Setting the mood for a cowboy painting, 65-year-old New Mexico artist Tim Cox begins mounting a smoothly primed board on easel, and, paintbrush in hand, applies ever-so-thinly diluted washes of lightly pigmented tones of oil and spirits. This is how a Western realist oil painting starts.
He masses-in main shapes first, fuzzy blobs, no details yet—there will be plenty of time for that later—and a picture, like a ghost, begins emerging from the stark white gessoed panel surface. A pencil underdrawing ensures the composition is plotted accurately.
Storm clouds roiling across a backdrop, or vast expanses of diffused blue sky, or perhaps a blazing sunset, rendered in oil, help bring that Western mood to fruition. When the details start plucking forth the scene, steadily bringing it into focus, they don’t stop until the very finish—every variety of grass, shape of animal’s ear, or horse’s gait depicted bespeak meaningfully of years lived, growing up on a ranch in Arizona in the 1970s….