A Bad Hoss 1904

Charles M. Russell made this dynamic watercolor painting, A Bad Hoss, sometime around 1904. Just look at that horse rearing up! You can almost feel the tension in its muscles. And the cowboy – he’s all action, isn’t he? He’s caught in this dance of control and chaos. I imagine Russell, with his brush, trying to capture that fleeting moment when everything is up in the air. What a thing to try and capture! I love the looseness of the paint here. See how the colors blend and bleed into each other? It’s like he’s letting the water do its thing. The washes of color create a sense of movement, like the dust kicked up by the horse’s hooves. Painting for me is a way of thinking through things. I can only imagine that Russell was thinking about capturing the essence of the West – its energy, its roughness, its beauty. Artists are always in dialogue with each other, across time, across styles. We’re all trying to figure out how to make sense of the world through paint.