| I was
raised in the Ft. Worth, Texas, area and graduated from Richland High
School in 1978. I attended West Texas State University for 3 1/2 years
before I finally decided I was wasting a lot of time and money. I
was working for Tuffy Thompson at the time looking after yearlings,
and trying to go to school on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It wasn't working,
so I decided to just go to work "full time". From Tuffy's, I went to the Waggoner Ranch in 1984. After a little more than a year there, I ended up (in a round about way) on a ranch in the Oklahoma panhandle. I stayed there nearly 3 years. I was working here when I met my future wife, Karen, on a blind date. We married in July 1989, and shortly after moved to the Masterson Ranch in King County, Texas. In May of 1992, I left Masterson's and started day working for several ranches in King, Cottle, and Motley counties. I had never in my life ever aspired to be an artist. All I ever wanted to do was cowboy, but at 32 years of age with a wife and growing family, I knew I was going to have to do something to supplement meager cowboy day wages, or find a "real" job. If Karen had not had a good job teaching school at Guthrie, I could have never done what I decided to try. Although I've been drawing since I was very young, it wasn't until '92 that I decided to try to make a little money with it. I know that I've been blessed with a God-giving talent that until now I had not pursued. On days that I wasn't cowboying, I worked on my art, and had limited edition prints made. The first 2 sold out in a surprisingly short amount of time (at least it seemed so to me) mostly to guys I'd been cowboying with. I finished more originals, and had more limited edition prints made. Some have sold really well, others haven't, but my customer base was growing mostly by word of mouth. Word got around to some pretty good places. I got a pretty good boost being featured in Livestock Weekly (1993), Western Horseman (Sept. '97), America's Horseman (March/April 2000), and most recently in Southern Living (May 2003, in the Texas edition). My art was doing well enough that by the end of the school year 2001, shortly before the birth of our fourth child, my wife resigned her teaching job at Guthrie to be a fulltime mother, something we both had wanted since we married. I was spending more and more time with my art, and less time cowboying. Now I am cowboying on the side as a way to get pictures to work from, and to keep from going stir crazy. We hated to leave Guthrie. This was home. We had lived here since we married, and this is where all of our children were born. But, we needed to get a place of our own, and unless you can afford 3000 to 5000 acres, there was nothing else in King County for sale. After a year of looking, we finally found a house 12 miles southwest of Snyder, Texas, with enough acreage to keep my horses on and (with some generous rains) maybe a few yearlings. We moved here in June 2002. This is where I now work and live with my wife and 5 children: Zachary 12, Gregory 7, Anne 5, Joseph 21 months, and newborn Justin. I quote from C.M. Russell in my brochure and I might as well do it here, also: "Any man who can make a living doing what he likes is lucky, and I'm that ..." Thank you, |
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All pictures printed on 100% acid free paper. Pictures shipped Priority mail usually within 24 hours of your order. All prints guaranteed: If When you received your prints any are damaged in an way, return them for replacement or refund. |