Eric Bowman - Turning Pro, Economics of Art, and Fundamentals of a Good Painting

Hello out there, George Irwin here, also known on Instagram as Western Gallery. I'd like to welcome you to Horizons, a series of talks with people who make, collect, and present artworks that represent the American West. Mostly painting-focused for now, we'll zero in on the people involved with works depicting the Western landscape, cowboys, Native Americans, and wildlife. So saddle up and join me as I venture west. I recently spoke with the multi-award-winning oil painter Eric Bowman. You might be familiar with his studio landscape and western paintings, but if you haven't given his work a deeper study, you should. His figure-oriented pieces and plein air sketches are also worth a long look. For some samples, check out his website at www.ericbowman.com or his Instagram @ericbowmanart. Or if you're a subscriber of Western Art Collector Magazine, you can find a 6-page spread of his work in the May issue. I spoke to Eric on speakerphone as he was finishing up work for his upcoming solo show. If you listen closely, you can hear him painting, scraping, and bumping around in the studio, finishing up his painting titled The Searchers. You can see that painting and the rest of his show beginning May 4th at Maxwell Alexander Gallery in LA.

All right, well, thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me today. I really appreciate it, especially considering you're still working on your pieces for your upcoming shows.

Oh yeah, I'm working while we're talking.

What piece are you working on right now?

I don't have a title for it. A couple of cowboys on the hillside. One guy's kind of pointing off into the distance, the other one's looking where he's pointing. So they're, I don't know, they could be scouts or they could be just hunting for cattle or pointing at some clouds. I like to leave my paintings kind of open-ended so people can kind of write the finish, figure out what's going on. So I'll title this one later when I have some time to think about what I should call it.

Gotcha.

Yeah, it's about, I don't know, 75% done.

Would you have any idea where that one's headed?

Oh yeah, this is all part of my show. I've got a one-man show, solo show. It's my third show at Maxwell Alexander Gallery in Los Angeles and opens May 4th, and I've got 12 new paintings for that show. So this is one of them. This is probably number 9, I think.

Cool, so you still have more to go following this one then?

Yeah, and I'm still— I mean, I've got some that are close to finish. I still need some tweaking, but I have probably another 3 or 4 that I need to get started, so I'm kind of under the gun here.

Well, that's exciting though. And then also, do you have work that you're sending to the Briscoe as well?

Uh, yeah, I've already sent those 4 paintings, and those are all on my website, I believe. Okay. Yeah, I sold out there last year, so that was nice.

Excellent. So you've got your solo show at Maxwell Alexander in May, and Night of Artists has 4 of your pieces at the Briscoe, and then the last thing that you were showing in, was that the Maynard Dixon exhibit?

Yeah, I had a, I had a couple of pieces in that. In fact, they just sent me the book for that. That's all been compiled into a book, the show, and it's actually a book on Maynard Dixon, and then there's just maybe the last 20 pages are images from the show, and that piece sold, so I was happy about that. It's a really cool book, they they had the artists that were in the show each submitted 1 to 2 paintings and then wrote a little essay about Maynard Dixon and his influence on them. Yeah. And then they printed those up in the book. But the bulk, the bulk of the book, it's almost 2 inches thick, it's a huge book, is all the Maynard Dixon collection that Mark Sublette has, pieces that he's dealt, and then he, you know, wrote the whole thing too. So it's a really nice book. Wow.

Yeah, that's on my list to get one of those. That looked like a great kind of combination as well of, you know, the history of Maynard Dixon and then the group of contemporary artists that he put together to, I don't know, I guess honor him in a way.

Yeah, I know, I was really honored myself to be a part of that. Oh yeah. So that's pretty special.

Well, it's a, you know, you can see, I think, in your work kind of why you were included in that group.

Well, yeah, he's definitely an influence along with, you know, 100 other guys, but he's one of them.

Right. Well, do you want to talk about influences?

Oh, I've got so many, it's hard to, you know, can't list them all.

Do you have any that you go to kind of frequently to study?

Sure, yeah, there's like the Taos, you know, several of the Taos artists, not all of them, but like Blumensheen and Dunton and Hennings, maybe some Victor Higgins. I was talking to a magazine yesterday about the Taos artists and then also Tom Thompson and the Group of Seven Canadian painters. Oh yeah. Both of those groups really kind of just a lot of stylization and it really injected a lot of you know, their own vision and their own style, almost fantasy-like into the landscape compared to other groups or other individual artists who pretty much painted what they saw the way they saw it with, you know, less stylization or less idealization, if that's even a word, that the Taos guys and the Group of Seven did. But yeah, I really like the boldness that they had to take shapes and kind of break them down into simpler geometric forms and then put some really nice color into them and kind of stylize, you know, the whole setting. So it's, it's not really, it's not fantasy art, but it's not realism either. It's very stylized realism, I guess you'd call it.

Yeah, I'm glad you said something about Tom Thompson, Group of Seven, because I guess I didn't make kind of a, I don't know, a mental connection between them and your work, but I can see some of that influence now that you mentioned it. It's also kind of interesting to think about you being kind of in the Northwest as well.

Yeah, somebody was just asking me that about how many other Western artists are up here, and I don't— I mean, I'm doing a lot of Western art now, I don't necessarily want to be pigeonholed into that exclusively, but I don't know of any other Western artists that are up here, and that's probably because this is just a really kind of a no man's land for representational art, right? Portland in particular, maybe Seattle too, just don't have the history of representational painters, you know, 100 years ago painters were moving west from the East Coast, they came out here, and I think they just, they hung a hard left and followed the sun, went down south, and you know where they could paint year-round outdoors, and where there was more variety of color, and everything wasn't so green and gray like it is here. I didn't move here, you know, to be an artist, I actually moved here to get into comic books about 32 years ago, right? And then I became an illustrator, and by the time I discovered fine art, plein air painting, painting outdoors and painting from life, I was, you know, married and had a, you know, starting a family and was pretty well entrenched in the Pacific Northwest. But, but before that, I grew up in Southern California where a lot of my color influence comes from still.

Okay, that makes sense. Interesting. So I guess talking about, you know, your— the moments where you kind of became interested in fine art following your your career in comics and illustration. I know you said there were, you know, there were about 12 years of overlap in your transition, and— Correct if I'm putting words in your mouth, please. And you mentioned in your recent podcast with Mark Sublette I listened to, I think like your years of professional experience as an illustrator kind of gave you an edge in making it into the fine art market, and I was curious, I guess, if you might be able to outline what are some of those skills or the professional knowledge or habits that you think gave you that edge?

Well, I don't know, did I say edge? I don't know if it gave me an edge, but—

I don't think, I don't know if you said edge actually, that may be my word.

I prob— maybe the illustration I was trying to make was that there's a lot of painters out there today, especially with the whole plein air movement thing, painters that just jumped right into painting, just wanted to go out and just start painting, and a lot of them don't practice drawing So some of that, you know, a number of them really suffer from composition and just basic drawing skills that really should hold a painting together, at least be the foundation underneath a good painting. And, you know, when you're an illustrator, you've got to know how to draw, and you draw, you know, every day. And so, yeah, I guess that, you know, gave me at least a leg up on putting together paintings that I could take to galleries because I at least had, you know, decent drawing skills. And it helps, of course, doing figure paintings too.

Sure.

You know, a lot of people just paint landscapes and some just do figures, and I'm trying to do both together into, you know, make a pleasing picture. And, you know, drawing skills definitely that I learned and developed through illustration come into play and help a lot with that.

Definitely. I mean, that seems clear that you definitely have the artistic background, the drawing and the composition design. And I do want to talk to you about all of that for sure, but I was kind of curious if there were more like business skills or personal skills that helped you get into doing fine art professionally.

You know, there's really no manual that comes, right, when you decide you want to find art. It's really a kind of a blind path and learn as you go. I'm sure you can talk to galleries or talk to other artists and get a lot of tips on that, But as far as promoting myself, I learned a lot of how to do that early on as an illustrator, freelance illustrator. I did that for 30 years, you know, I didn't go to school or anything for it, so I just kind of had to learn as I went. And yeah, some of that comes into play when you start to work with galleries and, you know, you have to really stick up for yourself and learn how to negotiate. And it's kind of hard when you're starting out because you're sort of at the mercy of a gallery. Or a show that you desire to be in, and if you have any success at all, after a while then the galleries are calling you, and then you have a little more negotiating power to say what you would like out of the relationship. So yeah, I guess, you know, business skills, they develop along with your artistic skills as you're making a living, figuring it out.

Sure, so just kind of your general experience across the board, I guess.

Yeah, yeah, I said there's no roadmap. You just use intuition and whatever smarts you might have and try and figure out what the best thing is to do in any situation. My policy is I go through doors that are open to me if they make sense, and that's kind of just how it works, you know. I mean, you can— I guess you can go to school, art school. I don't know if they have classes now to teach you about how to actually go out and apply your skills and make a living. I think in the past it was just, you just learned the skills at school, how to be an artist, how to be a painter, how to be, and so forth, but they didn't really help you much with the business side of things. True. So then that's, you know, so that's why there's these clichés about artists falling prey to businessmen who take advantage of them because artists for the most part are not good with money or not good with business, and I don't know how true that is. I've never felt like that, but I know I have been taken advantage of. So it's a buyer beware, artist beware kind of a thing.

You gotta— Right.

Just watch out for yourself out there in the big mean world.

Yeah, I guess that's, you know, that's true for everybody. Gotta pay attention. No.

What do you do for a living?

I do web design and development and digital marketing.

Okay.

I have a BFA in design.

Uh-huh.

I did drawing and painting in college, but—

Right.

Went right into the first dot-com boom.

Okay. Did you have a lot of success with that? Uh, no.

I had, I mean, kind of average success as far as like getting into a career. It wasn't, I wasn't like a, like early investor in Yahoo or anything like that.

Yeah.

It was the kind of thing where, you know, like you were saying too, like I had all these visual skills to do my work as a designer. And then I kind of learned the technical on the job as well as figuring out like how to be an adult after I got out of school.

Yeah, yeah, that's sadly, that's the thing I think that's lacking in a lot of different professional areas where people learn a skill, they fall short when it comes to actually how to apply that in a business model and have success at it.

Yeah.

So I feel very fortunate, you know, that I've been able to make a living for the last, I don't know, 36, 38 years, you know, pay for my family and keep a roof over our heads. Yeah, yeah, because it's tough, especially around '08, '09, that really got pretty tight.

Yeah, I can only imagine. Remind me, were you doing mostly fine art at that point, or were you still doing a lot of illustration?

It was like if you, if you picture a set of scales where illustration was weighing everything down on one side, and I just stepped, you know, I just started doing the fine art, so the fine art side was way up in the air, in around the late '90s, early 2000s, and I got into my first gallery around 2005 or 2006 and started selling. And then, you know, the scale started to balance maybe around the mid-2000s, and after '09, everything stopped. I mean, everything really dropped way back, fine art and illustration.

Oh gosh, yeah.

And I was still— we were squeaking by making a living, and— but I got to the point where I told myself, you know, I'm going to be poor, I'm going to do it, you know, the way I want to do it and at least enjoy what I'm working on. And, you know, and by that time I'd done so— I mean, I'd done everything to do just about with illustration and was, you know, pretty successful with it. And I just had this calling or this passion that was growing inside me to be a painter, a real painter, which would mean forsaking the illustration stuff altogether and doing it my way, doing what I wanted to do. So it was kind of a mixed blessing because it gave me— it afforded me time with work falling way off because of the recession to put more time into going out and painting. And so I started feeding my galleries more paintings as I was getting less illustration jobs until— back to that scale illustration— until the fine art was really weighing down on one side. So I called my agent in New York and I said, you know, I think it's time to to make a change. I'm going to move on in full time to fine art. And so we parted ways, and that was like 2013, maybe. Okay. So that would be about— that would be when I became officially 100% a fine art painter. But, you know, like you heard before, it was like kind of a 12-year transition because I couldn't, you know, I was making a good income with illustration, and I couldn't just stop it and step into fine art.

Right.

We just would have dried up and blown away.

Yeah.

So I had to feel like I was secure enough and had enough money coming in from the galleries and plein air shows that I, that I was doing at the time in order to cut loose the illustration work. Because illustration, when you get a call for a job, you're going to get a paycheck. It's your money. Whereas what I do now, I have no guarantee of anything. Everything's on— everything's speculation. I'm just hoping. My paintings were going to sell. So it's, you know, it was a pretty scary jump to make.

Sure.

So again, back to your— to the business sense thing, I kind of, you know, I was careful as I could be. You know, that day I called my agent and said it's time to quit, it was still a big chance, a big leap to take. But I, you know, like I said, it was 12 years before I felt comfortable enough to do that. Wow. You know, that was 12 years of building my skills and quality of work too, not just 12 years of getting galleries and getting used to working with them. It's like I had a lot, you know, there's still, it's a huge learning curve and I'm still learning. I feel like I'm way behind the curve actually when it comes to fine art painting compared to a lot of my peers. It's a never-ending learning process.

That's the fun of it too though, right?

Yeah, it is. I would, it would get boring if it was easy to do.

Absolutely. When you were transitioning like that and you were doing, you know, illustration jobs as they came in and painting and trying to get more paintings and galleries in and you're supporting your family, how did you kind of balance your workloads with also, you know, being a father and a husband and all that?

Yeah, well, if you talk to my wife, she'd probably say it's not balanced. You know, when I was doing illustration, oftentimes to meet a deadline, I'd have to work really late into the night, sometimes pull an all-nighter, and that's, you know, always tough on the family. Fortunately, my studio is on our property. It's behind our house, and so I'm always available, but—

That's good.

But it was frustrating to get really excited about a painting, a fine art piece that I'm working on, and then the phone will call, the phone ring, and it would be a job from my agent, and I would have to stop the painting and take the job because the job was sure money. And so it was, it became really frustrating having to shift gears back and forth where I was trying to paint looser with bigger strokes and marks of paint on my canvas paintings on the easel, and then I'd go back over to the, to the illustration board and be working with a lot smaller brushes. Early on, I was an airbrush illustrator, and then later as I switched over to oils, I was still painting really tight, super highly detailed, finessed paintings for advertisers. Where they want all that detail and not the painting I wanted to do. So yeah, it became really frustrating shifting gears and going back and forth. So the day I quit the illustration side of things was a big relief because I didn't have to, you know, change gears anymore and now I could just focus full-time on painting the way I wanted to.

That's great. I imagine that being able to keep that focus, it probably made a significant change in the quality of your work.

Oh yeah, I still search and destroy and hunt and peck and try and figure out where I'm trying to get to when I'm painting, but when I had to do— to work in both disciplines, fine art and illustration, you'd get confused, and sometimes I'd end up going too far into a painting with too small of detail and smaller brushes, and then I'd step back and realize, you know, I'm rendering this thing now, and I don't want to render it. That's for illustration. I want to— I want this to be more spontaneous, and so yeah, so I don't recommend trying to work it unless of course you're still—

but when you got to make a living, sometimes you have to do that. Yeah, so you just endured the illustration until you could let it go towards the end?

Yeah, but you know, it became a necessity at the time. I loved it when I first got into it for many years, it was all I wanted to do, and then are you familiar with Tim Soliday? Oh yes, Western Painter. Yeah, well, so I met Tim through an illustrator friend, and I spent the weekend with Tim and Steve Houston, another painter, and they opened my eyes up to the world of fine art in one weekend. I mean, it was— it really turned my world upside down. I went home and realized that's what I really wanted to do, and so that's when the journey started of trying to make the transition, which, you know, was another dozen years to pull off. But sure, yeah, if I hadn't met those guys, I don't know if I ever would have gotten into it.

Interesting, like almost like a conversion moment or something.

Yeah, pretty much. I mean, it was— I think it was a God thing. I could look back in my records somewhere and probably give you the exact date of when, you know, it was a Saturday that I hung out with Tim, and then Sunday we went over to Steve Houston's studio. Are you familiar with Steve Houston?

I don't know if I am or not. I don't— no, not off the top of my head.

You should look him up. It's H-U-S-T-O-N. He's a big figure painter and he teaches in— he teaches in art school now, but he was famous for painting boxers, fighters. He was originally an illustrator as well, but hanging out with those two guys for that one weekend changed my life, literally. It just took a long time to get it rolling. In fact, Tim told me, he said it would take it would take about 5 years before I'd feel like I had a handle on painting outdoors, and he was right, and it took actually 6 years before I actually got into a gallery. So there was a lot of, a lot of years there just practicing, just getting, getting down mileage on canvas.

Interesting.

And that's, and I tell, I told younger painters that, knowing that it's really discouraging thing to hear, you know, because We live in an instant world where everybody wants instant gratification.

Yeah, overnight success.

They don't wait years for something to develop, and I didn't either, but I couldn't argue with it once I got started. I was so bad at it and, you know, had no idea what I was doing, but along the way you meet other artists, you meet other painters, and you form relationships, and you start to trade information and give each other tips, and you learn and grow. So it's a journey and it's still going.

Definitely. It sounds very familiar. I spent time in Nashville writing songs and pitching to artists and—

Oh yeah?

You know, I heard before going up there that it's the 7-year town to get into being able to really do it. And, you know, I think it was probably about what it was, but after about year 3 or 4, I couldn't continue to kind of— I was doing a similar thing as you. I was continuing to do like freelance design and development work on the side and as well as pursuing the music thing. And I couldn't keep them both going after we— my wife and I had our first kiddo up there and just had to move back to where we were closer to family and do a more steady thing. But, you know, it's inspiring to hear you talk about persevering across that length of time. That is really hard to visualize, I think, for people who are just getting into it.

Well, part of the equation there too is that I really had nothing else I could do. I mean, like I said, I didn't go to school. I don't have a degree in anything. I have no other skills except my passion to create art, right? So if fine art had never worked for me, I would have had to go back to illustration, and I would have also had to have learned digital skills.

Oh, right.

You know, I've— it's not like I'm in the Stone Age. I've got Photoshop on my computer, and I tweak paintings after I have them shot, clean them up and so forth. And sometimes I compose things with sketches on my computer to figure out a composition. But had I stayed in illustration, I would have had to learn how to actually create digital illustrations, and I have no interest in doing that at all.

Yeah, it's, it's interesting how the technology evolves so rapidly. It's really difficult to keep up with, but especially, I guess, like that big jump from kind of the analog illustration world to digital. That would be a tough one.

Yeah, and expensive too, right? You know, you've got to keep upgrading and learning this, the, the software, learning the keyboard moves and so forth. So I'm kind of stuck you know, somewhere probably 10 years ago as far as I learned on my computer, but I know enough to get where I want to get, but the handy tool at times, but as far as creating art that way, that has no interest for me.

Yeah, you mentioned just a second ago using Photoshop for sketches occasionally, and I'm curious, I know you do some photo shoots for reference material, do you take those photo shoots into Photoshop and kind of chop them up and work with the lighting and stuff like that in there, or what do you, what do you mean when you say that?

Not so much, although Although I do, I'll admit I did just do that with, I had two different cowboys on horses from two different photo shoots and I put one behind the other to see how they would look in a composition.

Oh yeah.

But usually I'll just, I'll sketch, I'll just draw from the photographs in my sketchbook and, or I'll use tissue paper, tracing paper, do a couple different sketches and then overlap those and kind of move them around to to see how I could juxtaposition those shapes. And so, yeah, Photoshop, but I will, you know, adjust lighting and stuff when I first load the photos into the computer before I print them out. So yeah, so that's handy.

How do you document your stuff?

A good friend of mine who's really proficient with Photoshop and digital photography, he shoots all my paintings and then I clean them up and then send them to the galleries. Anything that's small, I can shoot, like maybe anything 12x16 and under, I can shoot myself. But anything larger than that, yeah, I take it over to his house. He's up— he lives across the river in Washington State. It's about a 40-minute drive. Okay. So I'll take 5 or 6 paintings at a time. So the ones I, you know, half of the show, not quite half the show, I've had him shoot. So when I get these other ones done, then I'll take the rest of the show up there and have him shoot them all, bring them back, clean them up, and then send them on to the gallery.

Cool. Don't feel like I'm trying to put you on the spot here, but As far as like, I guess, the economics of that, like, do you pay for all your own documentation or do different galleries pay for that?

Oh, um, yeah, good luck getting a gallery.

Don't feel like you have to. I'm not trying to pit one against the other, but I'm curious if there's a standard.

No, galleries aren't going to pay for that, but like I said, this is a friend of mine. He actually does these for free for me.

Oh, well, that's great.

Out of appreciation, I gave him a painting a couple years ago. Ah, but we've been friends for a long time and, you know, I've helped him out with other things and vice versa. So he's happy to have me. It's a good time for me or a reason for us to get together and hang out too because I only see him, you know, maybe once every 2 or 3 months. So we hang out, go out and have lunch after we shoot the paintings. And I'm fortunate in that respect because I don't have to pay for that. But what I do have to pay for is the frames, and that's a real killer because, yeah, you know, As you get into better galleries and better shows like museum shows, you really have to step up with frames and that gets expensive with, you know, gold leaf hand-carved frames.

Oh, definitely.

In fact, that's my next big hurdle is to figure out how I'm going to cover all the cost for the frames and all these paintings for my show.

Wow.

Yeah. And it'd be nice if galleries helped with that, but you know, most of them don't.

It seems like it'd be helpful, especially if they're confident, you know, they're going to sell at least a certain percentage that they could float you for the frames, maybe to be I don't know, like, it seems like there could be a better deal there.

Yeah, and I've heard that there are with some, some artists have negotiated deals like that. The galleries I'm in are all 60/40 split, whereas they were 50/50 when I first got into the business. And I even had galleries that wanted the artist to pay for it, for half of everything to put on a show, including refreshments. And that— oh wow, yeah, too much. I mean, the artist is bringing the product, so to speak, created from scratch by the artist with no help from the gallery, and then framing it out of their own pocket and shipping it to the gallery's doorstep out of their own pocket. So that's when the gallery should step up and put their money on the table to pay for the promotion and selling of the artwork. I think that's a much fairer deal, and those are the kind of galleries I work with, um, really good people. Beau Alexander at Maxwell Alexander Gallery, where my show is going to be, hey, he takes really good care of his artists. And I was told that that was the reason that gallery started with his brother and him was they wanted a place where artists could show their work and be treated the way they wanted to be treated. So I feel really fortunate to be working with people like that.

Yeah, that's great. A minute ago when you said 60/40 split, is that artist/gallery?

That's 60 to me, 40 to the gallery.

Yeah, I assume especially the way you're speaking about it, that's what you meant, but I wanted to be sure.

Um, yeah, and even when it was 50/50 though, I'd tell somebody that and they would be kind of shocked that the gallery would take that much It's hard to think of another, of another industry where they take that kind of a percentage. I mean, you know, writers' agents don't take that much, you know, Hollywood actors' agents don't take that much, but I don't know, maybe that's a remnant of artists being taken advantage of, you know, from years ago that started a precedent that galleries maintain, still try to enforce them to this day, yeah.

Huh, that's interesting. I have never thought of it from that way as far as like just going back to some early beginning where—

Well, somebody had, yeah, somebody had to establish that ratio and—

Right.

I don't know how they got to that, but somebody did. And then, you know, so then when you're a new struggling artist with a gallery and you bring that up, if you even have the nerve to do that, the answer is usually, well, that's industry standard. So— Yeah. Whether it is or not, you really kind of have, you're gonna work with this gallery, you sort of have to do what they say until, you know, you get to a point where they're selling so much of your work that you then feel like, well, now we need to renegotiate, and then you have some power to do that because they don't want to lose you. Yeah. You know, it's like anything else in life. You gotta watch out for yourself and pay attention and make sure you're not getting ripped off because that's kind of human nature. They'll do that if they have a chance, and not just galleries, anybody in business. They'll say it's not personal, it's business, right?

Right. It's interesting to me the idea of maybe that ratio coming about as being artists being hoodwinked back in the day or something, because when I've looked at the economics of running an art gallery, it just does not seem economical at all. No, I mean, they're even with the 50.

Yeah, you know, let me be clear on this too. Even the galleries that I used to be with took 50/50. They weren't bad evil people trying to rip me off. I mean, they're taking a huge risk for themselves because they're paying for that real estate. And, you know, I mean, literally the real estate of the building, but also the real estate on the wall space. They're taking a chance by hanging my paintings, hoping that it'll sell. Otherwise, they're losing money. And of course, I'm not making anything either. But—

True.

Yeah, you know, I have to hand it to them for taking that chance because from my perspective, I don't think you can— I think it's very hard to make a living especially starting out as a nobody by selling your work yourself online or even through an agent online. Fine art, once you get over a certain price mark, people aren't gonna buy it off the web unless they can see it physically, sit in front of it and handle it and know they really wanna live with it. And that's why you need these brick-and-mortar galleries.

I think that that is definitely true for the most part. Though I think that there are kind of exceptions for some expensive works going you know, sight unseen off the web, but usually I think it has to do with collectors. They have to have seen—

yeah, they have to be established artists that collectors are familiar with.

Yeah, they've either seen their work previously or they have a piece already and they just— right— know they're going to like it.

Yeah, so, you know, someday maybe I'll get to that point and people will be able to buy stuff just by seeing it online.

Actually, that probably happens with—

yeah, last year at Maxwell Alexander, my solo show, they sold— I think it was 7 or 8 pieces before the show opened to people Yeah, they're really good about that. Yeah, well, he's got a well-established relationship with his collectors that they trust him. So even though I'm kind of an unknown, with him talking to them and saying you really should consider Eric Bowman's work and then show it to— showing it to them online, that was enough to make the sale. Wow. You know, again, that's why it helps to be hooked up with a gallery who has a good clientele list that really trusts them and knows what they're talking about.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

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Let's change gears here for a little bit. I realize we've already been talking for a while. This is left field. I hope that's all right.

Okay.

I read an article about a plein air award-winning piece of yours where you started to describe some of your compositional elements or rules like the horizon and gravity.

Oh.

I was wondering if you could kind of walk me through how you design your pieces from, you know, using those points, I guess.

Yeah, I've taught maybe half a dozen workshops so far over the years. I just, it's not a big passion for me to teach, and I really would rather be painting and covering the bills that way. But when I do teach, yeah, I talk about the horizontal plane and the vertical elements and how gravity influences everything that grows on the horizontal plane. You know, trees, bushes, and so forth are reaching up, and you have to have a balance between what you see horizontally on the land and what is going upward, whether it might, you know, it could be a cliff or a bluff on a plateau or something in the desert, or it could be tree trunk and so forth, or it could be people or buildings, what have you. But those things that are going, you know, up and down are governed by gravity. I'm talking organic shapes.

Right.

So that's the point I try to make, and that when we see, when we're looking at a landscape, it helps to have it balanced. I mean, we're on terra firma, so that's the horizontal plane that we're standing on and viewing everything from, and it helps to have a balance to that, you know, yin-yang effect. A foil of some sort of vertical element in there to break up that horizontal plane. I'd have to think more about it and show you, you know, visually what I'm talking about. It's some of the basic nuts and bolts to beginning a composition.

I was really curious about the gravity comment, but I guess now that I'm understanding it more, where especially if it's a, you know, got a representational element to it, you don't want to paint something that looks like it would fall down, right? And have it standing upright.

Yeah, I think—

unless that's the point, but yeah.

Well, yeah, but the main point I think about the gravity thing is that with a tree or even a cloud is that it's being drawn upward or it's growing upward. So for instance, all the paintings in my show, this new show, they all have clouds. They all have skies with clouds in them. They're all set in the Southwest desert. That's why it's called Under a Desert Sky. So a lot of the clouds are in a vertical. They're actually the vertical piece because in the desert, in most of these desert settings, you don't have trees. You could have, you know, some big rock boulders or some, you know, some cliffs and so forth in the distance. But pretty much all of them so far, I've used clouds as the vertical element to balance everything that's happening horizontally.

Okay, interesting. Thanks for elaborating on that. And then kind of along the same lines, I guess aside from just sort of your kind of natural voice that has evolved over the years, Are there any tactics you use to help your paintings to stand out from any other, you know, work that might be on the walls around them?

Consciously, probably not. You know, I'm trying to paint the way I want it to look. Here's my, here's my real conundrum is that, like I said earlier, most of the time I don't know what I'm doing. I know where I want to get the painting to, and eventually I get there, but there's always a nagging voice in the back of my head that says, you know, there's probably a better way to do this, you just don't know how to do it. So my process is once I get a composition figured out, I get a good strong drawing down on the canvas, and oftentimes that gets obliterated by smearing paint over it, and so I'm constantly reconstructing that drawing, and then I'll scrape and destroy the paint and then build it back up again, and while I'm doing that, I'm reconstructing the drawing again with a really fine line brush.

Interesting.

Because I'm a drawer, and that's I don't know if I'm ever going to get away from that. I mean, I really admire painters who just take a big brush and they put down these staccato impressionistic bold strokes and marks and make the shapes that they want. And the shapes that I like to see, I would like to see in my paintings, but I don't have that skill. So I often have to, you know, I'll put down some big marks, but then I might have to come in and like kind of box them in or outline some of them just to retain the shape I'm after. So it's the battle back and forth of drawing and painting and drawing and painting.

It sounds almost like a layered situation where you draw and then you paint and then you draw more and then you paint on top of that.

Yeah, not— it's not transparent like glazing, but it's—

right—

it's covering over, you know, over and over and over, which helps build texture and which builds more interest. And if I could nail on my palette the exact color and value of a paint that I was after for a shape on the canvas and put it right in to where I want it, it wouldn't be as interesting a finished piece because it wouldn't have the history of struggling and failing and then rebuilding over and over until I finally arrived at where I wanted to be in the first place.

Right.

It's a goofy formula, but I really don't want to learn any more technique. Wise. I struggle to learn just trial and error on my own to paint the way I do, and maybe that's where, you know, anything that anybody recognizes as being, you know, quote, my voice, right, that's where it comes from. Because I'm looking at the dead guys from 100 years ago and probably 100 different painters all contributing a little bit of style into my mind, what I, what I'm trying to picture. So this just happens to be the way I go about getting there.. And I don't always get there. I mean, I don't post all the failures, and there's tons of them all the time. Yeah, but it's, it's, you know, there's a lot of alla prima painters out there which just paint one session, session, wet into wet, and finish their paintings like that. And the ones who are good at it are, you know, really good, and I really appreciate that. But I think others who kind of just bang these things out, they're missing you know, the joy that comes with the struggle and the frustration of building and tearing down and building up again and having this kind of built-in history to the painting itself. Regardless of the subject or the story you're trying to tell, there's, there's the struggle that the artist had that maybe the viewer isn't aware of unless they really think about it and examine the painting up close. You can, you know, in my paintings you can see where sometimes there's some drawing underneath. There might be a pencil line or there might be a the faint image of a destroyed painting underneath the one I painted over. And that's, you know, if there's enough of the message I'm trying to convey and I'm happy with the results quality-wise, it doesn't bother me if there's remnants of a failed painting underneath or showing through it, you know, here and there. I think that just again adds more interest and makes for a more compelling overall story.

I would agree. I think a lot of that work that goes into making a painting has a subconscious effect on the viewer, probably.

Oh yeah, I think that, that crosses all lines of art too. I mean, that's in music. I was having a conversation with a friend the other day about older music before the digital age, you know, before drum machines and so forth. And there's a lot of mistakes on hit songs, you know, if you listen for them, you can hear them. Yeah, but the effect was more human that way.

Exactly.

In fact, when a friend of mine did buy drum machine years ago, he pointed out to me that it came with, I guess it was an internal software mechanism that was called the human element. And it would, if you set the beat for a certain, you know, like a bossa nova beat for a song, and he was a guitar player, he did that to accompany him, it would skip a beat or miss a beat or it'd hit the cymbal partly or something when it wasn't supposed to. And that made all the difference, so it didn't sound like a mechanical robotic drum beat. It had human element of that fallible mistake there.

Yeah.

And yeah, so that's another reason I don't like what I've termed to be safe paintings, where they're so figured out and they're so tightly wound and just detailed to the nth degree that you really hardly see the human element in there. You don't see the struggle, you don't see the sloppy stroke here or there. Some of the greatest painters that ever lived, like like Sorolla, he got away with all kinds of crappy strokes in his paintings, but the overall effect was genius, you know, just beauty. But, you know, Frank Tenney Johnson, Western painter, he's got a lot of sloppy faces and body parts in some of his paintings, but it doesn't matter because the grit, the, you know, the oomph of the painting just hits you so hard, and it's so realistic that way because it's portraying muscle and bone and dust and dirt and, you know, everything's going on out there and on the tundra. It's just, it has more impact, more life to it, I guess is what I'm trying to say.

Yeah, oh, I think that's, I think that's very true.

Yeah, you could have a sloppy or thick and spontaneous mark on a painting that can say so much more, I mean volumes more, than a carefully finessed mark that you make, simply because it's, it's conveying or it's showing the strength of the artist behind it or the intention of the immediacy of the artist hitting the canvas with that brush and putting that mark down. It's hard to control though at times. Yeah. Especially when it's smaller, you get a smaller scale, it's hard to control that kind of thing.

Yeah, so along those lines, I'm curious, you know, recently on Instagram you posted a study and then you posted the finished piece, which was really cool to see, by the way, and I was kind of shocked at how much the finished piece resembled the study. But I'm curious, and this— I'm not suggesting this is the case in this one, I love them both, but do you ever do a study and find that like— oh, which ones?

Yeah, which painting were you talking about?

It's the ones you posted just like last week, Mass and Monolith. Oh, that's the last one.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I'm curious, and I don't think this happened again with this one, but do you ever find that after you do a smaller study like that, that doesn't translate to the larger scale with the same kind of passion or—

Oh yeah, or there's—

you lose that human element.

Sure, there's a— there's a—

of the first one.

Yeah, there's a law of physics that comes into play where, you know, we're only so big, you know. I'm 6 foot tall, my arm reaches whatever it is, so there's a ratio there between me and the canvas where I have a comfort zone and the scale of my brushes also factor into that. So when you get to a bigger canvas, you can use bigger, wider brushes, but after a point you got to take several strokes to make a shape that maybe could have been done in one single brush stroke at a smaller scale.

Interesting.

And that's when the idea that works really well at a small scale in a study starts to give you problems on a larger scale. It didn't really happen to this way with that cloud painting you're talking about, but when I was doing illustrations, the guys back in, you know, in the golden age when the ratio of what they were being paid compared to the cost of living back then was so much better than it is now, and they also gave them a lot longer lead time to get the painting finished, you know, like if Norman Rockwell was doing a cover for the Saturday Evening Post, he had several months ahead lead time, When I did a cover for the Saturday Evening Post, they gave me like a week. And then when you have that short of time, you don't have as much time to do studies or as many studies as like Rockwell did for a Post cover where he worked out all of his problems ahead of time on those studies so that when he finally went to the final canvas, it's pretty much smooth sailing. So there's a time factor that enters in now which prohibits me sometimes from doing studies But every time I do do a study, I figure things out that I either don't put into the final painting, or it gets me another step closer to making a better final painting. And more studies I do, the painting progresses and usually gets to be a better painting by the time I do that finished piece, because I've not only worked all the problems out in preliminaries, but I've also discovered some things I want to change on that final piece.

Gotcha.

So that's why it's You know, it's really important to do those if you can afford to do them, especially for larger paintings.

Interesting. Yeah, I guess that makes sense. I think I was going somewhere like in writing songs and then recording them, sometimes you'll get a first take that's just magic, right? And then try and do a more polished version and it just doesn't hold up.

Yeah, absolutely.

But I think, you know, like, I think if you approach it more of like practicing before recording or whatever, that makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, I've read before that artists, you know, musicians you know, on their 3rd, 4th, or 14th take, they've lost their energy and the excitement, and that gets lost on the final cut too, you know. So yeah, if you want to get that spontaneity and that energy, especially if the label who's paying for the album heard them live and they want to capture that, it's like you can beat that out of them if you take too many takes on a, on a song. I imagine it's a little bit the same thing because I don't know how about other artists, I assume a lot of them feel the same way as I don't like painting the same thing over and over.

Yeah, right.

I was forced to do that a lot of times with illustration, you know, they'd want something changed or they'd want to add something, so they'd send the painting back to me. It's like, oh no, I've got to look at this thing again.

Oh yeah.

Yeah, so there's part of the excitement of painting too is the exploration part and the unknown factor that you don't know where you're going with parts of the painting even though you have some of it worked out in your mind or on a preliminary. But once everything's figured out, you sort of lose that excitement, you know, overdoing the painting and then you're just kind of going through the moves to get it done and—

Right.

—then the end product really suffers.

Yeah, though I can also see it in a way where like in making those studies it's kind of like, if continuing with the music analogy, it'd be kind of like working out just the right lick or something like that, you know. Oh yeah, there's something— And then once you've got it, right?

There's some things that happen in the preliminary that are completely spontaneous and you couldn't to do it again to save your life. The way the paint— you got 15 different hues on one brush stroke because you smeared your brush through everything that's on your palette, and you lay that into the painting, and it just— you just get this shape that you love and all the color that's in it, and it's, you know, it's something that's virtually impossible to reproduce, and you wish that was in the painting, but it— you just can't get back to that. Yeah. So yeah, that's frustrating when that happens.

Interesting to think about. I never really considered the kind of the transition between the study and the finished piece like that before. You told Mark that, you know, if you weren't a painter, you would be a musician or some other kind of artist. I was curious, do you play any music or—

No, I don't. I, when I was a teenager, all my friends were guitar players and they were in various garage bands in the neighborhood, and while they were learning guitar, I was drawing because I was, you know, I was always class artist. That was my thing. But I've always maintained the belief that the artistic gene, whether you're born with one or whether you naturally develop it over time, must be a common gene that's throughout anybody who has artistic talent, no matter what the discipline. Whether you're a writer, a musician, a dancer, an actor, an artist, sculptor, painter, whatever. I think there's a lot of— there's some sort of commonality there, so that if I hadn't channeled all my passion and energy into painting and drawing, if I channeled that into playing a guitar or whatever instrument, I think looking at where I'm at now, you know, successful enough to at least make a living, maybe I would be a professional musician of some sort. I doubt I'd be any kind of superstar musician making a really good living, but maybe end up a session musician or something.

I don't know. Yeah, never know. You don't—

yeah, it's You never know these things, but I wish someone would have made me learn an instrument, you know, when I was younger. We tried to do that with our daughter, and she's just not interested. She'd rather write. She's a writer.

Oh, cool. You got to have a passion for it. No, that's true. I guess also I was kind of thinking about, you know, you've more than other artists I've seen painted a lot of guitar players.

Oh yeah, I was really into early blues, acoustic blues guitarists. And then some, and some jazz guitar players too. And I thought maybe that would be a good subject matter to explore, and I just couldn't get it off the ground with enough interest. I think I've sold all of them eventually that I did, but people were telling me you really should go down to like New Orleans or someplace where they have much more interest in that kind of musical genre to promote and sell your artwork if that's the subject you're going to paint. Yeah, much harder to sell than, than, uh, than Western art.

Well, I guess I'm curious, you know, you've got like the mariachis or the cowboys playing guitar. Is that what you're talking about?

No, no, no, no, this is before, before I even delved into Western art. Okay. Yeah, I was painting blues musicians and jazz musicians, and none of that stuff's on my website anymore. Although if you look online, I think I've seen the trumpeter or something. One thing I hate about the internet is people will take an image of mine and they'll reproduce it and they'll pump up the colors and they'll just turn it into this garish, god-awful looking image and then put it up on a website with my name on it. I can't, you know, retract those and get them back, but that's what's happened to a lot of the earlier paintings I did of the musicians. So if you search for them, you can find them, but most likely they're not very true representations.

Yeah, but as far as like, did you find the same kind of— I don't know if this is dangerous to talk about, like the market for the, for like the Western music, musician paintings to be the same situation, or is that different?

This coming weekend is— when does the Briscoe Museum Night of Artists?

I think it might be the, I think it's the maybe the last weekend, last, last weekend, yeah.

I have 2 out of the 4 that are in that show are, one's a Mexican guy playing a guitar at night, and the other one's a cowboy playing a guitar out in the field with cows around. Oh, cool. So I did sell a cowboy playing a guitar at that show last year. Okay. And then the only other one I think I've done— I did it— well, I did a señorita playing the guitar and another Mexican guy playing the guitar at night, and both of those sold through galleries. So yeah, I want— I'll do more of that as long as people respond to it, because that, that kind of combines the two things. I mean, I love music, I like guitar music, I love, you know, I love classic rock, I love early rock, I love jazz, early blues. That's the kind of stuff I listen to in the studio. It influences what I— yeah, what I'm painting, and if I'm actually going to paint that subject matter, I have some passion behind that because, you know, I love that kind of music. So yeah, to answer your question, I'm— that's still on the table. I'm still kind of exploring how far I can go with that.

Yeah, because I mean, maybe I just haven't been around enough, but I don't see a whole lot of Western art featuring horses.

Yeah, no, I don't either, so that's— hopefully I can do some more of that and maybe that'll become something I'm known for if it's successful enough, because it's easy, it's easier to get a guy to sit down and play a guitar to model for you than it is to have a horse stand still.

That's a really good point. Also, yeah, the guitar player is probably easier for him to sit down and play guitar rather than just sit there without a guitar too.

Yeah, give them something to do.

Exactly. That's interesting.

Hey, let me interrupt for just a minute to ask you a question. This interview is pretty long and took me quite a while to produce, and I missed my deadline for April. Would you rather hear a long interview like this in two parts or wait to get it all at once? Let me know your preference by emailing info@western.gallery, sending me a direct message on Instagram, or leaving a review on iTunes or your podcast app.

Do you have more time? Yeah, we keep chatting for a little bit, or do we need to wrap this up? I'm just sitting here while we're talking. Cool. What visual problem are you trying to solve right now in your painting?

I'm painting rocks. I start, I start, it depends on what the painting is. In this painting, the one I'm working on now, is a couple of guys on a top of the hill. The horizon is probably a third of the way up from the bottom of the canvas. So I've got some grass, some dirt patches, so it might be like springtime maybe on this high hill. There's some big rocks, kind of boulders around them. Two guys, one's on a horse, sitting on his horse, the other guy is standing next to his horse kind of in front of the first guy, and then I've sort of framed behind them are some big heroic stylized clouds that are going up into the the atmosphere. So everything's there. Now I'm just going back and adjusting edges, which is the element of a painting that I always forget to pay attention to until much later in the painting. I'll start out blocking in the big shapes and, you know, juxtapositioning different elements and getting the values correct, and then lastly is usually when I come in, I start to soften up edges, crisp them up depending on what's needed. So that's where I'm at right now, is just working the edges on the shapes of the rocks. Cool. Not really a problem at this point. I've kind of got past the problems on this one.

Okay, so it's more just like what you're working on right now is just kind of getting it done.

Yeah, fine-tuning it, getting it to where I think it's, it's a finished piece, which needs to happen sooner rather than later because I've got to get on to the other painting. My deadline, you know, I've got to get stuff done by mid-April. Yeah. Because I'll drive them down myself, probably the last week of April. I'll head down to LA. Okay. And I've got family down there I can stay with, but I got to get the paintings to the gallery several days ahead of time so they have time to hang them.

Yeah, and you got to get them photographed and all that before that, probably.

Yeah, there's— yeah, right, there's drying time and photographing and varnishing. And fortunately, the framer I'm using, Mayan Olson Framing, Orange County, California, great framers. Yeah, doing the same thing I've done the last couple years where I'll drive the paintings down unframed, and he's already— I've given him the specs, so he's, you know, making the frames. Oh wow. So by the time I get there, we just pop the paintings in the frames, and I load them back up in my car and turn around, drive back up to LA, and drop them off at the gallery. Oh, that's great. Which saves me Yeah, since I'm going to be down there anyways, it saves me shipping charges of having the frame shipped up to Oregon, which is completely unnecessary. So yeah, that works out well.

Yeah, plus the time, right? Yeah.

So that's another thing to allow time for when I go down there is another extra day getting over there and getting them framed up and then taking them back up to LA. Yeah.

How much, how much lead time do you like to have for a gallery show? Say a solo show maybe in one instance and then maybe a group show in another?

Oh, as much as they'll give me. I just got— I was just contacted by a gallery, my gallery up in Central Oregon, Mockingbird Gallery, to do a group show with Russell Case and Eric Jacobson and a fourth guy. I can't remember who the other guy was, but that's set for I think September 2020, so that gives me—

year and a half—

plenty of time. Yeah, and it's not that, that there still won't be pressure because in between that time there's going to be other projects and so forth, but yeah, the rule of thumb is the more time the better. I made the mistake a couple years ago of doing my solo show and then I was kind of pressured by another gallery into doing a two-man show with another artist. Oh wow. And it It was too much. I'm just, I'm not a fast enough painter. I can get, you know, once I have an idea design figured out, I can get most of the painting on canvas in a day, but then I'll spend another week, week and a half, you know, reevaluating and tweaking it and getting it to where I'm happy with it. And if you, you have to do, you know, 10, 12, 15 of those for a show, yeah, that's a lot of time. And if, if I'm rushed to do that, then you know, obviously the paintings suffer and, right, and then, you know, yeah, you don't want to be in career suffers.

Exactly, don't want to be in that situation.

No, but, you know, it happens because there's always scheduling snafus and having a teenage daughter, there's a lot of drama around our house and, you know, yeah, a lot of things cut into my time when I'm supposed to be out here focusing on creating artwork. It's, you know, life happens.

Yes, always does. One other kind of off-topic question I had, you mentioned, you know, changing scales can be tricky if you get too big, you know, due to simple mechanics of anatomy, I guess. But I was curious, you know, you were talking about your studio and it sounded like you have a real, a really big studio in the back of your house. Yeah. And I was curious if you have any designs on, like, mental designs on doing really large-scale work at any point?

Well, yeah, I mean, as far as mental designs, I'm definitely mental. So I think about a good friend of mine who was a framer— not a picture framer, but a, you know, builder. He helped me, and he did most of the work, remodeled the inside of this building so that I have a woodshop workshop on one side, one corner, and a bathroom and storage room on the other side. And then there's loft that bridges the two. That's my office upstairs. Fantastic. And below that, where the library is, I've got a double door entry, and I purposely made a double door so that I could at some day, you know, some point, bring huge canvases in here to work. Ah, cool. But today I haven't gone any larger than like a 48 by 60, which is huge for me.

I'm gonna say that's pretty big.

It is big. Yeah, but I could, I could conceivably, I could work 3 times that size in here. Yeah. And I've talked to Beau at the gallery about this, and that's something that collectors eventually like to get. You got to work your way up. They don't want to start out large. Yeah, it's something you got to work your way up to. Yeah. And often those are like commissions too. So I'm not opposed to working big. I have— certainly have the space to do it, but for now I'm trying to stay in my comfort zone, not going larger like the The biggest painting in this show is probably going to be that massive monolith cloud piece, which is only 34 inches high, right, by 30. Yeah, yeah, 34 by 30. I've got some others, 24 by 30, 30 by 30. Yeah, I mean, that's, that seems to be a good, a decent size, and it's, and it's not too exorbitant price-wise, right? It's more of a collector-friendly size. Yeah, especially for Maxwell Alexander does a Black Friday sale every year. Mm-hmm. That's small-scale paintings designed specifically to appeal to and be manageable for younger collectors that have smaller budgets, right? So where my price points are now, they're more on the lower end compared to the guys I was showing with at the Autry Show, right? Yeah, you know, some of those guys have huge prices and they're big-name artists. They've been doing it a long time. I'm the new kid on the block, so my prices are relatively much lower. Yeah, you know, they'll move up over time, but that's right. So for now, I think, yeah, medium to large to medium-large-ish is still pretty affordable as far as, you know, my works go. And the small stuff are really pretty cheap. So if I'm getting 60% of that, it's still a good chunk of change if I sell a number of pieces in a show. Oh, definitely, that's good. Yeah, anything that gives me enough money to to pay the bills and keep me going in this career, I'm very grateful for. I don't need to be a rich guy. I'm not trying to make a million bucks doing this. I just want to feed the passion and do the best painting I can and pay for my family, and then I'm very happy.

Great. Yeah, I was going to address the collectors who might be listening to this and say, get your Eric Bowman while you can.

Yeah, it's nice and cheap. So yeah, get an armful now because Who knows what they'll be in another couple of years.

Exactly, that's great.

The main thing is what comes before what I'm thinking about price-wise is I'm just trying to be the best painter I can be, and I have such a long way to go compared to what I have in my head that that's the focus. It's not about, you know, how much money I'm going to make off of a painting. Oh sure. It's just trying to reach that elusive level of work that I'm after. Well, I think that's some artists, that's what it is all about, is making a living, making the money. And, you know, you see some guys kind of painting the same thing over and over because it was a big seller, or they're chasing after the flavor of the week because it's selling really hot in their gallery with some other artists. Yeah. And I don't want to fall into that ditch.

Right. No, I think your passion for doing it, I think, comes through, and that is, I'm sure, some of what makes your pieces sought after.

I hope so. That's, yeah, that's the point. I mean, the intention.

Yeah. Well, Eric, thanks for chatting today, and I really appreciate the time you've given to talk and doing it while you're painting.

Yeah, no, I enjoy it. Thanks a lot, George. All right, we'll talk again. Sounds good, Eric. Take care. Okay, you too. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye. So there you have it, fine art painter Eric Bowman. Thank you for listening. I hope you learned from our conversation. I know I did. Thanks again, Eric, for the inside scoop from your studio. If you're enjoying the show, please leave a review on iTunes or share an episode with a friend. If you have comments, suggestions, or for sponsorship opportunities, please email me directly at info@western.gallery or direct message @westerngallery on Instagram. Horizons is produced by Western Gallery for the love of Western art and artists of all genres. Music in this episode is by The Georgian Company, courtesy of Pants of Fate Records and How You Like My Moves Music, all of whom you can find on iTunes and Spotify. Thanks again, and tune in next time. Happy trails!