Artist of the West - An Experience of History

Connor came to a successful painting career through a rather circuitous route. After a stint as a Navy Seal he traveled around the West, unclear what he was after. As he drove the back roads and winding highways, the rugged land and dramatic terrain tugged at him, spoke to him. But it wasn’t until he stood in the Cowboy Artists of America Museum that he saw his future.

“I saw all this Western stuff and I decided right there that’s what I was going to do,” Connor says.
He went back to school to study art and ended up taking classes in Los Angles at the Art Center College of Design. At the same time he devoured books on American history and the early pioneers, feeling a kinship with the hard lives of the men and women who set out for parts unknown.

His paintings aren’t romanticized portraits of an age and a period remembered through movies and tales. Instead, they are — strange as it may seem — in the moment. It is as if somehow Connor has dipped his brush into the pool of time and come away with, not so much a painting, as an experience.

Crowded in his small cabin studio are shelves and shelves of field studies. They spill over into baskets and spread, scattered across the drawing table. Stray paintings stand tucked between random spaces. Because first and foremost, Connor thinks of himself as a plein-air painter, at home with his paints and sketchbook in the outdoors, his paintings start with the land and end with it. His work is true to natural formations and pulls on the light from the sun, the moon, a bonfire. From there they expand to relate an experience, a moment of deep courage, a foray into the unknown, or maybe something as mundane as cleaning up after supper.

In a painting called Helping Ma, Connor focuses on an everyday chore, washing up dishes in a field, and in so doing brings out such exquisite details as the handmade quilt tumbling from the covered wagon, stationary in a field. There are no men, toughing it out in the extremes, just a mother and her two daughters tending to daily life. But the beauty of this moment shines a light on the beauty of every day, every moment — whether it was 200 years ago or last summer — that life then as it is today, is made from these small personal experiences.

Boating along a river or standing in the shadows of spires — it is there Connor allows himself to just sense the land. His deep respect and connection with a timeless earth, flows from that point forward. The mountains and valleys that Connor paints do not change much over the centuries and so they have borne witness to the times Connor paints. Like listening to a yarn by a campfire, Connor listens to the geology and the layout of the topography and thinks, “what if…”