Final Frontier
Devon Jackson
Western artist Bob Coronato depicts the Old West of yesterday and today
 Hang’n em on the bunk house wall: you know you should surrender…but ya can’t let it go, chine collé etching, 11 x 8 |
Coronato, a New Jersey native who’d graduated just four days earlier from an art school in Los Angeles, had been feeling pretty swell, until one of the visitors began drilling him with questions about the details of his work. “Then he said, ‘Can I give you a critique?’” recalls Coronato. “‘I’m a saddle maker, and the saddle in this painting here is all wrong.’ When he said that, I had this hot flash of suddenly knowing that I didn’t come from the culture that I wanted to paint. The guy’s name was Carson Thomas, and he told me, ‘You’ve got the talent but not the experience. I can change all that.’ And he did. He told me, ‘Move to Wyoming and I’ll get you to working on a ranch and painting from real life.’”
When Coronato got back to New Jersey, he called Thomas to ask if he was serious. Thomas was, he said, if Coronato was. Within a week, Coronato had relocated from the suburbs he’d grown up in with his CPA father and his corporate secretary mother (a place he describes as very “Sopranos”-like) to a room above Thomas’ saddle shop in Hewlett, WY, population 409. He had $500, no furniture, and didn’t know anyone except Thomas. Turns out, Coronato had moved to one of the few places in America where the West he’d always wanted to paint actually still existed.
Born in Newton, NJ, in 1970, Coronato always knew that he’d one day move out west to paint. In high school he made copies of paintings by Frederic Remington, Charles Russell, and Joseph Henry Sharp. In his junior year, he attended a summer program at the Parsons School of Design, where his teachers told him he should pursue a career in art. Considering their other advice—that New York schools specialize in theory and California schools let you paint—Coronato opted for sunshine and the chance to paint. After high school he headed for Los Angeles and the Otis College of Art and Design.
While Coronato’s subject matter and style of painting certainly went against the grain of the L.A. art school—“I had a hard time there, but I was too stubborn to quit,” he says—he nevertheless graduated with a major in illustration. And then, that fateful exhibit at the High Plains Heritage Center in South Dakota.
 Noth’n like the feel’n of rid’n a fine horse…through Wyoming country…that’s still considered frontier, 30 x 97 1/16 |
“The word serendipity comes to mind for my entire career,” says Coronato of his chance encounter with Carson Thomas. After Coronato moved to Wyoming, Thomas got him work at a ranch. The ranch foreman took the new kid under his wing, showing him how to ride, how to gather and brand cattle, how to survive. Finally the foreman told Coronato, “We’re done babysitting you. You get your own horse now.”
Another influential chance encounter was meeting plein-air painter Tom Waugh, who lived nearby in a log cabin he’d built himself. The two hit it off and starting painting together. Waugh taught Coronato all he knew about the local history and culture, about Native Americans and Americana, and, most important, he taught him how to etch…
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