Artist of the West - An Experience of History

He tosses a small 4 by 6-inch field study of the painting he’s working on across the table. “I saw some horses just there,” he says, and then points to the large painting in his easel. “The landscape is as important as the figures. It’s more about the colors and the mood of the piece, the abstract qualities and the composition, how the darks flow.”

Connor says he looks for good color and composition and then depends on the landscape to tell that story.

“I want to show the tension, the sorrow, the sadness of the times,” he says. “I want people to feel the loneliness these people felt, the isolation as well as the peacefulness, and the love they struggled for. It was a time when men and women had only themselves to rely on and I want to portray that aspect of life during that era.”
According to Montana Trails Gallery director Tara Bowman, collectors compare Connor to the likes of Remington and Frank Tenney Johnson.

“Collectors purchasing Connor’s work love his historical perspective,” Bowman says. “What I like about his work is the way he paints nocturnal life and firelight — it’s just incredible.”

And although Connor doesn’t consider himself a portrait artist, his figures hold their own in his paintings.

“He’s so good at painting the figure,” Bowman says. “It really takes his work to another level. And because he makes the landscape so important, the painting becomes very cohesive. His imaginings, what would have happened in this place at a certain time in the past, is what draws so many people to his work. He’s just so creative when it comes to seeing what might have been. The overall effect is an extremely successful piece of artwork.”

In the painting Wagon Train, a 20 by 30-inch painting of an almost boundless West being discovered step by steepening step, you can feel the expansive hearts of these people opening up as they view for the first time, the possibilities before them, the feel of the humidity of bulging clouds building thunderheads in the summer afternoon. You can taste the grains of trail dirt in your teeth and the pounding hot sun on your head. These are things Connor commands. It is as if he has gone through the bend in time and taken his paints and canvas with him.

But most of all it is his heart, as true and straight as the rifles he paints, that allows us to see a world that exists only in history, through the eyes of experience.