Painting the Old West on New Canvas

There’s rangy Fred Fellows and the older, grizzled J.N. Swanson, and their weathered faces under their sombreros tell it all. Cowpokes, both of them.

Moving from Oklahoma to the Los Angeles area at the age of 9, Fellows worked as a cowboy for spending money during his years at Lynwood High School and then, after graduation, branched into saddle making and full-time cowboy work “on a couple of big spreads in the Mojave” and went on the rodeo circuit.

When, through a relative employed by Northrop Corp., Fellows was invited to apply for a staff artist job with the defense contractor, he jumped at the chance.

“I loaded my horse on the trailer, tied up my bedroll and took off. I was a little tired of being a cowboy by then. . . . It wasn’t as romantic as I’d thought.”

Seven years later he was Northrop’s art director. Formal art training: high school only.

For Swanson, it would seem that cowboying was to be a lifetime commitment--beginning as a teen-ager with the Crofton Cattle Co. at Tehachapi and continuing after service in World War II on similar spreads in Oregon.

“Oh, I was a dumb kid then and didn’t know until a lot later that I was riding with great vaqueros like Frank Martinez--a legend even today. I was making my $50 a month and wearing cowboy boots where I had to hold the soles on with tape.

“I’d drawn, you know, all my life, but it wasn’t till my mother gave me a paint set for Christmas one year that I got all excited by it. In ‘49, with 30 bucks in my pocket, I came down to Carmel Art Institute with my lame racehorse and the two of us lived in the same stall for a year while I went to school.”

Formal art training: one year at Carmel.

In terms of training (from zilch to advanced degrees) and roots (from the West to the Midwest to Brooklyn), the two artists are a mixed bag of 32 highly individual talents--members of the invitation-only Cowboy Artists of America.

They are men who have embraced the color, the glamour and the hardships of the Old West and the contemporary West and who have committed the drama of it to oils, watercolors and sculpture in the tradition of Frederic Remington and Charlie Russell. Men whose work has been shown in exhibits at Le Grand Palais in Paris, the Beijing Exhibition Center in China, the Glenbow Museum in Calgary. Men whose art is in the permanent collections of scores of domestic institutions and historical societies.

And whose work attracts hundreds of private collectors who come from all over the country every October to share the unveiling of the previous year’s work.

This year’s preview and sale is Friday. The exhibit is open to museum visitors next Saturday throughNov. 19 at the Phoenix Art Museum--the 24th such show since the informal founding of the CAA in 1964 by four artists who shared the bond of loving and depicting the West.

To attend the Friday evening sale, buyers and collectors pay $150 for admission, which includes a Friday afternoon reception, a Saturday morning autograph party and Saturday evening awards banquet. Prices are established on the artworks, and purchasers are chosen by lottery. Thousands of dollars are raised each year, with the museum taking a commission on the sale.

Now numbering 25 active and seven emeritus members, the artists have a common and simple goal: to preserve the memory of a part of the country at a time when Indian tribes roamed freely and when the white man was scrambling for a toehold in an environment that was as hostile as it was unspoiled.

As simple as the goal is, the approaches to it are as varied as the imagination and the insight of the individual CAA members.

Former rodeo roper Fred Fellows’ popular oil last year, “The Music Box,” for instance, flies in the face of the classic “cowboy art” definition--the full-length study is of a Western woman from another era, seated with a music box beside her, and staring out a window with a look of infinite loneliness. Waiting. Remembering.

Perennial historians with an encyclopedic knowledge of the customs, the dress, the living conditions and the tribal lore of the period they are depicting, today’s cowboy artists are too literal for some critical impressionistic tastes. As one CAA member, his leathery face breaking into a smile, said at last year’s exhibit: “Takes all kinds.”

A few years ago, T. Boone Pickens Jr. of Mesa Petroleum was asked why he collects Western art.

“All history is a resource from which to draw wisdom,” he said. “The history of the West is particularly rich in wisdom because of the strength of the individuals who lived it. They have given us an unsurpassed legacy of human values founded on such basics as morality, truth, duty, honor and country. I have collected Western art with a hope that it will help preserve these values for successful living and perpetuate them for future generations.”

The loosely knit CAA membership is scattered throughout the West--Big Fork, Mont.; Bonita, Calif.; Estes Park, Colo.; Prescott and Sedona, Ariz.; Clifton, Tex.; Santa Fe, N.M., and a dozen tucked-away ranches in between. All devote their full efforts to their art, the culmination of which is the annual Phoenix show. All are happy men.

“I took a big chance,” says Northrop’s one-time art director, Fred Fellows. “I decided to paint full time so I just pulled up stakes and took off. That was 25 years ago. I’ve never spent a day regretting it.”

Cowboy Artists of America 24th Annual Sale and Exhibition. Oct. 20 preview and sale is open to the public at $150. Reservations, information: Ruth Kaspar, (602) 240-6147. The CAA exhibit opens to museum visitors at 1 p.m. Oct. 21 and continues through Nov. 19. Admission to the museum is $3; children under 12 free.