---

QUICK LINKS:

CALENDAR

OUR NATURAL WORLD

Robert Bateman
on exhibit thru Summer

ANNUAL CHRISTMAS VISIT

Dean Morrissey
December 5-6

"This was a day I'd been waiting for since I was a kid," says cowboy artist Bob Coronato about June 9th... .  Coronato relates the genesis for this piece, based on his experience working on a ranch on the border of South Dakota and Wyoming.  "I was there to help the foreman, a colorful, tough old man of few words, move cows to their summer pasture.  We got up at 4:30 a.m. and my friend George suggested I wear my heavy winter gear.  Since it was 75 degrees the day before, I thought he was pulling a prank.  I decided not to take a chance and brought the gear.  I saddled up my horse, which was bucking and kicking to shake out the cold.

Hoping to get a good view of the thousands of cows snaking up the limestone canyon, I went to the front and took a small bunch ahead to point the rest of the herd.  The temperature dropped as we got higher into the mountains and the rain turned to large wet flakes covering the canyon walls.  As the cows were heating up, steam started to rise off their backs until billowing clouds rose up through the canyon like a train puffing through the Black Hills.  I was glad I had my slicker and wild rag around my neck as the snow turned into a blizzard.  I sat tucked up under a pine tree branch listening to the flakes through the trees, hoping I'd never forget a detail of this amazing day.  As the snow collected on my hat and the black dye ran down my back, I couldn't wait to paint this scene, unfolding before my eyes.  With about ten inches of snow on the ground, George and I rode up the side of the herd yelling 'this is the life for me!'"

"In the open country of Wyoming, the ranches are big, the grass is plentiful and the country is rough," says artist Bob Coronato of No Place . For Amateurs! "With few people for hundreds of miles, this is perfect cowboy country. I was on a brand crew with some of the best hands I'd ever had the privilege to work. With the Montana Badlands in the distance, we were gathering from 10,000 acre pastures and branding about 300 cows a day for about 12 days straight. I use times on the brand crew to add the grit and character to my art that only living the life can inspire. I was working with Mark, who we called "Gootz", roping and dragging calves when I saw the image I knew I had to paint-a vision that perfectly captured the spirit and freedom of the cowboys who work the rough country."

“The weather in the northern range is very unpredictable and can go from unbearably hot to snowing in the span of just a few hours; it pays to be prepared for any condition. One June morning we were trailing cows up into the cooler high country. We had to go about 27 miles up through hill country to the summer pasture. The weather went from clear, temperate conditions to rain and then sleet; by noon we had almost a foot of snow. The next day was the town rodeo and the day dawned 85 degrees and sunny. The joke up here is ‘take off your long johns on July 4, and put them back on July 5.’”

"I wanted to create a painting that summed up what it was to be a cowboy-the freedom, the landscape, the teamwork of a bunch of hands and the sheer vastness of the workplace. This was and is a little piece of my American frontier. A great horse, a great rig and a beautiful day like this are all you need to create a feeling you'll never forget."

With his experience as a working cowboy, artist Bob Coronato has been rounding up awards and recognition. A recent article in Southwest Art Magazine proclaimed, "It's a road all his own, and one other western artists must envy. "With proportions as vast as the great frontier itself, this Greenwich Workshop Museum EditionT Giclée Canvas will bring the open range to your hallway, great room or office.

"Crow Fair is a nearly hundred-year-old tradition," says Bob Coronato, "held each August for the reunion of family clans and the celebration of Crow Indian culture. I have attended Crow Fair for many years and I'm always impressed with the singing, the relay horse races and the thousands of tepees. The Crows fought governmental pressures to change, and as a result being at the fair is like going back in time, because their culture has been amazingly preserved. It's uplifting and I look forward to it, year after year." - B. C.

When Spanish explorers came to the land that would become America, they brought horses with them clad in armored masks. Native Americans soon adapted the mask for their own horses, influenced by visions and decorated with motifs of hail, thunder and lightning. The symbolic armor adorned with these symbols of power could transform the horse and rider into great warriors with extraordinary abilities and possibly even carry them into the space between this world and the next, where bullets and arrows could not hurt them.

To this day, Plains Indians decorate their horses for ceremony and adorn them with images of power. Bob Coronato was inspired to paint this piece while watching the relay races at Crow Fair. He realized, he says, how much the "horse culture is very much the same today as it was in the past."

"It's not the Old West of the 1890s but Crook County, Wyoming in the early 1990s," says artist Bob Coronato. "The people and the ways of this area are very much the same as they always were. I was drawn to the area because it's the closest you can get to seeing the frontier the way it was. The big towns are hundreds of miles apart and the little towns are the glue that holds the frontier together. Brandings here are still a community effort and the ranchers still work the same way they did a hundred years ago.

"The ranches these days are disappearing. It is sad, but as the ranches disappear, the cowboys also disappear one by one.As the land gets developed the cowboy lifestyle fades fast. I was lucky to get a chance not only to see it at the end, but to take part." Bob Coronato's When This Weather Quits . . . will be featured in the 2008 Coeur D'Alene Art Auction July 26th in Reno, Nevada.