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Red River: Sweetheart of the Rodeo

By: Walter Piehl

The extraordinary ability to capture intense movement is the preeminent feature of Walter Piehl's Sweetheart of the Rodeo series. His painting in the MSCTC—Moorhead Art Fund Collection, Red River: Sweetheart of the Rodeo is fraught with this spectacular energy that seems to fill, not only the canvas it’s been created on, but the surrounding space. The horse and rider of the rodeo are the principle subjects in this abstract expressionist work. Abstract expressionism is an art style in which emotional intensity, self-expression, the painterly application of color, and the ability of the artist to take advantage of the 'accidental'—splattered color, unintended drips and lines, for example, - come to the forefront.

In Red River: Sweetheart of the Rodeo, the bucking bronc seems poised to force the rider into the ground of the painting, but the skilled rider outwits his opponent with perfect counterweight posture. This tension between horse and rider, created with dynamic line and dramatic brush strokes that form abstracted shapes, is the focal point of the painting -that is, once the viewer sees the subject instead of the swirling energy of the surrounding forms. The horse and rider appear as though coming forth from chaos into some semblance of visual order. The vibrant, fire-works-evoking sprays of color—in this case, mostly bright yellow and blue-- enervate the entire canvas and range from contrasting to analogous, from primary to tertiary. Overall, Piehl creates images from and about Western Americana, preserving these rituals in relics of a modern-postmodern, American West aesthetic.