WIlliam Matthews’ watercolor paintings show a predilection for cowboy hats and men astride horses, their faces rarely in view as they head out away from the viewer and into an open range. It’s a trick. It says “get on or get left behind.”
Choose to ride. He’ll take you to places far from the well-paved habitats of most mere mortal westerners and into the timeless world of American cowboys. His subjects may look like they strode out of the historic Wild West, but in reality they’re men living and breathing today, still roping steer and riding hard.
“I’ve always thought of myself as an outsider,” Matthews says. He sees what he does as being a journalist, an observer, documenting the lifestyle here and now, before it disappears or changes irrevocably.
Matthews shows the viewer places in the world that aren’t easily accessible — remote regions of the West, private corners of working ranches, the long view of ranch life.
“Not only is he trespassing into this world that he really is not necessarily a part of, but he allows us to do the same. In a sense, we get to also trespass into that world,” says Thomas Smith, curator of Western American Art and director of the Petrie Institute of Western Art at the Denver Art Museum.
“The reality is,” Matthews adds, “the only way to see most of these things is to really get off the pavement, and most people don’t.”
The Denver Art Museum’s William Matthews: Trespassing is a one-man retrospective that circles (literally) through Matthews’ work, beginning with his first near monochromatic renderings of cowboys and returning to his most recent paintings, in which he returns to incorporating typography as he did in an early career designing album covers for Warner Brothers and Capitol Records.
“It’s another exhibition in a long line of shows the Denver Art Museum has done about creativity and about an artist’s career development,” Smith says. He sees it as important to acknowledge Matthews, who lives and works in Denver, as not just a local artist, but among the best watercolorists in the country.
Matthews grew up in the Bay Area, his mother an oil painter who often took him to museums. He recalls looking at the work of watercolor painters John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer and Andrew Wyeth and making a decision around age 12 to “get really good at doing what those guys do.”
In an artist’s journal entry online, Matthews writes, “Watercolor has been my paint of choice ever since I was a young boy. It’s more than a medium for me — it is an attitude. It has to do with feeling slightly out of control. It has to do with capturing the gesture. …
“Not all of my work is fit for human consumption. I have ruined thousands of paintings and destroyed them. I’ve burned mountains of paper in the wood stove in my studio. It’s part of the process. I expect that at least one-third or half of the things I start are not going to be successful. If the percentage were higher, it would mean I wasn’t taking enough chances. And if the work is too safe, it’s not interesting. I always try to do something new and better than anything I’ve ever done before.
“Watercolor has a mind of its own, and it goes where it wants to. For me, it is important to work in partnership with the medium, and thereby yield some control. It’s important that a watercolor appear fresh and not overworked. And mostly, it’s important to know when to stop.”
Painting wasn’t something anyone encouraged in him, he says. It was a distraction from school, and he never went to college. He moved instead to Hollywood, where he began designing record covers. In 1972, he came to Denver, where he still lives and works, and there met Dana Crawford, who asked him to put up a one-man show at a business in this struggling little urban center — Larimer Square.
His introduction to cowboys and buckaroos came at the Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada, in 1983.
“They were great guys and they were very warm and they were very inviting and they invited me to come visit them, so I started painting them,” Matthews says.
His first works were in burnt umber and ultramarine blue, sepia-toned rendering with flourishes of color like a teal bandana. With the passage of time has come the addition of color.
He’s been painting people around the Great Basin — Nevada, Idaho, Oregon, Utah and California — for decades now. The American West icons he captures, the cowboys, ranches, farm architecture and broad landscapes, aren’t seen in just a trespasser’s furtive glimpse, though he embraced the show’s title. It’s a friend’s steady gaze.
“These are all guys who are friends of mine. These are all people who I’ve known and in many cases knew their wives, knew their kids as little kids. Their kids have now grown up and married and are starting to have their own kids,” Matthews says. “I really have known, in some cases, three generations.”
In “Hard Candy,” the anti-Marlboro Man raises a red sucker to his mouth, his effort to quit smoking being aided by a candy dependence.
“This is one of my favorite paintings in the exhibition and the reason that I am so charmed by it is that in many ways it’s challenging the idea of who cowboys are in this mythical idea that has been so engrained in American culture,” Smith says. “I think it’s a great example as well of the key to what will make William Matthews’ work stand the test of time, and that is that he painted the West today.”
He often sees artists today falling into the trap of painting scenes of the Old West.
“Willy Matthews, he paints today, what cowboys look like today, what the West looks like today,” Smith says.
From an art historian’s perspective, that’s an important distinction, and something likely to secure Matthews’ work in places like the Denver Art Museum, which already includes a few of his works in its collection.
“When you try to think about the development of Western American art, that’s where you can look at William Matthews and say, ‘This is where he fits. He painted his time. He painted his place,’” Smith says.
Setting aside where the works figure in history, and looking at them in and of themselves, the dedication to representing what he sees when he visits these places also allows him to catch some of those human surprises, like a cowboy and his candy.
“Painting something that is real rather than invented gives him the possibilities to look at aspects of humanity that you might otherwise not,” Smith says. “There’s a lot more nuance, and they’re also experiences that people relate to. When you see something in a work of William Matthews’ that you associate with, you think, ‘Oh that’s an experience I’ve had in the West. I’ve seen that.’ It’s a much different feeling than to see a painting of the 1890s and have no sort of basis, any real experience that connects to that. It’s just something that’s a myth.”
Matthews’ isn’t an imagined history, a mythical creation of romanticized cowboys and Indians playing out their dramas against a background of open prairie and bison herds. These are real men, doing real work, even the flinch-worthy moments of it — as a close inspection of “Branding Arrangement” will reveal.
“Branding Arrangement,” grabs perhaps the most attention in the exhibition. The piece uses the gallery’s largest wall to hang a grid of 35 small paintings — it’s so big that Matthews’ mock-up of it in his studio couldn’t fit more than 25 at a time — that build a loose logic that ties them all together. He’d done grid paintings before, and wanted to expand on that idea, and had painted brandings before, describing them as a symbolic beginning of spring and rebirth, as well as a rite of passage (well, obviously, from the calves’ perspective). The 35 shown were selected by Smith and Matthews from 50 he made on the subject.
The paintings fit together now so that close-up images of a spur or a boot against a calf’s prone body are interrupted by paintings that collectively illustrate the act of branding — in one frame, the cowboy’s elbow and handle of the branding iron, in the next, the business end of the iron and the furred hide of the calf.
Matthews wanted to do something collage- or puzzle-like. It’s like the actual act of rounding up calves in the spring.
“The thing about brandings is that, there is a structure but then anything can become disorderly,” Matthews says.
“It’s one of those works that the more you look at it, you will begin to see that some of them connect together — not all of them, certainly, but some of them do, and as you continue to look, you’ll see that there are more and more things that do connect together,” Smith says. “So it’s one of those brilliant pieces that, the more time that you spend with it, it really pays you back for spending that time with some creative things that will connect together to tell you other stories.”
For years, Smith visited Matthews at his Denver studio, and the two worked together to select the 27 works included in the exhibition.
“When you’re working with an artist who’s living, it’s always a different set of challenges,” Smith says, but it’s also allowed him to watch Matthews’ work grow and change over the years.
His latest paintings revive the use of typography of his early graphic design days, and hand-lettering appears in the images, some times central in the image and sometimes a footnote.
“All of my years as a designer, doing album covers, is not lost and one of the things I really pride myself on is being able to design a painting, and I put a lot of time into the design of the painting,” Matthews says. The boots and spurs and animal hides all boil down to a design, and image — the painting is an abstraction.
Inspiration comes from everywhere, Matthews says — for the painting “Close Range” that was the cover art for Pulitzer prize-winning author Annie Proulx’s book of short stories by the same name that included “Brokeback Mountain,” his palette drew from the hues of her dark and dangerous stories of cowboys in the west.
He’s recently begun delving into farm architecture, and his gallery in Denver will feature a show of works on industrial buildings by both Matthews and his son Austin in March.
In the series of paintings on the Gamble Ranch Granary, five of which are included in Trespassing, Matthews returns, Monet-like, to the singular rectangular structure of a grain elevator in the empty northeastern corner of Nevada, painting it in winter, in January at dawn and on June afternoons, in moonlight and sharing the rosy glow of sunset with a reptilian ridge of mountains behind it. Sometimes the view is head on, and sometimes at an angle. Sometimes it’s of just a detail — a red streak of powerlines, the tunnel that cuts through its center and offers a view of a haystack hill beyond, the lower perimeter buildings, the long shadows. Sometimes the granary is drawn in blues and stains over a field of white space. In “Moonlight, #10,” the whole canvas is covered in navy, and it appears he’s pricked the color away with a pin to reveal white beneath the blue — stars.
It’s an unusual venture away from cowboys and buckaroos, to study a piece of architecture so thoroughly. He handles it with a roughness that can only be earned through deep affection and the familiarity from having become a frequent visitor, invited or not.
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