A Brush With the Old West : Culture: Once a year, the Cowboy Artists of America meet on a ranch to ride and rope and find new inspiration.

Think of Monet bulldogging steers at his spread at Giverny. Or Renoir busting mustangs in the Bois du Boulogne. Imagine Picasso in a Stetson covered with trail dust or Toulouse-Lautrec clumping up to the bar in the Moulin Rouge Saloon.

The images just won’t focus--probably because most of us have trouble imagining a guy with a branding iron in one hand and a fan brush in the other.

But there they were last week, steering their ponies around the O’Neill Ranch near San Juan Capistrano, 21 guys in chaps and boots and spurs, with Texas and Arizona and Montana in their voices, using words like representationalism and rodeo in the same sentence.

The Cowboy Artists of America, men with a rare amalgam of talent that allows them to paint a horse better than they ride one, were in town for two days of Western ridin’, ropin’ and realism.

They came to Orange County for their 25th annual trail ride, a yearly reunion of the 27 members and six emeritus members of the group (21 showed up this year). The ride--this year’s was the first ever held in California--serves as a kind of retreat for the artists, who spend most of the year painting or sculpting scenes of the American West.

They come from such places as Carefree, Ariz., or Big Fork, Mont., or Clifton, Tex. as invited guests of ranches in other Western states to, in a sense, re-experience firsthand the roots of much of their work: the cowboy life.

They are not all experienced riders and ropers--though several are highly skilled--but they all share a common love of the American West, past and present. And they have earned a reputation, individually and collectively, as some of the finest artists working in that genre.

“There’s no question that this organization has contributed to the appreciation of Western art and the love of the West more than any vehicle that’s ever happened. They are the best,” said Bill Riffle, an art collector from Kennedy Meadows, Calif., who rode along as a guest on the trail ride.

“When I was first interested in this art years ago, there were few appreciators. But it’s an international thing now. They’re crazy about it in Germany, they’re crazy about it in Japan. This is American art. The cowboy is America.”

The idea for the group, however, was born in Mexico 25 years ago.

John Hampton, an artist from Scottsdale, Ariz.; Joe Beeler, from Sedona, Ariz., and two other artists were invited to participate in a roundup on a Mexican ranch.

“We were having a good time, sitting around the fire,” said Hampton, “and we were saying we ought to have a gang, get together once a year. We were all artists and cowboys and I didn’t think there were a dozen guys in the country at the time who could qualify for that.”

When they returned home, the four met in the Oak Creek Tavern in Sedona (“kind of a cowboy bar,” said Beeler) and decided to officially form a group dedicated to the Western realist art popularized by Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell.

They also decided that each year there would be a professional exhibit of the members’ work (this year it begins Oct. 19 at the Phoenix Art Museum) and one event that would be almost purely social: the trail ride.

The members and their handful of guests arrive the night before the ride to pitch small tents near a clearing on the O’Neill Ranch. Early the next morning, an open fire is heating huge pots of coffee hanging from iron bars, and the smell of bacon, eggs, sausages and biscuits with brown gravy perfumes the air. The trail beckons, and cholesterol be damned.

A few members have brought their own horses, but most animals are provided by the ranch. There are jokes about creaky muscles and rusty riding skills. One rider asks for a horse “that respects age.”

For the next four hours, the riders snake up and down hills, through small canyons, under canopies of trees and along dusty trails that few Orange County residents ever see. Their artists’ eyes remain finely tuned, however, and they often remark on the beauty of the open coastal range.

They return in time for a late lunch of tacos and rice and beans, sweating, covered with grit and loving it. There is much laughing and joking over the meal, much of it in several varieties of the nasal twang characteristic of the Southwest.

Some will spend the rest of the day participating in roping events, while others will talk about their artwork. Still others will spend time sketching.

The juxtaposition of waxed lariats and palette knives seems only natural to the cowboy artists.

“Some people ask you what you are: a cowboy or an artist,” said Joe Beeler. “I would have to answer that question personally that I’m an artist. All my life I’ve painted and drawn what I’ve been around. Our interest in this group is the cowboy and his way of life. It was a dramatic period of history and it’s a dramatic way of life yet. There are still cowboys and this way of life. It’s hard to imagine that an artist wouldn’t go for the action and the color and the drama and the light that the cowboy life affords.”

Artist’s words, but they come from a man who was coiling a waxed rope, preparing to climb into the saddle and rope steers.

“The mind-picture of an artist is probably somebody in raggedy pants and a pair of thongs and long hair, but that’s a stereotype,” said Fred Fellows, an artist--and former professional cowboy--from Big Fork, Mont.

“It’s just natural, though, that if you’re an artist and you’re serious about doing painting and sculpture that you’re going to do those things that you love, things that you have a tremendous knowledge and love about. Not everybody in the group rides a horse great, or ropes, but the West and being a cowboy to me is more a thing of the heart than something of an actual location.”

Fellows, however, is one of the purer amalgams of artist and cowboy.

A 22-year veteran of the CAA, he once roped calves and steers on the California rodeo circuit, worked on a pair of large ranches and also worked as a commercial artist for Northrop Corp. in El Segundo. He continues to rope steers on a ranch near his home three nights a week.

Now 55, he has made his living as a full-time painter and sculptor for the last 30 years. He has never missed a CAA trail ride.

“This,” he said, neatly marrying his two passions, “is a chance for us to sit around the campfire and talk about art.”

Like Fellows, Bill Nebeker once was a rodeo rider, in college, and “rode and roped a little bit. I have cowboy in my heart, I guess.”

He also has the talent to produce striking bronze sculptures of cowboys, Indians and Western life, a skill he learned as an apprentice in a bronze foundry. A member of the CAA since 1978, he says the group is unique among artists.

“One thing that is really neat about the group is there is none of the prima donna kind of thing people usually associate with artists, being temperamental and that sort of thing. We’re very supportive of each other.”

Each artist also supports himself well, each having had both critical and financial success. One gauge of their popularity is the auction at the annual exhibits. Last year, said Riffle, $1.2 million worth of cowboy art was sold on the first day.

The trail ride, however, said Beeler, “is probably the bond that’s kept us together for so long. This is where we can laugh and be at ease, sitting under a shade tree talking about art and horses.”

There are few common backgrounds among the artists, however. Several attended colleges or art institutes, while others, like Nebeker, were self-taught. Still others, like Fellows, were commercial artists. Some were born to the cowboy life in the West and others, like Hampton, who was born in Brooklyn and once worked as a “ghost artist” on such 1930s-vintage comic strips as “Red Rider” and “The Lone Ranger” and hung his first paintings in the Red Dog Saloon in Scottsdale, learned it later.

For the outsider, it takes a bit of mental reshuffling to come to grips with the fact that one is hearing some fairly heady academic talk about Western realism from a man who looks for all the world as if he rides a horse named Widow-Maker.

It all comes back, say the artists, to the legacies of Remington and Russell, and the strong artistic images of the West.

“Russell was a cowboy, but he loved his art, too,” said Nebeker. “We love the outdoors and working with animals and the ranching aspect of it, but our art instincts also take over. The cowboys would say, ‘He’s a hell of an artist.’ And the artist would say, ‘He’s a hell of a cowboy.’ ”

He smiled when he said it.