I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that sentence.
Someone would be standing in front of one of my cow paintings, usually a Hereford, and they’d say:
“I’m not a cow person.”
Okay.
Then they’d stand there a little longer.
“I don’t even know why I like this painting.”
Okay.
And then:
“I have to have it.”
And they’d buy the fucking cow.
It happened over and over again.
I didn’t paint cows because cows were selling.
I painted them because they belonged to me.
My grandparents were ranchers. They raised Herefords. Those cattle were part of my childhood, part of my history, part of the landscape that made me who I am.
Long before I ever picked up a paintbrush, I knew those faces.
And after decades of making art—and selling the majority of what I’ve created—I think I finally have words for something I’ve known for a very long time:
Authenticity gets into the paint.
Years ago, I was talking with another artist who told me her husband had said landscapes were selling, so she thought she should start painting landscapes.
I asked her, “Do you like painting landscapes?”
“No,” she said. “But I can.”
Well, there’s your fucking problem.
Of course you CAN paint them.
But that’s not the same thing as needing to paint them.
And I think people can feel the difference.
Maybe they don’t consciously know what they’re responding to. Maybe they can’t explain it any better than those collectors who stood in front of my cows saying, “I don’t know why, but I have to have this.”
But something gets through.
The older I’ve gotten, the more convinced I’ve become that an artist’s job isn’t to figure out what people want and then manufacture it for them.
What’s selling?
What colors are popular?
What subject matter is trending?
What won’t offend anyone?
What will collectors like?
What should I paint so somebody will buy it?
Fuck that.
Because somewhere in all that noise, you can stop listening to the very thing that made you an artist in the first place.
The spark.
The pull.
The thing that says:
Paint this.
And sometimes the thing that wants to be painted is fucking HARD.
That Hereford calf pictured here was hard for me.
But I stayed with her.
Because she was the painting that wanted to be made.
And maybe that’s what eventually reaches somebody else.
Not the subject.
Not the marketing.
Not the fact that cows happen to look good over somebody’s sofa.
Maybe what reaches them is the part of the artist that was actually alive while making the thing.
The memory.
The struggle.
The joy.
The history.
The love.
The frustration.
The connection.
Whatever the fuck it was.
Because here’s the strange thing:
Those people weren’t cow people.
They weren’t looking for cows.
They didn’t wake up that morning thinking:
“You know what this house really needs? A fucking Hereford.”
They encountered something that belonged deeply to me…
and somehow recognized something in it that belonged to them.
That’s art.
I don’t completely understand what happens in that space between the person making something and the person who eventually recognizes themselves in it.
And I don’t need to anymore.
I just know that you cannot manufacture resonance.
You cannot strategize your way into soul.
And you sure as hell can’t paint somebody else’s truth and expect it to carry yours.
So paint the thing that’s alive in you.
Write the thing that’s alive in you.
Make the thing that’s alive in you.
Say the thing that’s alive in you.
Not because it will sell.
Not because people will approve.
Not because somebody told you it’s what the market wants.
Because it’s yours.
Put yourself into it honestly.
Then let it go.
Somewhere out there may be a person who doesn’t know they want it yet.
Hell, they may be absolutely certain they don’t.
And then one day they’ll stand in front of it and say:
“I don’t know why…
but I have to have this.”
Authenticity gets into the paint.
Apparently, sometimes the fucking cow does too.
