Captain Murie’s Pawnees 1983

Tom Lovell painted ‘Captain Murie’s Pawnees’ with a muted palette of ochres, browns, blues and greens, and the scene shimmers with reflected light. Just imagine Lovell’s hand moving swiftly across the canvas, trying to capture this transient moment with accuracy and sensitivity. What might Lovell have been thinking as he painted this scene? He must have been aware of the romanticism of Frederic Remington, and so I wonder if he was trying to create something more realistic, and less symbolic. Look how the riders seem weary, and the horses too, as they move slowly along the river bank. You can feel the heat of the sun and the dust in the air. I admire the way Lovell has tried to capture the relationship between the riders and their horses. The horses and the men are moving together, united, but separate. Painting is about entering into a kind of conversation across time. Lovell looks back to Remington and other painters of the American West, while contemporary painters look back to Lovell, riffing off each other’s ideas. Art making is an embodied expression, embracing ambiguity and uncertainty, with multiple interpretations.