Brent Cotton | Mesmerized by the Light

By Gussie Fauntleroy

It’s a fascinating bit of family lore. In the 1870s, when Brent Cotton’s ancestors settled in southeastern Idaho and established a ranch, Cotton’s great-great-grandmother Emma described her experiences in a journal and in letters back to her father in England. One letter excitedly told of an expedition party that had camped at the ranch while en route to mapping the Yellowstone area. Among the party’s members: the painter Thomas Moran. “Even though she was far removed from society, she was knowledgeable about art. She knew who Thomas Moran was,” Cotton says.

A century and a half later, Cotton is an award-winning painter. His artwork underwent a significant shift almost 25 years ago, moving from tight realism to a looser, more atmospheric style. As it did, his work took on qualities that would have been familiar to Moran, George Inness, and other mid-19th-century Hudson River School artists: a luminous sense of intense, often dramatic light that bathes the landscape. It’s a romantic, spiritually expressive style that in the 1800s reflected the optimism of European-Americans reaching ever deeper into the West. But it wasn’t until after Cotton turned in this direction that he discovered his aesthetic lineage in painters like Moran—in addition to later Tonalists—bringing him full circle to his family’s Idaho ranch.

Cotton and his three younger brothers grew up on the ranch, along with grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. The children would often head to their grandparents’ kitchen, where they were welcomed by the aroma of fresh-baked bread. Their grandmother covered the big kitchen table with butcher paper and set out boxes of crayons and colored pencils, and Brent and his brothers and cousins would sit and draw. A talented, self-taught watercolor painter, she offered encouragement and patient answers to questions like, “Grandma, how do you draw a horse and make it look like a horse?”

Looking back, Cotton smiles and describes the products of these mini art lessons as “mess-terpieces.” But his grandmother could see his true interest in art and the potential in his drawing. As time went on, her lessons with him became more serious. “She gave me better materials and tools so I could experiment and grow,” he says. “What she really instilled in me was a love of art—seeing and appreciating art.” On family trips to Jackson, WY, young Brent looked at paintings in galleries and glimpsed the idea that some people make a living with art, although it would be some time before he imagined it as something he could do. Then a small town in Kansas helped change his thinking.

Cotton was 10 when his father took a job in Lindsborg, KS, and the family traded the mountains for the Midwest. Founded by Swedish immigrants, Lindsborg was the home of landscape painter Birger Sandzén (1871-1954), who taught art there at Bethany College. The town was unusual for its size, steeped in an appreciation for art of all kinds and supporting music, theater, and visual art. A museum in Lindsborg was dedicated to Sandzén, who was known as “the Swedish van Gogh” for his Impressionistic style. Cotton visited the museum on school field trips, and although he knew this was a well-respected painter, he didn’t like or understand Sandzén’s art. “Back then I thought it had to be more finished and photographic-looking to be fine art,” he says.

Cotton now sees that living in a very art-aware environment beginning in fifth grade had a major impact on his future career. After graduating from high school, however, his first impulse was to get back to the mountains and the outdoors. He trained as a fishing and hunting guide and spent three years working in the wilderness on Idaho’s Salmon River and in Alaska. But even that time was not without art. As a teen he had picked up a chunk of firewood and tried carving it. It was oak, so the work was laborious, but he thought it turned out pretty well. He acquired better tools and honed his mostly self-taught skills, eventually carving realistic fish and birds. In his free time and in the off-season, he continued carving. These pieces were the first he sold in a gallery, but he soon realized the work was too time-consuming to be viable as a livelihood. At 23 he decided to switch to painting.

He had raw talent and some experience and began signing up for workshops. At one of these he met a fellow student—older than he was and already an accomplished artist—who became an important mentor and lifelong friend. Christine Verner took him under her wing, teaching him in exchange for work he did at her Oklahoma ranch. For two years Verner shared her knowledge of art history and painting and encouraged Cotton to shift into a looser approach. It was harder than he expected. “I started to understand that, wow, trying to say more with less is not easy,” he recalls.

At the time his focus was wildlife art and western subjects, but when Verner introduced him to plein-air painting, the door to landscape subjects opened and took him to places he had always loved. Among these were western rivers where he could wade in and cast his fly-fishing line. Yet before his work could move beyond depicting the landscape’s visual elements, before it could reflect a deeper, more emotional relationship with his subject, he would go through another major artistic change.

In the late 1990s a friend invited Cotton to share a small apartment not far from the beach in Maui, where the two set up easels, painted the seascape, and sold their work to tourists. Where they lived was high on a volcanic slope, and every afternoon clouds descended, enveloping the landscape in mist. Details were softened and blurred, and Cotton’s paintings became atmospheric and moody as a result. During this period he returned each summer to Montana, where his parents had settled. As it happened, the early 2000s were a time of intense wildfire activity in the West, producing smoky, orange-tinted skies. Although distressed by the fires, he fell in love with the effects of sunlight filtering through sepia haze. He became excited about creating images in which details are subsumed in mystery and mood. “I wasn’t consciously trying to move into the Luminist or Tonalist realm,” he says. “I was just capturing my lived experience.” Yet he suddenly found his work being described—favorably—in those terms.

Especially under radiant light at sunset or dawn, western rivers now provide the perfect setting for much of Cotton’s art. COMING OF THE DAWN, for example, is based on a rafting trip he took with a friend on a remote Montana river. Because the river is fabled for its beauty and coveted for rafting, the pair had to enter a lottery for a chance to be there. They were successful—but their time slot was in mid-April and very cold. Camping beside the river, they woke to six inches of fresh snow. As the first rays of morning sun hit the canyon wall, the contrast of cold and warm colors, including a campfire where two men warm themselves, impressed itself in the artist’s mind. The painting was shown at the 2020 Prix de West Invitational at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, where—along with the Eiteljorg Museum’s Quest for the West and other national shows—Cotton’s work has been honored with top awards.

Like the frigid morning campfire, cherished memories inspire much of Cotton’s art. In THE GOLDEN HOUR, his brother Clint stands quietly fishing in a river of shimmering gold, silhouetted by sunset light through cottonwood trees. “I was mesmerized by the light,” the painter says. “I remember watching my brother and thinking, man, I’m so lucky to be standing here. You just lose yourself in the moment, all the cares of the world gone.”

Those moments are not hard to find in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley, where the artist lives with his wife and two teenage kids. In the mornings he can carry his coffee onto his deck overlooking a pond, watch the trout rise, and cast his fly line off. On his 15-yard daily commute he may shoo chickens out of the way, arriving at his studio with its attached woodworking and blacksmithing shop. He once built all of his own frames; these days he sometimes adds carved details to frames made by others. At his forge, he produces ornamental objects and knives. Yet as enjoyable as all of this is, the outdoors is always calling—whether that be the wildlife refuge on the cottonwood-lined river bottom 2 miles from his home, or rivers and canyons farther away. “There’s so much beautiful, restful, peaceful subject matter,” he says. “It’s a joy to be able to live here, put down roots, and paint.”

representationHueys Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM; Trailside Galleries, Jackson, WY; Mockingbird Gallery, Bend, OR; The Sportsman’s Gallery, Charleston, SC; www.cottonfinearts.com.

This story appeared in the October/November 2021 issue of Southwest Art magazine.

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