The Myth & The Modern

By James D. Balestrieri

In some ways, the American West was made for modernism. The landscape is elemental. The physical forms are strong in themselves and their composition—in nature, before the artist works them over—has a geometry all its own. Time has exposed the layers of rock; time has made the mountains rise and carved them into cones and pyramids; prevailing winds and wild, angular storms mold and pile the clouds; and the sun shines and spreads across the sky and over the land evenly. The landscape of the American West calls for fields of color and shapes that would make Euclid weep for joy.

Somehow, all of this has translated over time, and we have come to see the people of the American West through the lens of the landscape—though our vision becomes more mythological the further we look back in time, into the stories of the peoples and the people, as groups and individuals. When artists of the American West these days—artists of the New West—apply their interpretations and versions of modernism to, say, the idea of the cowboy and cowgirl, we, as viewers of their art, should know that what we are looking at is the vision of a myth.

Myth. We throw that word around. It’s right up there these days with “iconic” in terms of its clichéd meaninglessness. If you’re expecting a dictionary definition, you’ll be disappointed. Besides, you can look that up faster than I can type it. Instead, I propose that we try to create a definition of the myth of the cowpoke inductively, by looking at three contemporary practitioners of figurative modernism in the American West—Daniel Falcón, Carrie Fell and Duke Beardsley—to ascertain what they have in common, and what they don’t. Perhaps, in this way, we can arrive at a more useful meaning of the word, especially as it applies to modernism in contemporary Western art. Let’s see.

We need an example; perhaps, the Greek myths. What are they but origin stories of a people that evolve over time into morality tales that evolve yet again into something very much like a faith? What happens to them over time, as time undermines them, as they are displaced by other stories? They do not vanish. Rather, they shimmer as stories once again, stories to be taken with all their moral equivocation. In the Western film, the contrast between, say, High Noon, where Marshal Will Kane’s sense of duty, of man doing what man must do, even if he has to do it alone, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence and its final tag line, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” articulates the trajectory between myth as faith and myth as legend.

Falcón’s brief bio provides essential clues to his artwork and guides us on our quest for myth. It begins by identifying the basics: the artist was born in 1994 in Caracas, Venezuela, and he pursued a career in luxury menswear where he developed an understanding of tailoring and design. Then, it provides more context, reading, “Raised on the East Coast, his travels throughout the expansive American West profoundly influenced his aesthetic vision. Through oil renderings and works on paper, he creates narratives that juxtapose contrasting cultural elements, examining how regional fashion shapes our sense of identity and cultural roots.”

What is myth about if not “identity” and “cultural roots?” What does myth do but create “narratives that juxtapose contrasting cultural elements?”

I want Falcón’s paintings, works like BLACK TIE IN CLAY and RODEO FANCY to be painted on colored mirrors, as if they are something you might find at a carnival, in the frightening house of mirrors Ray Bradbury creates in the novel Something Wicked This Way Comes. I want a sign to say, “You too can be a cowboy.”  You wouldn’t even need a costume and a photographer in a bowler hat to place you in one of those sepia postcards you see in Tombstone and every other tourist trap in the West. Falcón’s masquerade is instantaneous.

If I put myself there, in that rig, just like that, I’m “All hat, no cattle.” Just like that, I’m a legend, a fashion legend—All dude, no ranch. For me, in that moment, I’m the 7-year-old in a red cowboy hat with my Fanner 50 cap guns strutting down the sidewalk in Milwaukee (imagine that these days!). Except I’m not. The minute I move on, I’m me again. Legends are like that—ephemeral. Never meet your heroes; they turn out to be the cowboys and cowgirls in Yellowstone, legends worn thin by their own clinging rapacity. And never try to be a hero; all you’ll do is play at it. Falcón’s narrative chronicles the journey from myth as faith to myth as legend.

Like Falcón, Fell has a strong background and interest in design. Read just one paragraph from her biography and you will see how her work takes from and transforms the myth of the cowboy: “From her use of traditional Western motifs to the refined abstractions of her DesignLINE series, the nostalgic ambiance of Modern Social, and the bold vibrancy of Neon Cowboys, Carrie masterfully navigates the space between heritage and innovation. Her work remains at once timeless and cutting-edge—classically elegant in form, yet unmistakably contemporary in execution.”

The pairings of “heritage and innovation,” “timeless and cutting-edge,” “classically elegant” with “unmistakably contemporary” tell the tale.

Also like Falcón, Fell’s figures express themselves without conveying individuality. Unlike those in his work, however, Fell’s figures are fully realized, in vibrant color and with the kind of curvilinear draftsmanship you might see in fashion design. In short, Fell’s work is stylish, even, perhaps, lifestylish, to coin a phrase. There might be aspects of pop art in her work, but areas that would be painted in flat fields are, instead, full of variety and gradation. The apparent speed suggested by Fell’s control of her medium lends an immediacy to the work.

Where she depicts the past, it is through the illusion that it must be grasped right now, before it changes, escapes, vanishes. As a subject, HAPPY JUNCTION SALOON is a stock Western scene. Stock itself is an interesting word. In the West, it refers to cattle, but there are stock images and stock stories, both of which are, for want of a word, the stock in trade of myth. No two cows are alike. With myth, the idea is that stories and images are not merely repeated but—and this is crucial—they are varied, almost like music. Variation is essential to the life of myth.

In Fell’s work, stock characters and scenes have undergone variations and evolved. Legends have become icons—and here, the word fits, icons meaning objects that stand in for deities and almost seem to require a measure of worship. To confirm this, consider the figures in DENIM TREND or COLOR BOOK HERO, each of which depicts a model that is part Old West cowboy/cowgirl, part New West fashion model. In DENIM TREND, denim isn’t a tough, working fabric, it’s a statement, a trend. COLOR BOOK HERO takes this a step further as the cowboy in the painting strides from bright day in the west to dark, starry night. The nocturne, of course, is where Remington ended up, where Frank Tenney Johnson made his mark, and where the Old West, in history, comes to a close and Fell is acutely aware of this and conveys it beautifully in her work.

Beardsley’s paintings range from pieces that recall Maynard Dixon to fine studies of working cowboys, botanicals and landscapes. But the works he labels “Line Ups” return us to a seminal point in the story of the American West, to the photos of Eadweard Muybridge that captured, once and for all, the gait of horses—and the fact that all four of their hooves are airborne at once. These images, repeated and varied in silhouettes, have the effect of stills from a stilled film. The cinematic Western that was born with Muybridge becomes, in Beardsley’s paintings, film without projector, sequential art stripped of the technology that makes it move. Think comic books and Japanese manga. Beardsley’s cowboys, however, are not seen in profile. They are repeated images, not at all individuals, yet they ride at us, right at us, in mythical Old West formation. They are not characters out of mythical tales or classic Western paintings; they are a single legend, a singular entity, an army, rising out of painting, riding through film, and emerging out of the shimmer of the horizon into the form—and that’s the key word, form—of legend.

FINN MACCOOL, for example, takes its title from the outsized, brash, always-ready-for-a-scrap hero of Irish myth. The image of the mounted cowboy—vaquero? both?—face showed by hat brim, repeats in serried ranks. In palimpsest, Beardsley scrawls the language of myth, myth shading to epic: “colossal gargoyles”; “dragons”; “devil-slayers”; “winged bulls,” linking these figures with creatures from Assyrian, Greek, Germanic and Celtic tales. They are almost incantations intended to revive the heroic origins of the myth of the cowboy. SANGRE SAGRADA (Sacred Blood) shifts the trope of the Line-Ups back to the Americas, yet locates them in the tradition of the posters of Sergio Leone’s films. JUDITH BASIN RHYTHM, by contrast, finds the background breaking down into a patchwork landscape, geology and geography gridded out, fenced in. Only the thick white lines around the riders keep them from disappearing.

In the end, the myth of the cowboy, as seen through the art of these three contemporary modernists in the New West, is a question of absence, of what isn’t there. And what isn’t there is individuality. Now, to take the converse, because that’s what you do when you are trying to be thorough, even scientific, about something, even when that something is as elusive as art, consider contemporary Western photography, which often—not always, but often—takes a more maximalist approach, showing us the wrinkles on the faces of cowboys and cowgirls, often in large-scale black and white, or showing us everything, in focus, in an image of ranch life. Emphasis on the sharpness of a moment places that moment in time.

It’s an attempt to capture individuality in sharp, stark relief, as if it might be wiped off the picture plane and vanish into history. It’s the opposite of modernism with the same anxiety at its heart—that a way of life and the myth that has grown and swirled around that myth—is disappearing. Myths emerge, evolve, even decay and disappear. They begin as stories with a palpable presence in our lives; over time, they fade, becoming stories of absences that are felt no less, and perhaps even more keenly. At every stage, in the hands of perceptive artists, their depictions can tell us a great deal, not only about them, but about ourselves. In the end, what I’ve written isn’t a definition, not in Webster’s mind, or in the minds of the dictionary dons at Oxford, but something that might be useful—a way of looking at some art of the contemporary West that might, just might help us to understand how we feel about them—and why.

This story appeared in the October/November 2025 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Subscribe today to read every issue in its entirety.

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