West Texas Ranches by A Resident Painter

I was a visual artist before I took up writing. I trained at the Minneapolis School of Art, later renamed the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. My major was fashion design, not because I wanted to design clothes, but because of the three hours a week of instruction in fashion illustration. Painting was my elective and I hoped to one day be a serious painter.

After graduating, I worked as an illustrator in two different local department stores, and later taught general drawing and fashion illustration for Art Instruction Schools, known for their “Draw Me” heads in TV Guide and other magazines. For various reasons, I never achieved my dream of becoming a famous painter.

 

However, I still love beautiful art and today I’m going to tell you about a Texas artist I came to admire through a book of his paintings. His name is Mondel Rogers. He hails from Sweetwater, Texas, about forty miles west of Abilene. The book title is Old Ranches Of The Texas Plains. You can find it here: https://www.amazon.com/Old-Ranches-Texas-Plains-Paintings/dp/0890960194 Since I own a copy of the book, I uploaded the cover. Sorry about the fuzzy lettering.

Rogers is at least a fourth generation Texan. His ancestors moved to here from Tennessee in the 1830s. In his introduction to the book, he mentions his “very old” great-grandmother who entertained him with stories about her girlhood on the West Texas frontier. She recalled bear hunts and seeing Indians silhouetted against the moon. Both of his grandfathers regaled him with adventures from around the turn of the 20^th Century when they worked as hard-riding cowboys on large ranches.
 

The “real West” was in Rogers’ blood, and living on the Texas plains, he personally experienced “choking sandstorms, frigid blue northers, electrifying thunderstorms [and] ‘cyclones’.” He also saw plenty of relics from the past studding the land: hitching racks (posts?), fences from yesteryear and other ranch landmarks.

 

Rogers holds a degree in architecture from Texas Tech University – “the M.I.T of the plains” to quote Mitchell A. Wilder, former director of the Amon Carter Museum of Western Art in Fort Worth, in his forward to the book. In his paintings, Rogers combines his architect’s knowhow with his innate love of ranch history. He is a master of light, color, texture and the wide open spaces he grew up absorbing.

I wish I could share some of the artist’s work with you here, but I fear that would be copyright infringement. All I can do is highly recommend his book. It contains seventy-six plates (prints), some black and white, but many in color. My favorite is #66 on page 90. Titled “Prince of Sylvester”, it depicts an abandoned mansion, all that’s left of the town of Sylvester in Fisher County. Several prosperous ranchers built their headquarters there, where their lands touched.

This information is included at the back of the book in “The Artist’s Comments on His Paintings” where he gives a brief history of each of his subjects. Fascinating stuff for history buffs, especially authors!

Find my books here: http://amzn.to/Y3aotC

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