY. After just a few weeks, he met James Bama and they formed a friendship lasting for the rest of their lives. From 1952 to 1962, he completed 94 illustrations for short stories in the Saturday Evening Post. He also did illustrations for True and Argosy magazines. As the illustrations in the Saturday Evening Post began to dwindle, Meyers could see the same for the future of the commercial illustrator.

In 1960, he moved his family to the 300-acre Circle M Ranch on the South Fork of the Shoshone River near Yellowstone National Park, fifty miles from Cody, Wyo. During the summer of 1970, Meyers was inducted into the Cowboy Artists of America. Tragically Meyers’ life and career ended later that same year over a dispute with a neighbor who attempted to have an easement through the Circle M Ranch. Robert Meyers was never able to participate in the CAA annual show, but his art lives on.

Byron Wolfe was not the type of artist who painted the American West because the work sold well in galleries. He would have been a Western artist even if the collectors could be counted on one hand and only sailboats were selling. Wolfe painted the Old West because he loved the drama and color of that chapter in our country’s history. “I do not paint anything but Westerns,” he said. “I was once asked to paint a prize bird dog and I said I’d be glad to if I could put him on a horse.”

Wolfe was born in Parson, Kansas, in 1904. As a youth, he worked on a ranch, “keeping water tanks filled, riding fence, and repairing the damage done to fences by restless bulls seeking strange pastures.” The margins of his school notebooks were filled with sketches of horses, cowboys, and Native Americans. After studying art at the University of Kansas, he worked for a publishing company as a freelance illustrator, and eventually as an art director for a Kansas City advertising agency. Wolfe’s interest in the West grew when he was commissioned to do a series of Western illustrations for the Goetz Brewing Company of St. Joseph, Missouri, and cattle scenes for the American Royal Livestock, and Horse Show & Rodeo, which were published in the Kansas City Star.

Michael Kennedy, who was then director of the Russell Gallery in Helena, Montana, soon became interested in Wolfe’s work. With Kennedy’s direction and help, Wolfe’s career as a Western artist got its first and most important boost. In 1966, Charlie Dye asked Wolfe to join the Cowboy Artists of America.

Wolfe’s studio was always filled with cowboy gear, guns, and Native American artifacts. He created his paintings surrounded by these many objects; constant reminders to him to keep his work as authentic as possible. Dean Krakel, former managing director of the National Cowboy Hall of Fame, once described Wolfe this way: “He’s original . . . he ain’t no one else.”

Collections:
Buffalo Bill Historical Center; National Center for American Western Art; National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum; Sangre de Cristo Arts Center; Woolaroc Museum

Like many of his contemp- oraries, Mel Warren followed an arduous path to achieve artistic success. After serving a stint in the Air Force, he earned degrees in fine art from Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas. When he graduated, he found that there was little in the way of work for a newly minted artist. Galleries for Western artists were few and far between, and those that were established already had a number of artists in their stables. To support himself and his family, Warren turned to the world of commercial art. After working his day job, he spent the evenings pursuing his real passion – painting the people, places, and historic events of the West.

The subject matter came easily to him. His father had been a ranch hand and cowboy, and Warren grew up on a succession of ranches in Texas and New Mexico. He had ample opportunity to watch cowboys in many different situations and was familiar with all their customary chores. He became a keen observer of ranch life and Native American culture. Warren’s fascination with cowboy life and his desire to become an artist were constants in his youth. He first brought the two interests together while living on a ranch in Seymour, Texas. After seeing an ad for a course from the Federal Art School, he performed odd jobs to earn enough money to take the course. From then on, his life direction was set.

By the early 1960’s, Warren had achieved enough success selling his paintings in galleries to leave the commercial art field. He joined the Cowboy Artists of America in 1968 and won the group’s Memorial Award in his very first exhibition with them. Skilled as both a painter and sculptor, Warren specialized in depicting scenes of the heroic West. His early experiences of ranch life informed his artwork throughout his career. Many of his paintings were used to tell the history of early Texas in the books Frontier Forts of Texas and Trails of the Southwest. President Lyndon Baines Johnson was one of the most avid collectors of Warren’s work.

Collections:
Desert Caballeros Western Museum; Leanin’ Tree Museum of Western Art; Meadows Museum, SMU; National Center for American Western Art; National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum

Many Western artists first achieved success during the golden era of magazine and book illustration. To find work, they often had to move from the West to the East. Donald Teague moved in the opposite direction. Unlike many of his contemporaries in the Cowboy Artists of America, Teague became an artist first and a Westerner later. He grew up in New York; decided at an early age to become an artist, and followed an educational track to pursue that career. He studied at the New York Art Students League, and later in London, England.

Yet, both the history and geography of the West exerted a strong pull on Teague. While he was in his early forties, with a successful illustration career already begun, Teague moved to California. It seemed that now that he was closer to the subject matter, art directors for such magazines as the Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s began to assign him the illustrations for Western stories. Teague worked as a top Western illustrator for more than thirty years. In 1958, he decided to devote himself to easel painting on a full-time basis.

Over the course of his fifty-year career, Teague developed into one of the country’s most accomplished watercolorists; a technique he devoted himself to almost exclusively. From the later 1950’s, Teague spent much of his career depicting the historic West, but he continued to paint in locations throughout the world. His subject matter included still-life, interior scenes, landscapes, and seascapes.

Teague was a member of the CAA, the National Academy of Design, the National Academy of Western Art, and the National Watercolor Society. Frequently recognized by his peers, he also won many awards from these organizations. His work is now in the permanent collections of the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis, Indiana; the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; and the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Collections:
Favell Museum of Western Art and Indian Artifacts; National Center for American Western Art; National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum; Phoenix Art Museum

Ray Swanson says, “When I reflect on the 43 years of my art career, it startles me to realize how quickly it has gone. During those years, I have experienced great pleasure and fulfillment in being able to do what I wanted with a paintbrush and make a living at it.

“When gleaning subject matter, I look for certain key elements. First and foremost, I respond to the overall composition, whether a scene is a pure landscape or portrait of groups of people. Architectural shapes and designs as well as patterns of color and values are also key elements. I search for dramatic light effects, particularly how light plays on a surface. More often than not, there are people in my paintings, and I endeavor to express their lives through their daily activities, labor, and crafts.

Swanson has received numerous medals and honors at major art exhibitions, including the National Academy of Western Art, American Watercolor Society, Royal Western Watercolor Exhibit, Artists of America Show, Franklin Mint Gallery of Art, the George Phippen Show, and Gold and Silver Medals at the Cowboy Artists of America Show. The 1994 Catlin Peace Pipe Award was bestowed on Swanson for art that demonstrates the unusual sensitivity and perpetuates the viability of the Native American culture. In 2000 an honor was bestowed upon Ray when he was chosen to represent Arizona at the Library of Congress Bicentennial in Washington, D.C. He was included in the Local Legacy Program that documents the nation’s rich cultural heritage to share with future generations of Americans.

Swanson believes along with his God-given artistic talent comes the responsibility to honor the diversity of mankind, preserving the traditions and culture that he paints. He sees the beauty in the life of each person, and his greatest satisfaction as an artist comes from sharing that beauty with others. “My subjects are real people found in real places. They are beautiful in their humanity and I think it’s that beauty people respond to. I paint each person as he or she is, not as I wish them to be,” Swanson says.

When he was still a young artist, Irvin “Shorty” Shope had the extraordinary opportunity to show his work to one of the masters of American Western art, Charles M. Russell. Like Russell, Shope lived in Montana and worked as a cowboy before beginning his artistic career. Unlike Russell, who moved to Montana as a teenager, Shope had grown up there, worked on his family’s ranch, and decided at an early age to combine his love of the West with a career in fine art. He attended Reed College in Oregon and graduated with a degree in fine art from the University of Montana.

In 1925, Shope, who was then twenty-five years old, visited Russell and cautiously showed him a portfolio of his drawings. Russell was impressed, and wrote on the back of one of the drawings, “These drawings of Shope’s are all good.” He signed the inscription with his trademark buffalo skull. That simple sentence became one of Shope’s most treasured possessions. Russell also offered some words of advice. He asked Shope if he were intending to head east to further his artistic education. When Shope said that he was, Russell said, “Don’t do it. The men, horses, and country you love and want to study are out here, not back there.”

Shope did study in the East for a while; bur remained a resident of Montana until his death in 1977. Throughout his career, Shope received encouragement and instruction from some of the West’s greatest artists, such as E. S. Paxson, Will James, and Harvey Dunn, who was both his teacher and mentor.

Like all of these artists, Shope took whatever artistic work was available to him; illustrating books and calendars, drawing maps of Western exploration for school classrooms, while continuing to paint the men and women of the historic West. Shope was a charter member of the Cowboy Artists of America. He died in 1977 at age seventy-seven; one of the last Western artists able to trace his artistic lineage directly to one of the two men who inspired the formation of the CAA – Charlie Russell.

Collections:
Favell Museum of Western Art and Indian Artifacts; Leanin’ Tree of Western Art; National Center for American Western Art; Sangre de Cristo Arts Center

"It was the days of hair chaps, high-heeled boots, and spurs that jingled when they drug on the ground. All my friends were either cowboys or Indians. I didn’t know any other kind of people,” Bob Scriver said, describing his youth. Those early days would lay the foundation for Scriver’s later success as one of the finest sculptors of the century in the Western genre.

Scriver was born in 1914 in the Blackfeet Reservation town of Browning, Montana. His earliest passion in life was not art, but music. He earned a master’s degree from Vandercook School of Music in Chicago and did postgraduate work at the University of Washington and Northwestern University. After serving in World War II, Scriver opened a taxidermy business in Browning. This work made him more aware of his creative talent and was a catalyst for his future career as a sculptor. “My only problem,” Scriver once said, “is tat it took me half a lifetime to decide what I really wanted to do in life.”

Scriver’s late start as a sculptor, at age forty-six, in no way hindered his success. He was affiliated with the National Sculpture Society, the National Academy of Western Art, and many other art associations. In 1967, just as the public’s interest in Western art was reawakening, Scriver was inducted into the Cowboy Artists of America.

During his long career, Scriver created more than 1,000 sculptures. He was adept at capturing the spirit and essence of rodeo and was also recognized for his classic sculptures of the Blackfoot Indians. He wrote and published several books, including surveys of his own work and a history of the Blackfoot artifacts in his collection. In 1969, in recognition of their high regard, the Blackfoot honored Scriver with the Little Dog Thunder Medicine Pipe. In 1990, he was presented the Governor’s Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Arts in Montana. Scriver simply wanted people to know that “I did an honest day’s work and that I was honest about what I did.”

Collections
Buffalo Bill Historical Center; Eiteljorg Museum of Art; Montana Historical Society; National Center for American Western Art; Rockwell Museum of Western Art

Frank Polk was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1908, but moved to Phoenix, Arizona, in 1911. His first job, at age sixteen, was in the rodeo, working with his trained burro. He later landed his first cowboy job with the Yolo Ranch at Camp Wood. His 1978 autobiography, F-F-F-Frank Polk: An Uncommonly Frank Autobiography, tells of his adventures as a cowboy.

Polk’s experiences, as a ranch hand, rodeo cowboy, and dude wrangler; gave him enough material to tell authentic stories of the cowboy in America in his basswood and bronze sculptures. In the early twentieth century there were no cameras, so Polk began to carve what he saw. He wanted to communicate what cowboy life was all about. Polk eventually opened a woodcarving store in Reno, Nevada. He was creating wood sculptures of Western scenes and models of characters for slot machines when George Phippen got him interested in the idea of casting figures in bronze. “Working in wood made it difficult to achieve the action and looseness I wanted,” Polk said, “but after I started working in wax, I found I could obtain these qualities with much more freedom.”

In 1967, Joe Beeler asked him to join the Cowboy Artists of America; “the best thing that ever happened to my career as an artist,” Polk later said. In 1972, he and his wife, Mary, settled in Mayer, Arizona. He bought the Old Mayer State Bank, which Polk had wanted to own ever since he was a boy, and turned it into his studio.

Polk believed that to be an artist is to follow a calling. “I believe that everyone has a talent for something, but many do not find it. What sets an artist apart and makes him different from the other members of society is his creative nature,” he said. “An artist’s creativeness comes from within. It is not something that can be learned in books, although lessons from another artist more mature in his work can help. An artist is born with a gift from the higher-up and a constant inner contact with his maker.”

Collections:
Leanin’ Tree Museum of Western Art; National Center for American Western Art

George Phippen was co-founder of the Cowboy Artists of America and the organization’s first president. His formal education consisted of a little less than eight years in a one-room country schoolhouse. “I’ve had no schooling in art except what I got from friends, artists,” he said, “and I’ve been mighty lucky to have more friends than enemies.” Despite being self-taught, Phippen became a highly respected sculptor and painter of Western art. During the 1950’s and 1960’s, he was a major advocate for the revival of lost-wax casting of bronze sculpture.

Phippen was born in Iowa in 1915 and was raised in Kansas. He was fascinated by the stories of local old-timers who had driven cattle up the Goodnight Trail; and was inspired by prints of paintings by Charles Russell and Frederick Remington. At age eighteen, he traveled west with the Civilian Conservation Corps. During World War II, he wanted to be a combat artists for the Army, but was stationed at Fort Warden in Washington; where he worked in photography and drafting. After the war, Phippen and his family moved to the Southwest, where he received informal tutoring in oil painting from Henry Balink of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Hurlstone Fairchild of Tucson, Arizona.

Phippen’s skills as a working cowboy, hunter, and horse trainer, infused his art with authenticity. He sold his paintings through Allen Galleries of Houston, Texas, and Thomas L. Lewis Gallery of Taos, New Mexico. He worked for Babcock and Borough’s Western Stationary and Brown and Bigelow Calendars. He also illustrated many books and magazines such as True West, Frontier Times, Quarter Horse Journal, Appaloosa News, and Western Horseman.

“The art game, which includes illustrating, fine art, and cartooning; is considered about the toughest business there is,” Phippen once said. “I compare it with music, writing, and acting. They are mighty hard to get into, but no job holds the freedom the arts do once you make the grade.”

Collections:
Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center; Desert Caballeros Western Museum; Gilcrease Institute; National Center for American Western Art; National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum; Phippen Museum of Western Art; Phoenix Art Museum

Aspiring artists used to ask R. Brownell McGrew to show them his tricks. There aren’t any tricks, he would tell them. For McGrew, painting grew out of passion, and patience. McGrew rarely talked about painting; but his stated goal was “to paint as well as I can, in order to communicate the infinite thrill and rapture of God’s creation.”

McGrew was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1916, and his family moved to California during his middle school years. From 1936 to 1940 he attended the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. McGrew acknowledged that, although he had many fine teachers, Ralph Holmes had a “profound and decisive influence” on him. “He taught entirely by principle; by creating a sort of ambient aesthetic,” McGrew wrote. “Never once in my years with him did he demonstrate or teach technique. It’s a slow way to learn, but if one’s patience and money hold out; probably the best.”

McGrew spent the war years designing and drafting material for Firestone. In 1946, he was the first recipient of the John F. and Ann Lee Stacey Fellowship; and he used the money for intensive study of the Western landscape. In the mid-1950’s, he traveled to Arizona with Jimmy Swinnerton, who was known as the Dean of Desert Painters. There, McGrew met Navajo and Hopi people, whose way of life inspired his admiration.

In the late 1960’s, McGrew was invited to become a member of the Cowboy Artists of America, “a singularly generous and broad-minded gesture on the part of the cowboys,” he wrote. In the mid-1970’s, however, he was forced to tender his resignation, because his careful and slow process made it difficult for him to present new work for each annual show. One of the honors of his career, he said, was “having the CAA fellows request me to reconsider my resignation.” McGrew continued as an emeritus member of the CAA, contributing to the shows as time permitted, until his death in 1994.

Collections:
Eiteljorg Museum of Art; National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum; Phoenix Art Museum

Throughout his artistic career, George Marks’s work was always guided by the legacy of the West. As a boy, he listened to the stories told to him by his grandfather, who was a rancher. He himself was fascinated by the realistic paintings of Charles Russell. These early influences motivated Marks to study art, to explore museum collections, and to persist in the dream of creating art that realistically portrayed contemporary Western ranch life.

Marks was born in Iowa in 1923. He earned his fine arts degree from the University of Iowa and then worked as a commercial illustrator for fourteen years. Before seriously beginning to sculpt in 1970, Marks worked primarily in oils. Bill Moyers, a fellow member of the Cowboy Artists of America, assisted him with his first armature. Marks soon discovered that his proficiency in sculpture was enhanced by the hundreds of hours he had already spent drawing and sketching. He experienced firsthand how the two mediums reinforced one another.

Marks was among the first artists to be accepted into the CAA in 1966. During the 1970-1971 term, he served as secretary-treasurer and was honored by his peers with election to the vice presidency the following year. In his continual search for excellence and his devotion to this craft, Marks created paintings, drawings, and bronzes of indisputable grace and quality. His work garnered CAA awards in both drawing and sculpture.

Collections:
National Center for American Western Art; Sangre de Cristo Arts Center; Rockwell Museum of Western Art

A Native American finds a Raggedy Ann doll on a lonely Western road. A settler is teaching his gingham dressed wife how to shoot a rifle. Three Indians warm their hands over the chimney of a snow buried cabin. These are just three of the dramatic stories that Tom Lovell told through his artwork. Lovell’s attention to detail is unmatched, and he was seldom able to complete more than a dozen paintings a year. His peers consider him one of the deans of Western art.

Lovell was born in New York City in 1909. He was the Valedictorian of his high school class; and at the graduation ceremony spoke on the “Ill treatment of the American Indian by the U. S. Government.” He received a bachelor of fine arts from Syracuse University in 1931. For thirty-nine years, Lovell worked as a freelance illustrator for magazines such as Colliers, McCalls, National Geographic, Life, and the Saturday Evening Post. He was as famous for his Western art as for his stirring images of Civil War battles, which were considered so definitive that they were telecast as part of an acclaimed public television documentary and published in the accompanying best-selling book.

Lovell considered himself a “storyteller with a brush, a custodian of the past.” “I try to place myself back in time and imagine situations that would make interesting and appealing pictures. I am intent on producing paintings that relate to the human experience and our Western heritage.”

In 1974, Lovell was elected to the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame and was later named a Hall of Fame Laureate. In 1975, he and his family moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and he was elected to the Cowboy Artists of America the same year. In 1992, both the National Academy of Western Art and the National Cowboy Hall of Fame honored Lovell with a Lifetime Achievement Award and a prestigious one man retrospective show. He was the first artist to ever win the Prix de West – the National Academy of Western Art’s highest honor – twice.

Collections:
National Center for American Western Art; National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum; Permian Basin Petroleum Museum; Sangre de Cristo Arts Center

Robert Lougheed was born in Massey, Ontario, Canada, in 1910, but grew up in nearby Grand Valley. His childhood days were filled with farm chores and hockey games (at one time, he even considered playing professionally). Yet, despite the considerable demands on his time, Lougheed always felt compelled to draw. And draw he did; cattle, horses, pigeons, pigs, and everything else of interest in his immediate surroundings. His guiding principle even then was not to imagine the subject, but rather to always paint directly from the source.

With his parents’ support, Lougheed took a correspondence art course. At nineteen, he landed a job as an illustrator for the Toronto Star while continuing to take night courses. Wanting to further his education, he moved to New York to begin his studies at the Art Students League. There, in 1933, he met the impressionist painter Frank Vincent DuMond, who practiced and taught the principles of Plein Air Painting; painting outdoors directly from nature. Years later, DeMond said of his student, “There goes the best I ever had.”

Lougheed left the Art Students League in 1938. Soon, he was well established enough to spend half of each year painting and the other half illustrating for publications such as Reader’s Digest, True, and Colliers. Eventually, Lougheed moved to New Mexico, and in 1967, he joined the newly created Cowboy Artists of America. He had his first exhibit at the National Academy of Western Artists in 1968.

During an interview published in American Artist magazine, Lougheed said, “I am a realist in painting. I know that a serious composition must include those emotional and spiritual qualities extolled by the professional art theorist. Like every other artist, I also know that accurate reporting of detail does not, of itself, constitute art; but unlike other theorists, I cannot feel that realistic treatment need detract from my reas