Heart in the Hills: Robert Pummill
Robert Pummill is bringing his love of Texas and the West to a new exhibition at the Museum of Western Art.
It’s been said that under certain light, at certain times of the day, Texas Hill Country sings to those who gaze out upon it. One only has to listen carefully as the sunlight flicks across landscape, the bugs and birds skitter through the prickly pears and the desert breeze sends the bluebonnets dipping and dancing in rolling waves of vibrant color. In Kerrville, Texas, they have a motto, “Lose Your Heart to the Hills.” And they aren’t joking.
“It’s a wonderful land to paint, that’s for sure,” says Kerrville resident and Western painter Robert Pummill. “Those hills never fail to inspire me.”
Pummill, who’s devoted much of his recent career to Texas paintings, is the subject of a new exhibition at the Museum of Western Art in Kerrville. Texas: The Land & The Legacy — The Art of Robert Pummill will feature 62 works, almost all of them from the last four years, including 20 pieces from the artist’s own collection, and another 20 that are brand new for the exhibition. The show came to be after the museum’s executive director, Darrell Beauchamp, visited Pummill in his home and studio. There’s some irony in his mission to the artist’s house that day: he was looking for a more nationally recognized artist for an exhibition
and Pummill lives just a short drive away from the museum.
“When I first approached Bob about doing a one-man show, I didn’t think I had a shot at making it happen,” Beauchamp writes in the exhibition’s catalog. “I told him we could reach out to collectors, museums and galleries and pull together a show of his works. It would be great, I told him. He countered with, ‘Why don’t we do a show with mostly new and recently created works?’ No retrospective, he said. At that point I was hoping to get enough works to fill one gallery. But, after visiting with Bob I quickly knew we could fill them all. That many new works from an artist of his stature? That many new works from a guy who’s been painting for decades and whose contemporaries have long put down their paint brushes? I never thought it possible, but here it is.”
Pummill found painting the way many artists first interact with it—in his youth. He grew up in southern Ohio, and at the time there weren’t many ways of getting an art education so he convinced his parents to let him sign up with Art Instruction Schools, which many people remember as the Draw Me! School. “It was a correspondence course that was connected to Johnny Clymer at one point. I would create something and then send it away and a couple weeks later I would get a critique,” Pummill remembers. “Later I would go to art school, and I also joined the service, the Air Force, for nine years. After Shirley and I were married I went to work as a contract engineer and working in electronics. We ended up in California and I took art school at night.”
They bounced around a little bit in Florida and then, in 1968, ended up in Dallas, where he would paint on the weekends. It was the Dallas setting that led to some early Texas paintings, and would eventually lead to his professional career when Bill Burford started showing his work in the famous Texas Art Gallery. “I painted seascapes, landscapes, portraits here and there…whatever I could to supplement our income at the time, but the Western scenes started in Dallas at Texas Art Gallery,” he says. “From there I showed at the Western Heritage Sale in Houston, I was a guest artist at NAWA a few times, and was in the Cowboy Artists of America for 21 years. It wasn’t until I hit
retirement age that I really started to focus on the Texas landscape. I just looked around and realized that no one was doing those kinds of paintings, not the way I would do them.”
That was roughly eight years ago, and Pummill hasn’t looked back since. He estimates that Texas landscapes take up roughly 75 percent of his studio time these days. Today his work is right up there with the work of Frank Reaugh, Julian Onderdonk, Porfirio Salinas, José Arpa and many other great painters who were mesmerized by Texas Hill Country. But for Pummill, his work is just the sum of his experiences. “There was no light that clicked on; it was a slow evolution. I’m an accumulation of 60, 70 years of doing this stuff. There was no pivotal point that brought me here. I was just always working,” he says. “I like that Yogi Berra quote, ‘When you come to a fork in the road, take it.’”
“Robert Pummill has reached a point in his career that few artists ever achieve. He can paint what he wants, when he wants, and how he wants. Years ago, he gave up trying to please the buyers, the galleries, and the art museums. Today he creates art that pleases him. And by doing so, he’s created another chapter in a long and storied career,” writes Beauchamp. “Known by many as a painter of historical scenes of the Old West, the Texas landscapes in this exhibition will forever establish Pummill as both a historical painter and great landscapist.
Onderdonk, Salinas, Pummill. Those three come to mind. With his biggest supporter and critic, wife Shirley, by his side, he paints the Texas landscapes and Western scenes that make him happy. We’re honored to be able to share those creations with you. We’re absolutely certain that they will make you tingle.”
Works in the show include Dawn of the Texas Hills, a sunset piece showing that classic Hill Country scene, and On a Hill Side in Texas, which shows those famous wildflowers, including bluebonnets, under a glowing orange sky. In addition to many landscapes are several major cowboy works, such as Keepin’ to Higher Ground and Jackass Express, both of which show wagons, the men riding them and the
animals pulling them.
“Robert Pummill’s approach to painting, like his overarching approach to his career, is with diligent preparation and planning. Whether it’s the logistics behind stretching an enormous canvas himself or the meticulous research that goes into his historical pieces, nothing that Pummill creates is happenstance,” says Elizabeth Harris, owner of Insight Gallery, which is sponsoring the exhibition. “The amount of forethought that goes into each piece is no doubt part of the reason that to the viewer, his landscape work seems to simply flow freely from his easel. With a career that will be considered of historical importance, in the tradition of Hill Country impressionist painters such as Salinas and Onderdonk, Pummill has made the landscape of Texas his own. He made his mark in the Western art world with his stagecoach and cattle drives of the American West. While his Western work is still an important part of his legacy, it is in his landscapes that Pummill has found a creative freedom that has invigorated his career and keeps him at the easel during a time when many would be slowing down, enjoying the fruits of a successful career. Simply put, he’s having fun.”
Pummill, now in his 80s, agrees with that last part. “I am still enjoying myself,” he says. “It’s finding that inner light in each painting that makes it challenging, and enjoyable.”