The Carpentry of Words: Malcolm Brooks and the Road to Painted Horses

The thing that tipped me off to it was this rinky-dink little historical society pamphlet from 1962 in which they were trying to get volunteers in Wyoming to go work on some of these water reclamation archeological surveys, and they mention River Basin Surveys in conjunction with Bighorn Canyon. I thought, “Okay, that has to be a real thing.” Continue reading →

Mark-Making in the West: Malcolm Brooks’s Painted Horses

by Lisa Peet

What is a Western today if not its iconography?… We have exhausted the old conflicts of cowboys against Indians, or townspeople clashing with range riders. There are no longer fixed points in the genre except perhaps for this: a Western is the light, the landscape, the beasts that run through it. Continue reading →