The Scouts 1902

Charles M. Russell made "The Scouts," probably with oils on canvas, and it seems as though he laid down that sky first, and then the mountains, but it's the way the brushy landscape comes right up to the foreground that really grabs me. I can feel him there with his brush, dabbing and swirling, building up the image like a mosaic made of strokes. I wonder if he struggled to make the figures on horseback look natural. What do you do when you don't know quite how something should look? You try a few different things out, right? You move the paint around until it starts to feel right. It reminds me a little of Frederic Remington, but it's looser, more free-flowing. A bit less uptight, maybe? These guys were all checking each other out, pushing each other in new directions. You can see the conversation between them, the way they’re all looking at each other's stuff and thinking, "Hey, that's a cool way to do that." And that's how art moves forward, one artist riffing off another, making it new, making it their own.