Donning a yellow slicker, the cowboy crouches beside Biscuit before a day’s ride, sipping from his mug under a makeshift tent. The fog hangs thick. You can almost feel the wet.
Such moods can’t be staged in painting—at least not according to Western artist Mikel Donahue. It takes authenticity, riding with real cowboys doing cowboy work.
“I try to be as honest and respectful to who [the cowboys] are and what they do today,” Donahue, 67, told The Epoch Times. “It’s very important for me not to use models; the people that I paint or the places and things are real.
“Many of them I could call up today and I could talk to them. And it’s very important that I portray them in a true and honest way.”
The Tulsa artist, who grew up on his granddad’s ranch, now tags along with cowboys cowboys from Oklahoma to Arizona doing their “mundane” thing. You have to join in “the wet or the dirt,” he said, and they must know “you’re not somebody that they have to babysit.”
All the while taking field notes and appreciating the experience of bonding with these horsemen, Donahue finds the most menial tasks are anything but.
A thing as small and insignificant as a nail can become the center of a painting. Nails are needed by these ranchers who, lacking the luxury of a farrier, often shoe their own horses—a skill that’s become a tradition of their trade.
One painting by Donahue hinges on such a trifle of scrap metal. “For Want of a Nail,” the picture’s title, is completed by: “… the horse was lost.” Donahue finishes the idiom with: “For want of a horse, the battle was lost; for want of a battle, the kingdom was lost.” It illustrates a principle.
“It all kind of boils down to another thing that I like, which is the detail,” he said. “One small nail can cause a horse to lose a shoe in the middle of nowhere; hopefully you have a spare in your saddlebag or you can find it and tag it back on.
“Otherwise, your horse becomes lame, and you have no horse and you can’t do your job.”
The artist, who has always lived in Tulsa, turned to the visual arts after a knee injury in college ended his days playing sports. He got into commercial design and eventually became an art director in marketing, which greatly aided his artistic painting endeavor later in life, beginning around 2001.
Donahue’s work quickly grew in prominence—eventually to be picked up by galleries, shown in shows, and accepted into Cowboy Artists of America—until, in 2009, he quit his marketing job to paint full-time.
Taking a page from his design years, he still works in familiar media: gouache and acrylic, adding in watercolor sometimes, and paints on small but precious illustration boards. He still works out compositions with thumbnails and regularly pulls out tracing paper as the pictures develop.
As in “Coffee ’n Biscuit,” the works begin with thin washes that mute the harsh whiteness of the board. Then, increasingly-opaque gouache and acrylic layers build up a latticework of detail, modeling form and laying in atmosphere such as mist in said painting. Hence, you can feel the wet.
“Long Days” typifies cowboy life. Depicting a rancher hefting his saddle, he walks off into the sunset at the end of a long day. Among Donahue’s earliest paintings, that one garnered an award at the Buffalo Bill Art Show & Sale and hangs in the museum in Cody, Wyoming, today. The interplay of woodgrain texture and luminescent light speaks volumes. Here, Donahue’s design skills came into full play.
“It was, from a design aspect, I thought, very, very strong graphically,” he said. “One of the things I think helped me in my work today is that design training and work that I did as art director/designer years ago.
“[The painting is] very simple. I still make it very strong compositionally, and the title, I think, has a lot to do with the impression you get when you look at it.”
All the little details—every little nail—are crucial in the depiction of Western culture, Donahue says. Still, he admires painters who can do the most work with the least amount of brushwork. Ironically, he loves the Impressionists, who don’t get hung up on all the little details.
As an artist, Donahue strives for this efficiency in his paintings. Those can take anywhere from a few days to several weeks to complete. He likes to have three or four always on the go. Sometimes when you’re in the groove, you can get a lot done in a day, he says. Other times, it’s hard to see the forest for the trees. Stepping away and coming back to a piece is often the cure.
Meanwhile, Donahue’s wife can be a big help.
“She has kind of an equine background, if you will. She was from Colorado, raised around horses,” the artist said. “It’s always helpful for another pair of eyes to look at things, especially if I’m kind of struggling in an area and I’m not sure why.
“It also helps me to focus more on the design and the painterly aspects of something, as opposed to the detail of every little nail in the hoof holding the shoe.”
