Cowboys & Images: The Watercolors of William Matthews

The West has attracted many wonderful painters over the years, but rarely has any one of them introduced a new vision of the region and its inhabitants. William Matthews had already made a name for himself as a watercolorist when he began to paint cowboys and their world in 1985. Associated with the revival of cowboy poetry and music fostered by the Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada, Matthews brought a fresh and unexpected viewpoint to this classic American figure. Following the buckaroo on horseback, in pickups, and cookwagons, on the IL, the YP, the Winecup, the MC, and the Spanish Ranches in Nevada and Oregon, Matthews takes us into a realm of powerful evocation. Executed in subtle tones and thoughtfully composed, his watercolors are studies in complicity and distance. His buckaroo is a quiet, introspective man, a rural hero whose gestures create a quiet poetry much closer to cowboy reality than traditional images of action and derring-do.