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The Ballad of Colt 45 published by Faine Contemporary Art 2018 5 mono-prints in 5 colour ways with diamond dusted bullets.
In 1920 Max Earnst produced a collage "It's the Hat that makes the Man", which could have been the prequel for the Western Movie. In the fifties the cowboy film became the most successful genre of the cinema. As children of that period we ignored the pointy hat of Tom Mix, star of 270 silent and early talkies. We fidgeted through the boring bits when singing cowboys like Gene Autry and Tex Ritter suspended our disbelief with an impromptu song; an action parodied in the "Ballad of Buster Scruggs". We even believed the implaussibilty of Roy Roger's milk drinking gun fighter; later to be lampooned by his co-star Bob Hope in 'Son of Paleface', when he demanded "gimme a milk - in a dirty glass". As the cinema audience grew and became more sophisticated, the iconography of black hats for bad men and pale hats representing law and order, gave way to existential movies such as 'High Noon' with its attempt to reflect real time. in 'Once upon a time in the West', even children were killed, ironicically by the cinema's resident goodie Henry Fonda. The simplistic view of the native American as being inherently evil gave way to a more realistic portrayal of the conflict with the cavalry in 'Soldier Blue' with the military's agendenda for retribution for a masasecre, or the haunting ;Cheyenne Autunm in which a starving tribe risks annihation in an attempt to leave the reservation and return to their homelands. |
Canvases from 2018
