FOREWORD In the 1962 John Ford American Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance , a newspaperman utters: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” These words marked the sun rising on the career of pop artist Billy Schenck, who has become known as the ‘Warhol of the West’ for his exhilarating trek through Western mythology. Fusing Navajo culture, modern-day cowgirls and tongue-in-cheek humour, the Ohio-born artist explores the clash between wilderness and civilisation in his stunning collection, The New West . The body of work is inspired both by black-and-white stills of Hollywood Westerns and the pop art style of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. “I wanted to do with my paintings what Sergio Leone had done with film,” explains Billy. “No other genre in the last 200 years can compete. It has a timeless quality, and still has infinite possibilities to explore.” Bringing his art to the UK for the first time ever in November 2018, the real-life ranch sorting world champion promises to expose viewers to a reimagined Western narrative. Greek mythology clashes with irony, apocalyptic imagery and sexual tension for a collection that brazenly expands the limits of the genre.
Billy’s work is characterised by its scorching colour palette, surreal juxtapositions and cinematic composition. Reproduced in a flattened, reductivist style he illustrates what Southwest Art magazine terms ‘a stance…a pendulum between the romantic and the irreverent’. With accomplished use of chiaroscuro, Billy projects photographs from Western movie stills and fills the outlines with flat, hard-edged areas of colour. This, in his own words, produces “a perfect marriage of photorealism and a paint-by-number system”. His fiery horizons and landscapes are formed from distinct geographical locations and his childhood memories of summers spent in the high deserts of Wyoming. This curious mixture of real and imaginary, past and present is what defines the Kansas City Art Institute graduate. Through his exploration of mythical Western archetypes – including the lonesome cowboy and stoic Native American – Billy both celebrates and pokes fun at the subject. In a nod to Andy Warhol – with whom Billy shared a retrospective exhibition at the Briscoe Western Art Museum in 2018 – the artist has been titled the founder of the ‘Western pop art’ movement. With the legend of the cowboy continuing to live on in the popular imagination, Billy shows the sun is not yet ready to set on the Western genre.
“ I HAD NO I D EA THAT A FTER WATCH I NG THE SERG I O LEONE TR I LOGY OF SPAGHET T I WESTERNS I WOU LD SPEND THE NEXT 48 YEA RS OBSESSED WI TH TRYI NG TO CA PTUR E THE ESSENCE OF ‘WESTERN ’ MYTH .” BILLY SCHENCK
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