Why I Draw the West I Know

When people ask me why I draw what I draw, the short answer is easy: I draw the ranch life I grew up in, because it's the life I know.

The longer answer is a little more involved, and it's worth telling.

A Ranch in Southeastern Colorado

I grew up on a family cow-calf operation in southeastern Colorado, on land my family has worked since the late 1890s. The ranch sits twenty-five miles from the nearest town, a small agricultural community of about 2,500 people. Growing up that far out, I spent a lot of time on my own, which meant a lot of time drawing. Horses with balloon heads and stick legs, at first. Old West action scenes traced and copied from the cowboy art my mom kept in old calendars and magazines: Charlie Russell, Charlie Dye, George Phippen, Will James.

As I got older, I found myself drawn to a different kind of Western art. Photographers like Kurt Markus and Jay Dusard had been capturing Great Basin buckaroos throughout the 1980s and '90s, and artists like Tim Cox, Robert "Shoofly" Schufelt, and Dino Cornay were drawing contemporary cowboys working in places like New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado. Their subjects wore the gear I recognized, did the work I'd seen done. Compared to the more sensational, historic Old West imagery, their work felt grounded. It felt like home.

That's the direction I wanted to go. I just didn't get there until about thirty years later, after a detour through technical drafting, a long career designing bridges, and a stint as an amateur leather worker that I'd like to think built character, even if it didn't build much of a business.

An Ambassador for a Way of Life

I spent thirty-one years, and counting, working as a bridge designer. Drawing wasn't part of my life for most of that time, unless you count the occasional pen-and-ink rendering of a bridge for a public meeting, which, contrary to what you might assume, is not exactly the stuff of artistic legend. In early 2019, during a week off between Christmas and New Year, I picked up a pencil again. The first drawing came out better than I expected, which either means I'm a late bloomer or that my standards had dropped considerably. I posted it on Facebook, got an encouraging response, tried another, and by 2020 my wife and I had started A.R. Pelster Western Art LLC.

Once I started drawing seriously again, I had to figure out what, exactly, I wanted to say with it. I found the answer in the words of a painter named Ed Sandoval, who described himself as "an ambassador representing northern New Mexico." His paintings, he said, were meant to introduce people to the history, culture, and landscapes of the place he was from.

That's exactly it. I'm an ambassador for the ranching culture I grew up in and which remains close to my heart.

Ranch families breed, raise, and care for living creatures that eventually feed the country and the world. They witness life, illness, and death daily. They depend on the weather and the land, and so they take care of both. They work alongside family and neighbors and look out for one another. And yet, ranching has become a misunderstood way of life, often portrayed inaccurately by people who've never experienced it, whether through Hollywood mythology or through art that simply hasn't done its homework.

My drawings are not staged. The subjects are not actors, and they are not in costume. My subjects are friends, family, and neighbors who continue to live and work in rural southeastern Colorado. The branding scenes, the horses, the gear, the trucks and Carhartts and ball caps mixed in with felt hats and split reins, all of it is drawn from real people doing real work that I've witnessed or participated in myself.

What "Authentic" Actually Means

"Authenticity" has been at the foundation of my artist statement for years, but it's a word that gets used loosely, and I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about what it actually requires.

There's a version of authenticity that's really about the artist's own vision: if an artist sincerely believes their portrayal of the West is true, then it's authentic to them, regardless of whether it reflects historical or factual reality. I understand that argument, but I think it lets too many artists off the hook. It would make a Hollywood Western "authentic" simply because the screenwriter believed in it.

I draw a line between authentically representing an artist's vision and authentically representing facts. I've seen well-regarded painters present a modern photograph as if it depicted a "historical character" from a different era entirely, with no idea they'd gotten the basic facts wrong. I've seen beautiful, technically skilled paintings that combine elements from completely unrelated sources, a roping photo here, a branding pen there, a dog dropped in to balance the composition, until the resulting scene doesn't actually make sense as something that could happen. The paintings are well executed. They're just not true.

I love windmills, and I've spent time around them, including a summer working with a "windmill man" who serviced wells and windmills back home. So when I see an "Erector Set windmill" in a painting, something that looks vaguely windmill-shaped but bears no resemblance to how the things are actually built, it pulls me right out of the image, the same way a swell fork saddle in an Old West movie ruins the scene. The information to get it right is out there. Photos, owner's manuals, even detailed technical drawings going back to the late 1800s are easy to find. There's no excuse for guessing, and there's definitely no excuse for an Erector Set windmill.

My advice to other representational artists is the same advice given to writers: draw what you know. That doesn't mean you have to be a veterinarian to draw horses or a geologist to draw mountains. But if you're going to draw something, you owe your viewer the respect of doing the research, because the people who know that subject best are exactly the people most likely to be looking at your work.

Drawing Modern Ranch Life, On Purpose

The simplest way to describe about ninety percent of my drawings is contemporary ranch life. And I'll be honest: from a marketing standpoint, that's not exactly the home run I might have wished for.

Collectors and galleries tend to gravitate toward art that's "meant to be historic," old-time cowboys, gunfighters, new interpretations of Remington or Russell. Modern ranch scenes are a tougher sell. But historic Western art today is so often inaccurate anyway, mismatched clothing, gear from the wrong era or region, modern horses standing in for the smaller, rougher range horses of the 1800s, that I'd rather draw the version of the West I can actually get right.

I draw modern ranch work in its true context: portable pens, pipe corrals, cowpies. The gear and clothing in my drawings are whatever the people I know actually wear and use, not whatever looks "more Western." I draw what I see.

When I take on commissions, I keep to subjects that fit this same world: ranch, rural, or agricultural life, rodeo, equine, livestock, working dogs, and Western wildlife. I don't draw pet portraits, fan art, or scenes from Western movies and TV shows. No Clint Eastwood, no John Wayne, no Kevin Costner. I'd honestly be more likely to draw your chinchilla, and I'm still not going to draw your chinchilla.

Style: Looking Through a Window, Not at a Photo

My work is generally described as Representational Art, or Realism, and is often called "photorealistic." I don't think that's quite right, and the difference matters to me.

A camera captures everything with roughly the same level of focus. The human eye doesn't work that way. We focus on what interests us, and everything else falls into softer detail around it. I use that selective focus deliberately, putting the most detail into the areas I want the viewer to land on, and letting the rest support the image without competing for attention. The goal isn't to mimic a photograph. It's to mimic looking through an open window into another place, a window that happens to lead into a monochromatic world.

I say "monochromatic" rather than "black and white" because graphite, charcoal, and carbon each produce subtly different warm and cool grays. I almost never use true black or true white, saving those extremes for the focal points of the drawing, another way of guiding the viewer's eye.

Growing up, I spent hours looking through my family's collection of historic photographs, some dating back to 1900, when my family first came to the Eastern Plains. Those images, real people, real places I knew, brought the old days to life for me in a way no painting ever did. Later, photographers like Kurt Markus, Jay Dusard, and Bank Langmore photographed everyday cowboys and buckaroos throughout the West in black and white, and Ansel Adams was doing the same with Western landscapes, printing in gelatin silver to get tones that go far beyond simple black and white.

That's the effect I'm after with graphite, charcoal, and carbon. Each of those materials reflects light differently and produces a different warm or cool tone, and using them together lets me build the same kind of depth and atmosphere those photographers achieved in the darkroom.

Why I Draw, Not Paint

Drawing in graphite and charcoal is sometimes treated as a lesser medium, something for sketches and studies rather than finished work, with oil painting considered the "real" fine art. I've made my peace with being the guy who showed up to the fine art party with a pencil instead of a paintbrush. I'd argue that value, the relationship between light and dark, matters more to a successful image than color does. An image can be full of color and still feel flat if there isn't enough contrast in value. Working in a monochromatic medium forces total attention to that relationship, because there's nothing else to fall back on.

Drawings on paper also come with real practical downsides. Paper deteriorates. It has to be matted and framed under UV-protected glass in an acid-free system to have any kind of lifespan, which adds cost, weight, and fragility, all real concerns for collectors and galleries.

That's a big part of why I've moved most of my work to Claybord, a hardboard panel coated with kaolin clay that I'll write more about in a future post. The short version: Claybord lets me draw with the same materials and techniques I've always used, but the surface is durable enough that the finished piece can be varnished and displayed without glass, much like a painting. It also lets me etch back into the drawing to create crisp, bright highlights I could never get on paper, which has become a real part of how I build a finished image.

Two artists who have influenced me more than any others, Robert "Shoofly" Schufelt and Dino Cornay, also work in graphite, with exactly this kind of authentic, lived-in subject matter. Watching artists working in graphite and charcoal continue to find real recognition in the Western art world gives me confidence that the subject, the style, and the medium I've committed to aren't a dead end. They're just not the easy path.

The Through-Line

All of this, the subject matter, the style, the medium, comes back to the same idea: I want to draw the West as it actually is where I'm from, using materials and techniques that do justice to that place and the people in it.

I'm not trying to recreate the 1880s. I'm trying to document right now, the version of ranch life that's still going on in southeastern Colorado, with the people I grew up with and their kids after them. If a hundred years from now someone looks at one of my drawings the way I used to look at those old family photographs, and sees something true about this place and this time, that's the whole point.