Robert Pummill

The prairies stretched away toward a far horizon in low rolling hills and in a vast expanse of grass that grew belly-high to horses.  The tall grass ebbed and flowed in an incessant wind, like waves upon some unknown ocean where men might be drawn by their dreams off the edge of the world.

          The west demanded all of a man he could muster in full measures of endurance and courage.  Those who came early, pushing past the frontier fringe and into the hard heart of the west, found themselves adrift in an endless environment of space and sky and silence.

          Bob Pummill paints and paints well, the rough-hewn heroes who bet their lives against the odds in that once wild world what was the West.  His art is of men on the move…passing by, or pausing on their way somewhere farther on…with cattle, or coaches, or fitted-out in feathers…all of them upright and eager in the anticipation of adventure…just as it surely was in the warm-hued glow of the glory days while the west still lay wide-open and waiting.

          Bob Pummill’s paintings are uncluttered by the picky particulars of what is really hard-edged historical illustration, but too often passes for western art.  All the hard edges are smoothed off in a Pummill painting, like the comfortable seat of a well-worn saddle.  There is poetry too in these paintings…an emotional aspect created by color and subtle shapes that suggest the flavor of loneliness and wide-eyed wonder.

          Catch out your best horse, saddle up and come ride with Bob Pummill back down dim distant trails when the west was still wild and free.

 

 

 

 

   Don Hedgpeth

   Texas, 2001

 

 

The foreword from the National Center for American Western Art’s,

 “Under Western Skies, the Art of Bob Pummill,” by Michael Duty.