Spring City Home by Seth Winegar |
By Margaret L. Brown
As we were completing this issue we were saddened to learn of the death of John Hampton, one of the founders of the Cowboy Artists of America. Hampton, who was 80, spent six decades painting and sculpting the cowboy life. In an article in the June 1999 issue of Southwest Art, Hampton spoke of his recent move with his wife out of Scottsdale to wide-open southeastern Arizona, where he was eager to begin working in his new studio, ride horses, and camp out in a bedroll under the stars. I know Hampton will be missed as he rests beneath those stars.
The torch is being passed, then, to a new generation of Cowboy Artists—among them the group’s current president, John Moyers, who is profiled in this issue. Moyers, who was elected into the CA in 1994, is known for his impressionistic paintings of the historic West and Native American subjects. As Norman Kolpas writes, Moyers “portrays scenes from the past so realistically that they seem magically transported to the present day.”
In the second installment of our Mil-lennium Series, we look at the varied works of 18 landscape painters, including cover artist Louisa McElwain and Utah tonalist painter Seth Winegar. We also take you on location to the Grand Canyon, where Curt Walters and 14 other artists recently spent a week rafting and painting en plein air to help raise funds for environmental conservation. As a counterpoint, our Trends column examines the popularity of urbanscapes paintings depicting freeways, street lights, buildings, signs, and other scenes of city life.
In his article on painting the American West, Don Hagerty notes that landscape painting is “about places, their origins and substance. Even more so, it is about the spiritual peculiarity of these places that artists find seductive.” I hope the views in this issue seduce you as they did the artists who painted them.
Featured in February 2000