Billy Schenck
Cinematic intensity
Billy Schenck is a world champion ranch sorter and lives in the real West—on a ranch outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, with horses and cows. His home is full of art and artifacts of the Old West as well as prehistoric Native pottery. He prefers the early work of the Taos and Santa Fe painters before they were influenced by modernism. His sprawling adobe house is furnished with the finest examples of the carved ranch furniture of Thomas Molesworth (1890-1977) who revolutionized furniture design in the West. Schenck calls Molesworth’s look “explosive.”
Schenck’s paintings, however, seem to be in contradiction to the exquisite Western classicism of his home. His paintings and serigraphs are, in their own way “explosive.” He says, “I live on the ‘Double Standard Ranch,’ so I am allowed to talk out of both sides of my mouth.”
There is a different authenticity to Schenck’s paintings. He is attached to the romance of Western subject matter which he found in pulp fiction, spaghetti Westerns, and the movie stills and posters that advertised them.
His latest paintings of the West will be at Blue Rain Gallery in Santa Fe, through August 11. The gallery describes his paintings as The West as He Sees It.
He says his work “has been a continual process of appropriation. Much like the ‘pop’ artists of a generation before me, I eventually began appropriating the historic Western illustrators. I became fascinated by both their painting techniques as well as their chosen subject matter.”
Schenck’s paintings are composed of areas of flat color, abutting and not blending. They have the strong graphic quality of pop serigraphs. They have a slightly over-the-top cinematic intensity in paintings like La Vida Loca as well as humor and passion.
In South from Oraibi, he exaggerates the depth of field as a camera does. The Hopi rider in the foreground is in sharp focus and the three figures behind him fade rapidly into soft silhouette.
The Briscoe Western Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas, is showing Andy Warhol: Cowboys and Indians, and Billy Schenck: Myth of the West through September 3.