Ranchers comes from my series of work featuring themes from the American Old West, Untamed! That series began back in 2016, spanning a couple of years, and featuring a rogue’s gallery of drifters, grifters and outlaws who were mostly up to no good. I have ambivalent feelings about Old West mythology and visuals, both kinda in love with it all and yet also suspicious and leery of the subconscious hold that era seems to have on this nation as it wrestles with struggling to cope with change in the 21st century. Untamed! reflects America in all our absurdity.

This particular painting started life back in 2010, as a completely different image, and became one of the first completed work in the Untamed! series. As I often do with older paintings that hand around long enough, I obliterated all but the house in the upper-right. As with many things that have a past life, close inspection of the surface will reveal plateaus and valleys of relief - ghosts of flying squirrels and bricks of yore. This painting also represents one of the first paintings of mine that tipped the corner into depictions of people and objects disconnected from a grounded background and absent any proper scale or perspective.