Shawn Cameron | The Real Thing

Shawn Cameron’s art is informed by generations of her family’s ranch life experience.

By Gussie Fauntleroy

Shawn Cameron remembers being a young artist in the 1990s when she and her husband, Dean, were friends with painters Joe Beeler and Bill Owen. Both were longtime members of the Cowboy Artists of America who lived in Arizona, as did the Camerons. Beeler, Owen and their respective wives would come to visit, and as soon as they walked in, Dean would lead them to his wife’s most recent drawings—her medium at the time—and say, “Look what Shawn’s done!” The older artists’ genuine interest and encouragement had a major impact on someone just beginning to gain confidence in her skills. “They were very supportive, and they seemed so sincere [that] they made me take myself seriously as an artist,” she says.

Over the years, especially as Cameron shifted into oils, Beeler and Owen continued to be part of her life as friends and mentors, each in their own way. Beeler, the more outgoing of the two, once said to her, “Let the paint fly, Shawn!” It wasn’t her nature at that point to be unrestrained in her application of paint, “But I needed to,” she says. Owen quietly answered technical questions and shared his color palette and knowledge of the color wheel. “I learn from any place I can,” Cameron says. “Eventually it boils down to: How am I going to put this information together to tell the story that I want to tell?”

The stories in Cameron’s paintings are those that have been her lifelong world—and that of multiple generations on both sides of her family. They tell of the selfless hard work, humility, grit and determination that comprise what she calls the “noble profession” of raising cattle. With the Camerons’ children all now heading their own ranches, the two in Arizona represent the sixth generation in the profession in that state, going back to 1875. Prior to that, the artist’s father’s forebears traveled the Oregon Trail and then drove 200 head of cattle south to Arizona. Her mother’s family journeyed from Texas to Arizona in covered wagons in the 1860s to start a ranch near Globe. This long lineage is “special to me,” Cameron says. And there is nothing she would rather portray in her art.

Since childhood, Cameron’s daily world has been filled with “talk of cattle, weather, the smell of horse sweat and leather, the sound of hooves before dawn, the weariness of long days, and a sense of purpose.” But art has always been there as well. With drawing, she has “no memory of beginning” but does have fond memories of her mother’s passion for art. Her mother was an amateur painter and always kept art materials around, which she encouraged Cameron and her brother to use. For a young girl who loved spending time alone and was able to sit quietly and concentrate for long periods, drawing was a perfect complement to the more physical activities of riding or grooming her horse, a wild-captured, gentle mustang she was given at age 3.

In winter Cameron’s family lived southwest of Phoenix, where her father and grandfather ran the first automated feed yard in the state. Summers were spent at the family ranch in central Arizona, which at the time had no electricity or phone. “All there was to do was ride horses and draw. I loved those summers, they just fit me,” Cameron says. Her mother, having begun collecting Western art as a teen, bought Walter Foster drawing books for Cameron and answered her questions about artists whose work the family owned.

Cameron and Dean met in high school and married after he returned from Vietnam. He immediately became immersed in cowboy life and the couple raised their children on the ranch her parents owned. She remembers the cowboys coming in at 4 a.m. for the breakfasts she cooked for them. Even with unending chores and three small children, however, she found time to draw. But she had no idea how to translate that activity into an art career.

Then, one day in 1990, when Cameron and Dean were in Santa Fe, Dean picked up a copy of Southwest Art whose cover featured artwork by Robert “Shoofly” Shufelt, known for his graphite drawings of cowboy and ranch life. It turned out Shufelt was planning a weeklong workshop at the Scottsdale Artists’ School, and Dean signed his wife up for it. “It was a turning point for me,” she says. Shufelt not only presented the fundamental elements of art, but also offered tips on entering the art world. Cameron dates her professional career from that workshop.

Another pivotal event took place a couple of years later when she gathered the courage to travel to Sedona and approach a gallery about her work. The owner, a kind man, looked carefully at her pencil drawings. He told her that if she were painting in oils with the quality of those drawings, he would take her work immediately. So, although she still loves black and white, she began taking painting workshops. And she exposed herself to great art through multiple trips to Scottsdale galleries, where she would stand quietly, making mental notes to herself as she studied Russian portraits or Western artists she admired.

Cameron’s paintings are all inspired and based on lived experience, her own and that of her father and grandfather, husband, grown children and the cowhands she’s known. AFTER HOURS is a nocturne depicting two men riding home on tired horses at the end of a long day of work. The artist used her husband and son as models, but the idea behind the piece dates to a much earlier time in her life. For years, Dean would head out on his horse early in the morning and be gone all day. There were no mobile phones, no way to let her know if there’d been a mishap in the rugged terrain of the expansive ranch. Many nights, when it got to be 8 o’clock and he still wasn’t home, Cameron turned to prayer. “I would say, ‘Okay, Lord, I’ll start to worry at 9 o’clock, and then you’ll tell me what to do.’ Otherwise, I would have driven myself crazy worrying,” she says, smiling.

The Camerons remain connected to the cattle business through the ranches operated by their kids. With good horse pasture on land much less rough than the ranch, they often keep mares and colts from their daughter’s horse breeding business. Cameron’s studio, a rustic structure with roof-metal siding, sits in the pasture near the barn. Inside on the studio walls are chaps from four generations in her family, along with her parents’ cowboy hats and some of Dean’s. There are cow and horse skulls, bridles, bits and rope. For reference, when needed, the saddle house is a just few steps away. Still drawn to solitude, the artist likes to “close the door on the world and get into that creative, very private place” of painting, she says. And her subject matter continues to be close at hand.

Early one morning last spring, Dean went out to feed the mare and saw that during the night, which had been unusually rainy, she’d had her filly. The young horse, Cameron says, is “very easygoing and gentle. She follows us around like a puppy dog in the pasture.” She also loves to settle comfortably in the pasture a couple of times a day for a nap. SIESTA, based on sketches and photographs, was inspired by one of those moments.

Cameron always uses her own photos as reference, and in paintings depicting cattle work, she often has Dean confirm the accuracy of details. Her goal is to present contemporary Western ranch life as authentically as possible. At the same time, she tries to create visual stories that are understandable to anyone, so viewers can imagine they are there in the scene. For her part, she says, art is an expression of gratitude, noting, “I feel so fortunate that I get to know this life, in a way that few do.”

contact information
shawncameron.com

representation
Mountain Trails Galleries, Sedona, AZ, mountaintrailssedona.com

upcoming shows
American Miniatures, Settlers West, Tucson, AZ, February 10.
Night of Artists, Briscoe Western Art Museum, San Antonio, TX, March 24-May 6.
Cowgirl Up!, Desert Caballeros Western Museum, Wickenburg, AZ, March 22-September 1.
Miniature Masterpiece Show, Phippen Museum, Prescott, AZ, opens May 1.

This story appeared in the February/March 2024 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Subscribe today to read every issue in its entirety.