The Iron Spur

I choose linen because I want the work to change.

The West was shaped by time. Sun bleached timber and bone. Leather darkened under the hands of its owner. Saddles softened and cracked, iron rusted, copper took its patina. The people carried the evidence too: faces weathered by wind, sun, hardship, and years. Nothing stayed untouched.

I wanted the materials to carry the same truth. Linen begins simply: flax grown from the ground, harvested, spun, woven. Before I paint on it the surface is almost pure. Then the painting begins its life.

From the first mark, I do not think of the linen as something that should stay exactly as it was that day. It will respond to light, air, and age. Its tone may deepen. Its character may shift. I welcome that.

I want someone who owns one of these for thirty years to have something slightly different from what left my hands. Not diminished. Lived in. These paintings are not meant to freeze the West in a perfect moment. They are meant to age with it.

The copper leaf along the edges of my frames is not an accent.

Copper was pulled from the same unforgiving country that shaped the people who lived on it. Mining towns rose around it. Wagons carried it across the desert, railroads moved it east, and copper wire connected settlements that had been isolated by hundreds of miles. It was a material taken out of the ground and made to carry something farther.

The leaf is laid by hand over black, then worked back until the black shows through at the corners and along the edges. It is never laid flat and never sealed to a shine. Like leather, iron, and the landscape, it will darken and take a patina.

The artwork tells the story of the West. The copper carries the history beneath it.