[The Epoch Times, April 14, 2023](Reported by English Epoch Times reporter Michael Wing/Compiled by Zhao Ziji) “I can’t describe timidity.” Courage is the painting philosophy of this cowboy artist from Canyon, Texas .
“I’d rather be wrong about courage than get cowardice right in a painting,” 69-year-old Jack Sorenson told The Epoch Times.
Sorensen, who has 48 years of painting experience, blends the old west and the new west in oil paintings. He absorbed the artistic essence of some of the most talented Western painters in America.
“That’s how I approach it,” he says. “I work very fast, much faster than most artists I know. I can easily finish a large painting in a week.”
Once he has a story he wants to tell the audience, he begins to map out all the possible problems. Once he starts drawing, he goes all out.
Growing up on a ranch in Texas, combined with his natural talents and many excellent teachers, made Sorenson the western artist he is today.
Gifted and Wise Teacher
Like many painters, Sorensen’s professional journey began with an innate ability.
“The first day of first grade, my teacher called my mom. He said, ‘I think Jack is a prodigy.’ My mom didn’t know what that meant. She said, ‘Oh my god, what the hell is he doing?’ ‘”
He could draw anything, and he can now. But the young Sorensen was most drawn to drawing things from the environment in which he grew up, and because his father was a rancher, he drew most of them horses.
“My dad used to help people train horses,” he said. “Horse owners always wanted my horse sketches because they loved their horses.”
“So I have models for all kinds of horses.”
Innate talent is important, but Sorensen also had many teachers who helped him develop his hand-eye skills. One of the earliest and most influential people for him was the late Oklahoma Expressionist painter Dord Fitz, when Sorenson was 21.
“He was a genius. He had me go down to the bottom of the canyon and he said, ‘I want you to paint every shade of green you see,’ and the bottom of the canyon has over sixty different shades of green.” Soren Sen said.
“I showed him when I finished and he said, ‘Okay, now go back in there and take half of it and just give me the 30 I see most often. Then I had to reduce the shades to 12.”
“First determine the value of the thing. He said that if the value is correct, the thing can be any color. I’m not sure if that’s entirely true, but I understand what he’s trying to say.”
Over the decades, he studied with 28 different Western artists, notably Howard Terpning, whose paintings fetched up to $250,000, Martin Greeley and Bruce Green (Bruce Green).
Of course, the styles of the great artists of Western painting Russell and Remington are also reflected in Sorensen’s work. Russell taught him how to tell a story, and Remington taught him how to draw.
Both features feature prominently in Sorensen’s own work.
colorful style
Perhaps because of the different styles of his mentors, Sorensen has developed a range of different styles. He was capable of the most meticulous realism, as in his work “Easy to Come, Hard to Get Away,” which vividly depicts outlaws caught red-handed by law enforcement.
“These guys robbed the carriage, they had a safe,” the artist said, “and they got caught.”
Sorensen’s meticulously rendered Old West scenes stemmed from a love for dramatic reenactment of cowboy shootouts that he developed while building frontier towns and driving wagons. That’s another aspect of his growth.
Needless to say, growing up surrounded by gunpowder smoke and animal fur also gave him a fascination with the Old West.
While clients sometimes want a tighter picture, Sorensen personally prefers to “paint rather loosely”.
“I’ve noticed that the longer I paint, the more relaxed I become,” he says. “Painting loosely is much more difficult than painting compactly, because the blank frame is as important as the tangible.”
“You have to pay great attention to every brush stroke. I hope everyone who sees my paintings thinks I have fun when I paint.”
Fittingly, Sorensen prefers to paint wet-on-wet rather than working on dry layers of paint. He paints directly onto the white canvas while leaving visible brush marks. He often painted outdoors to preserve his sense of color.
A painting that better exemplifies this “relaxed” style is Sorenson’s portrait of Bass Reeves, a famous Oklahoma law enforcement officer on an Indian reservation, a black man .
“He was one of the few black law enforcement officers at the time, and a magazine asked me to paint a portrait of him.” Sorensen said that his work has appeared on 90 magazine covers.
artist’s seal
Above all, a painting must have a personality, that is the artist’s stamp. Some artists’ paintings are like “Kodak photographs,” Sorensen said, “the kind of painter who takes whatever he sees in the photograph and puts it on the canvas.”
“If you and I were just copying a photo, ‘the painting’ wouldn’t show any difference between you and me,” Sorensen said. “In my opinion, that’s not art. Put your own personal stamp on it.”
“My horses have to look like horses, don’t get me wrong, I mean, I want them to express what I think about horses.”
As for what his “seal” means, Sorensen said his goal was to “evoke the memory of someone with a similar background to him,” adding, “I just feel, you have to evoke an emotion. That’s why Telling stories is so important to me.”
But more than that, for Sorensen, denim has always been “a symbol of fortitude of character,” a virtue that shines through in his work. “I’ve never met a cowboy with low morals,” he said. “They seem to have moral standards.”
Original text: “Cowboy Artist Raised on Texas Ranch Paints Old West and New West, Inspired by ‘Gunsmoke’ Reenactments” published in English “Epoch Times” website.
Responsible editor: Han Yu#