After a long and distinguished trip traveling with the dual exhibitions Andy Warhol: Cowboys & Indians and Billy Schenck: Myth of the West, Schenck’s large half-tone dot painting, Half-Tone Flats, was acquired by the Petrie Institute of Western American Art at the Denver Art Museum.
The work appears in the catalog for the exhibition Western Pop: Andy Warhol & Billy Schenck,with essays on each artist by Michael Duchemin, the former president and CEO at the Briscoe Western Art Museum in Texas.
Billy Schenck, Half-Tone Flats, 1984, oil on canvas, 87½ x 70½ in.
“Labeled ‘The Warhol of the West,’ Billy Schenck fashioned a new style of Western Pop, inspired by Andy Warhol’s halftone dot process, his repetitive images, and limited-edition series of screen prints. By 1996, Schenck had created 52 series of limited-edition serigraphs, reflecting fictionalized Western histories, contemporary ranch life and rodeo, captioned image and word play, Cadillac cowboys, and cowgirls with guns. Increasingly, his work included social commentary about the rapid economic growth impacting rural life, from the Rocky Mountains of Wyoming to the Sonoran Desert of Arizona,” Duchemin writes in the catalog. “Self-portraits like Diamonds Forever (1978), showing Billy with his horse, Lyle, and dog, Fritz, reflected the life of a Western artist that Andy Warhol only dreamed of. Paintings like Across the Colorado (1983) demonstrate Schenck’s abilities in using halftone dots to transfer images onto the screens used to print canvases. Half-Tone Flats (1984) is an early example of Schenck’s contrast in composition. He employed the Warholian dot method on a rather large 87-by-70-inch work, hand painting two Arizona cowboys roping a steer in the foreground with a red rock mesa backdrop and a giant cumulus thundercloud forming above.”
For more information about the museum and exhibitions, visit www.denverartmuseum.org. —
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