Barbara East: Western Art Interview
Barbara East: I drew all the time, compulsively, all the way through school. My teachers loved me. I caused absolutely no problems, and I graduated with straight C’s. When I was a junior or senior in high school, they found out I didn’t know how to read very well. I never read. I drew.
I grew up with horses and helping my neighbors. They taught me everything from how to hold the reins to how to break colts and handle cattle. No matter what they were doing, they would give you a job so you had a bit of a purpose. They made you part of their day.
My sister and I had the best parents. My mom nurtured my art, but she really wanted me to go to college. I didn’t want to go to college. I went to work with Ace Powell, an old, old [Western] artist at that time. Ace was a mentor; he mentored a lot of young people. He helped introduce me to dealers and gave me a very good start to the business end of art. That’s also when I learned to do watercolors on cigarette papers, work for which I became nationally, even internationally, renowned.
WH: How would you describe your art or goals as an artist?
BE: I live in my paintings. My art is real. That scene I painted — it actually happened to me or a really good friend, and I could envision it because I knew that person. It was tangible.
Color wise, I paint realistically. I paint sagebrush the color of sagebrush. I don’t glorify it; I tell it the way it is. I paint it the way it is, and that’s who I am.
I can’t just look at a picture and paint a landscape. I’ve tried it, but all of a sudden, the painting doesn’t have the same meaning. You’re better to get the landscape a little incorrect and do it by hand because what you see isn’t perfect, but it is the way the light defines the land. My early work was strictly out of my memories and my imagination, and that’s so rare nowadays. My art is a record of my life.
I was self-taught. There are a lot of people who learned the technical part of painting better than I did. But for me, it’s about motion and emotion. If you can’t draw feeling into your painting, you’ve lost the purpose.
Art is a mediator. You can be educational with your pieces, and you can start a dialogue. Art can lead people into thoughts; it can lead people into questions they ordinarily wouldn’t know to ask. When people find out what we really do and how we [do it], some of the most adversarial people have become our best advocates.
WH: What advice would you give young or emerging Western artists?BE: Do your own thing. Don’t be a follower. Go on your own and do your own thinking. If you begin to be taught, you will always wait to be told what to do, and that destroys your imagination.
Once you’ve got your passion developed, then go back and get your professional teaching and keep looking to get better. By then, you know which direction you want to go, and you can take that outside influence and utilize it while preserving your imagination.
In college, I thought I had something far more important to say with my art than to learn a technique. My college art professor told me he liked my drawings really well, but he said, “You are like a runaway workhorse with blinders on. You can’t see what I can offer, but you can see where you want to go. So, have at it.” Had I been smarter, I would have learned the techniques and done a better job of saying what I wanted to say. But when you’re in school, you don’t always think that way.
Drawing pictures is much harder on your body than roping cattle and packing salt. Really, you’re sitting incredibly still for hours. When I first started out, I worked into the night. Then, the more I got to painting, I learned you can’t do color under different lights. I got to where I would work certain hours during the day.
Anatomy is very important; learn it. Draw the horse [from every angle]. Go out and draw those cows. Draw your anatomy because then it’s in your mind; you did it with your hand.
WH: Does range riding and your art influence each other?BE: Absolutely. With range riding and art, it’s like sitting on a swing. One creates the energy for the other; one feeds the other. When I get done painting, I feel I just cannot sit any longer. Then, I come up here [to the mountains], and I have all this huge, vast country to manage.
Range riding is taking care of the land first. If you don’t take care of the range, you don’t have any forage for your cattle [and] you can lose your grazing permit. It’s very key to be a range manager first.
I’m connected to the land; I am a person who gets “place attachment.” Place attachment happens when you’re somewhere year after year, and you see the change in the landscape. You can manipulate that change, and you can make that land work and be better. When you can fix things on the land, you begin to be very attached. It defines who you are.
Range riding is an art. It’s a balancing act all day long, every day. What is your goal? What day is it [in the season]? What does the grass look like? The art is in how you move and handle the cattle. And that art tied in so well with my paintings.
WH: Tell us about your Christmas cards
BE: For decades, I have created and sent Christmas cards to special people [in my life]. I started making Christmas cards back in the ’70s. The cards are very extemporaneous. I love painting them fast, and then I get more and more detailed where I need to. Most of the paintings related in some way to my previous summer spent on the range.
I have never marketed any of these pieces; I’ve just sent them to probably under 100 folks each year.
Some of the cards were totally fiction, like one with cows pulling a sleigh, but other cards were very sophisticated. The dry brush ink drawings of the workhorses inside Dave Allen’s barn and the birds sitting on the back of the hay sled were really neat original art. Those limited-edition cards became collector’s items.
In “Steers in Cimarron Oak Brush,” the dogs have all the yearlings treed. That was such a job! I had six dogs and 1,500 steers [to care for] on more than 10,000 acres of solid oak brush. Those steers were so crazy they’d jump the corrals. You could see that oak brush rattling, and they were leaving. The elk would still be there, and those steers were gone.
Bud Williams, the late legendary stockmanship trainer, and I got to be really good friends over those steers. One day, all the yearlings were running off, and the dogs quit minding. I noticed the dogs got around the steers a lot easier; they had them stopped. I told Bud I was severely humbled by my dog’s abilities, and he just loved that. I started watching the dogs instead of telling them what to do; they were telling me. I made that card — where the dogs are so proud of themselves — for Bud and Eunice Williams.
The next year, I painted “Treed Dogs.” I came up to work on a ranch near Gunnison, Colorado, and there were all these wicked, nasty mother cows. This time, the cows treed the dogs. If you look really closely, they’re the same exact dogs.
Through time, the Christmas cards weave almost a diary of my life on the range. They have been, by far, the most loved pieces of my art.
FINE POINTS
Artist: Barbara East
Mediums: Watercolor, dry brush ink, egg tempera
Favorite subjects: Working cowboys, stock dogs, range management, grazing livestock, land stewardship
Inspired by: Ace Powell, Bill Owen, George Phippen, Frederic Remington, Tom Ryan, Andrew Wyeth
Awards: C.M. Russell Auction “Best of Show” two-time winner
Commissions: Gunnison County Stock Growers, Society for Range Management, U.S. Forest Service, California Wool Growers, Colorado Water Congress Wayne N. Aspinall Awards, Weed Science Society of America, Winn Dixie Corporation
Fun fact: For more than 50 years, East has sent Christmas cards that are a collective visual diary of her life’s work as a range rider.
Contact: barbaraeast.com or [email protected]
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