The Cowboy Arts
Recently, I spent a couple of days with the cowboy photographer and artist, Peter Robbins, as he was working on a photo shoot for a clothing company.
Watching him—or any artist work—is endlessly fascinating to me. The places and ways these people find beauty and motivation is a glimpse into the diversity of humanity.
Art and beauty aren’t exactly crucial to human survival, but there is no doubt they are a necessary part of the human experience. God, in the beginning, created. We, being made in His image, are called to create too. Art is in us and our eyes are open to beauty.
With that perspective, I always find it gratifying that artists are so drawn (no pun intended) to the cowboy. Photographers, painters, sketchers, and sculptors come out of the woodwork of urbanity to capture men and women making their living tending to the land and livestock. Within the cowboy culture, poets, leather crafters, clothing designers, and silversmiths express the life they love in countless media.
I don’t know how to explain it definitively. I do think there’s an element of the majesty of the horse that factors in. Also, the interaction between man and nature in wide-open spaces certainly fuels the imagination. And it can’t be denied that some might be motivated to capture this lifestyle as it feels increasingly threatened by a quickly changing culture.
But more than that, I think the attraction of the cowboy world for the artistic set comes from an innate recognition that at some level, this is what humanity was designed for: taking care of the created order.
Of course, art makes us feel something and contemplate our worldview regardless of context. When it’s in celebration of something true and transcendent, it becomes great. I just hope artists in every generation keep finding something worthy in cowboy culture to inspire their work.
