An Interview with Duke Beardsley
Aimee Resnick (she/her) - January 14, 2023
Duke Beardsley is a sixth-generation Coloradoan dedicated to the American West. He was formally trained at The Art Center College of Design after earning a BA in Art History from Middlebury College. Raised in both a cattle farm and the city of Denver, Beardsley expertly depicts the duality of the developing West. This week, we sat down to discuss cowboys, art history, and the transformation of the American Plains.
NAR: Thank you so much for your time today! To start us off, can you recount your family’s history in Colorado and your connection to the cowboy?
Beardsley: My family’s been living out for five generations. We’ve done everything from ranching to traditional pioneering, the endeavors that people undertook when they first got [to Colorado] like lumber and mining, and then we progressed towards the cities when they grew a bit more.
My dad's side of the family has been ranching here since the 1800s: we continue to ranch today, although it’s mostly horses, hay and grandchildren at this point. It's very much a part of our everyday life. Cattle was always a big part of it really until about the 1990s. Then the focus kinda shifted away from cattle. My dad grew up in a family following the old Western model where people held a day job in town and a cattle ranch outside of town. That’s how I grew up.
NAR: You have said that “we're all cowboys at some point in our lives." Can you expand on this statement?
Beardsley: Being in the West and encountering pop culture iconography around traditional Western lifestyles, I was thinking about the many new people coming to the modern West and changing the population dynamic. When you come here, the legacy of the West is yours too. In that respect, that makes us all cowboys, metaphorical or otherwise. It’s also a little bit tongue in cheek about how the West has changed so much from the cultural American Western films, the pulp fiction magazines, and art, of course. I think it was a comment about the impulse driving the lifestyle.
NAR: How has the West changed in your lifetime? What transformations have you witnessed in Colorado?
Beardsley: Generally, just the population. The population has, you know, just exploded in my lifetime. When I was younger, our ranch was very remote, very rural. Today, it's considered glorified suburbia in many ways: there's just so many more people. Recently, the intrusion, or rather inclusion of social media and technology in our lives has gone through the roof. Suddenly this very rural, remote lifestyle is very attainable and reachable. So it's just a penetration of humanity that's changed the West.
NAR: How has the public perception of the cowboy changed?
Beardsley: In my lifetime, I think they’ve become more relatable in some respects. Not everybody understands cowboys and the cowboy lifestyle and ranching. It's not that people understand that world, but rather they romanticize it and relate to it and it’s suddenly much less foreign to them. There's a lot of misconceptions, obviously, around the rural ranching lifestyle. I think the perception of the cowboy has become even more romanticized.
NAR: The cowboy has undergone a radical transformation in the media with regards to race: the white, gun-slinging fictional cowboy of the 1940s is no longer a relevant portrayal of the West. How has this impacted your work?
Beardsley: Let's be clear that cowboys hold their origin in the late 19th century post-Civil War. This was the birth of the cowboy lifestyle in our mythology, and none of them were native to the Western United States: they immigrated from Mexico or the East Coast. The African-American cowboy was a huge piece of Western expansion Some of the best cowboys ever known were African-American. There were also Irish immigrants and Asian immigrants. Cowboy culture has always been a melting pot. I think it was gentrified and isolated into the white race only in 20th century pop culture.
But I don't really consider that, to be honest, in my work. I mean, I've always loved history and pay attention to it as best I can. But the cowboys I paint are friends of mine. These are people I know, people I spend time with, people whose lives I’ve been invited into. I spend a lot of time on horseback with them.
I’m trying to portray the real contemporary West, regardless of race or gender or creed or culture. When I turn the figure away, or I tip down a hat, or I cast the face in shadow, it's not so much to cover any racial or cultural or gender role as it is to make [them] as generic as possible. This is so that when the painting and I are done with each other, the painting and its new owner can have their own relationship. The viewer can put anybody they want into that narrative and most often they do.
NAR: In this vein, can you elaborate on the role of imagination in your art?
Beardsley: I just worship traditional Western art like that of Charles Russell and Frederic Remington and their amazing narrative history of the West. I just adore it. I always have. But I think that by cutting down on overt detail and removing these cowboys and cowgirls from a traditional Western landscape, I invite the viewer to modernize [them] and tell their own tale, which is really the power of art.
Great art for me is always triggered by story. I love telling tales, and that's what I love about abstract art. What do you see? I can tell you what I've painted, but what do you see? I think this role of imagination is paramount in all art.
NAR: You place your cowboys on a blank color-field background: can you explain the inspiration behind this technique?
Beardsley: I remove the cowboy and cowgirl, who are icons I consider to be very traditional and true, from visual metaphors like the Western landscape and place them into a color field more akin to the Abstract Expressionist or the Pop Art movement. This lets the viewer have their own narrative. What I’m painting is a very traditional, romanticized icon, and this contrasts the bright turquoise and purples and outlines.To me, that's really about the energy that I'm either trying to capture. I want to shake the traditional snow globe [of Western art].
NAR: I love that phrase - shaking the snowglobe. You’ve been classically trained in Art History. From what artists and movements do you draw the most inspiration?
Beardsley: I'm a junkie. I collect from time immemorial. Right now, my two biggest influences are a Jasper John's retrospective book and a Basquiat retrospective book. Those guys couldn't be more different, but they both resonate for me in the use of pattern, repetition, paint handling, and their great uses of color. I jump all over. Then there’s this host of young people just making beautiful stuff, knocking my socks off. So I'm a little bit of a tumbleweed. I go where the wind blows me when it comes to influences.
NAR: Your work is renowned for its vibrant colors. How have you been influenced by the Pop Art movement? Where do your neon hues originate from?
Beardsley: I discovered Andy Warhol's Cowboys long after I started painting full time, but I think their highly saturated, commercially driven color spoke to me. There's so much energy in color, and there's so much energy in cowboy iconography. So they seem to go hand-in-hand to me. The Pop Art palette just seems so natural a fit for my approach.
In the context of Colorado, we have such a high contrast, warm, cool, clear color palette of our own. I grew up on the edge of the Rocky Mountains and feel crystal-clear on our environment, colorwise. I grew up loving every inch of that. My upbringing has also influenced my color choices.
NAR: What do you see as the value of an education in Art History?
Beardsley: I have an Art History degree from Middlebury College and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Art Center College of Design. One could easily say that I utilize my Bachelor of Fine Arts every day, and I don't use my bachelor of Art History: I couldn't disagree more.
Art history is the study of human culture throughout time. Regardless of what we're creating, regardless of the medium we choose to do it in, we express ourselves, our culture, and what's coming from our heart. [Humanity] always has, from cave cave paintings to the artificial intelligence paintings of today. That's how we express ourselves.The most authentic way to study people is to study their art. What they passed in their legislature, who they invaded, where they traveled to; art history tells these stories.
NAR: Finally, who’s your favorite cowboy?
Beardsley: Gosh, I have to weigh that for a minute. You know, I recently read the original Charles Portis True Grit novel – the one from which the famous movies are made. It has a beautiful cadence to it, a beautiful parlance in the way he captures the way they speak. The [novel’s] La Boeuf is probably my favorite right now, but it'll change tomorrow.
Please note: this interview has been edited for length and clarity.
