June 29, 2024
When I got the word—on Facebook!—that a Buck Dunton Art Show was closing at the end of this month, I immediately made plans to go into the Beast and catch one of my painting heroes before his art disappears back into the Taos Seven Cosmos.
In case you are not familiar with Buck Dunton, here he is with his cat.
A decent hat and a lazy cat but his paintings are absolutely, absurdly good. Here is the title wall of the show, upstairs in the Phoenix Art Museum.
Masterful and so rich!
His ability to light up the foreground with dark, stylized backgrounds is comparable to no one. He just had this insane ability to formalize foreground figures. And the dude was from Maine! Ha. No offense, but we just don't think of Main-ites as Western painters, certainly not of this caliber. Anyway, glad we made the trek in, and by "we" I mean Kathy Sue and the Ds who joined us for breakfast at the Welcome Diner in The Beast.
For that we thank Patricia, Deena's longtime friend who recommended it. Dan is holding our 50th wedding anniversary present which we didn't have a chance to give to them last weekend. It's a blow-up poster of Darlene in a Super Stock Dodge pulling out of the Sagebrush Drive-In on Hilltop back in 1963.
It was an hour in and an hour out in triple digit heat, but you know what?
The laughs and the inspiration were worth it. Also, I had the chance to drop by Arizona Art on the way back out to Cactusland and picked up $150 worth of scratchboard supplies. That led to this little ditty.
"Oh, I think you can dance, amigo."
“We tell stories about heroes because of a simple fact about the human mind: Courage is contagious, and when you hear about someone doing something heroic, it makes you want to be a hero too. And these days, we could use more heroes.”
—Malcolm Gladwell
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