You might expect the story to go like this: Guy grows up around ranches and cowpokes and gets swept up in traveling rodeos. So knee-deep in the culture, when he begins painting, he naturally incorporates the imagery of the world he’s always known.
For Billy Schenck, it was ironically the other way around. He’d been painting western imagery in ground-breaking ways for decades, and it was his fascination with the subject matter that drove him first to photograph rodeos and ranch life, to actually finding himself on the back of a bucking bareback bronco.
“I was terrible at it,” Schenck said, reminiscing on his early rodeo days, pulling a horse trailer with his Cadillac convertible from one competition to the next, making just enough for his entry fees, some gas and maybe a hamburger. “I got bucked off every single time.”
Now an internationally renowned artist with more than 100 pieces in major museums and collections, including the Smithsonian Institute and the Denver Art Museum, Schenck has been called the “Grandaddy of Pop Western Art” or the “Warhol of the West” and is considered a massive influence, presence and player in contemporary Western art. He was in Durango at Sorrel Sky Thursday showcasing new work, which will be up until Aug. 20.
While his painting led him to rodeo life, the biggest influence for his iconic and celebrated body of work wasn’t another painter and it wasn’t even American, it was Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s and, more broadly, cinema in general.
Schenck was drawn to the vast mythology, the good and evil binaries and the cultural and gender issues inherent in The Western. Early film noir and its meticulous composition also played an important role in Schenck’s development, disassembling the films, sometimes frame by frame, examining the cinematography, storyline and acting.
“I might watch them two or three or five or eight times,” he said. “I just love to see past your initial response to a film, to see the structure, to see just how artistic is this thing.”
Often using still images from Western movies as subject matter, Schenck’s paintings capture the cinematic purview with reductivist style, vivid colors and dramatic composition. In this vein, Schenck might place a large silhouetted figure in the foreground, directing the focus to the mid- and backgrounds to create drama and tension, a technique straight out of film noir.
Certainly, other painters had big impacts on Schenck, most notably pop artists Andy Warhol, whom Schenck worked with in New York during the Spring of 1966 as an 18-year-old, and Roy Lichtenstein.
“I just thought pop imagery was pure magic,” Schenck said, recounting his initial encounters with the genre, seeing a show of Warhol’s Campbell Soup cans or coming across Lichtenstein’s massive Ben-Day dot comic panels.
Schenck’s pop art influences and subversive postmodernism can be subtle – making a social or political reference in a painting’s title, even if the subject matter is more traditional – or more overtly, like in pieces he refers to as “caption paintings,” giving Schenck an avenue to play with male/female tension and a way to incorporate a variety of sexual, political and social commentaries. In one, a large silhouetted hand of a gunslinger seems to twitch above his holstered revolver. With a graveyard and presumed dueling partner in the background, the caption reads: “And when there were no Native Americans left, they turned on each other.”
It is all in line with Schenck’s iconic take on Western art, which he sees as romantic revisionist history. He notes that such Western luminaries like Buffalo Bill Cody and Jesse James were being written about mythologically while they were still alive. Thinking of other Western painters who get caught up on precise historic details of horses and harnesses and wagons, Schenck scoffed, “Really? That is so boring. Why don’t you use the power of what this genre is. It’s mythology.”
At 68, Schenck shows no sign of slowing down, arriving at his studio at his Santa Fe ranch at 6:30 a.m. to get some serious painting done before the rest of the world gets going, usually working seven days a week. If being a renowned painter wasn’t enough, he got into the rodeo event of team penning in the mid-1990s, winning a world championship in 2009.
After nearly five decades as a professional artist, painting still gets Schenck into a fertile zone where he can think and imagine. He drives to Phoenix and back once a month, purposely music-free and usually alone.
“I can watch the landscape and see the color and light and shadows,” he said. He’ll think about screenplays he wants to write, paintings and books he has read, maintaining an internal dialogue that he brings back to his studio. “I never run out of ideas: The quirkiest, craziest stuff from anywhere.”
dholub@durangoherald.com
If you go
Contemporary Western painter Billy Schenck will be at Sorrel Sky from 5 to 7 p.m. Thursday as part of the First Thursday Art Walk in downtown Durango.
