Western dime-novel covers as fine art? It’s not such a stretch for Michael Cassidy, whose new one-man show, Far West, at the Gerald Peters Gallery in Santa Fe, is painterly, with pulp.
“I had seen some very large silent-movie-era western posters at Scottsdale’s Museum of the West a few years ago, which inspired me to do some large paintings with typography,” says Cassidy, whose early background as a sign painter and illustrator reinforced his love of hand-lettering. “Then I had the idea of doing what I call Western pulp paintings on the scale of those old movie posters.”
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He started a series of “low-brow high-art” pulp paintings and did them 70 inches tall for maximum impact. “I thought I was done with the pulp covers after I did a dozen of them, but the ideas just kept coming. Now it’s sort of morphing into versions of early western movie posters and giant book covers with my twist on them.”
Today he’s working on one called The Durango Kid. “The title comes from a movie franchise in the 1940s where the star, Charles Starrett, rode around battling villains on a white horse with a cool-looking black mask over his face — a western version of Batman. ... I’m trying to do serious paintings with a little bit of a nod to the over-the-top element of western pulp fiction.”
Cassidy has an earnest attitude toward the Western lifestyle the pulp portrays. “I think it’s what cowboying represents that attracts people: beauty, romance, adventure, hard work,” he says. “Those old westerns had a consistent theme that ran through most every one of them. Good outnumbered a hundred to one by evil somehow triumphs against impossible odds.”
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Living close to cowboy country in Oregon informs his paintings. “You can drive out of Bend 10 or 15 minutes and with a few exceptions it’s pretty much empty, wild country all the way to Idaho,” Cassidy says. “There’s a lot of wilderness around here. I like being on the edge of it. I like knowing it’s always there. I like elbow room. People still cowboy here on this side of the Cascades. The buckaroos have maintained the old vaquero ways right up until this day. The small-town rodeos here are fantastic. There’s something really attractive to me about things that either don’t change or change very slowly. The world moves too fast in my opinion. The people who cowboy here are really resilient. They don’t get rich doing what they’re doing. They do it for the love of it. They love the country and a good horse. I like that. It’s my speed.”
The Old West, maybe not so much. “It was a violent, brutal, hard, unforgiving environment,” Cassidy says. “At the same time, it was an incredibly awe-inspiring and beautiful place — still is. You could go from a moment of serene beauty to deadly terror in the blink of an eye. They were hard people; you can see it in their faces. They didn’t go through life with their faces in a cell phone or in front of a television just existing. They were alive! If I can give people some sense of that mixture of adventure and beauty in a painting that resonates with them enough to put it on their wall and live with it every day, then I’ve done what I set out to do.”
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Far West is on view by appointment July 17 – September 26 at Gerald Peters Gallery in Santa Fe.
Images courtesy the artist
From our July 2020 issue.
