Painter brings ‘pop of color’ to rodeo
Artist sells paintings featuring unique, vibrant characters
A resplendent horse, a defiant bull, an humble donkey and a dignified buffalo are among the colorful characters captured in the art Lyndon Gaither brought to sell at this year’s Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo.
“Once you’re around horses, you can see what they’re thinking by looking at their eyes,” the soft-spoken painter and rodeo regular said between customers on the first full week of the Houston Rodeo. “That’s why I paint the eyes first.”
It is the intimacy by which Gaither paints his subjects that amplifies their personalities. The acrylics he uses highlight this further.
An artist since he was 20, the Lubbock native’s style has broadened. For much of his career, Gaither painted off a monochromatic palette of brown sepias, which he partly attributes to the black-and-white TV consumption from his youth.
“Growing up, the Westerns stuck with me,” the 68-year-old said.
“The Gene Autry Show,” “The Roy Rogers Show,” “The Lone Ranger” and “Bonanza” helped illustrate the vision Gaither carried out in his earlier years.
“When our kids were little, we used to tease him, that he didn’t know [the world] was in color,” Gaither’s wife, Barbara, said. “He evidently had this color in his head for years, but nobody knew it.”
Around 15 years ago, Gaither left behind his decidedly conventional style of painting and transitioned into bold colors. He began to wet his paint brush with purples, yellows and green, reminiscent of American pop art.
A resident of Dallas, Gaither paints from photos he snaps of animals at ranches, rodeos and stock shows in Fort Worth.
He treks out to Yellowstone National Park to photograph the bison he paints, and his work sometimes draws from what he sees traveling to the National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas.
Before fully immersing himself in painting, Gaither worked as an art director doing the signage and color coordination for amusement parks, including Six Flags New Orleans and a Singapore water park.
Barbara Gaither said many of his customers live in upper Mountain states like Montana, where Western culture may be the standard but the weather is cold and the earth is brown.
His art “is a pop of color” for these customers, she said.