A Profile in Sun, oil, 8 x 12 in.

“Somewhere in Texas features a cowboy I’ve been working with for a couple of years now, Gerry Gesell. He manages a ranch very near El Dorado, Texas, where he raises his own horses. He’s a really interesting guy—he has a podcast, makes his own leggings and he’s involved with a bunch of artists, photographers and filmmakers in the area creating stories and making movies,” the artist says. “Here he’s riding one of his horses, Marsala. I liked this pose of Gerry and Marsala, and I knew I wanted to combine it with some of the big, billowing thunderheads I saw while I was there with him last, so I built this composition with the clouds framing his silhouette. I actually did get caught in a thunderstorm while I was there. As a kid growing up in Texas, I always loved those storms—the rolling thunder, listening to the rain pouring down. So this painting isn’t meant to be any specific place, but more of an attempt to capture that feeling I remember from my childhood of an approaching storm.”

Texas Cowpuncher, oil, 12 x 12 in.

LaRock’s work has a sophisticated paint quality that conveys detail without being overly sharp or busy. There’s a softness to his work. The artist attributes that look to the layers upon layers of paint. “That comes from my training in the Western European tradition, inspired by the great painters from that part of the world during the 19th century and prior,” he says. “The semi-transparent layers of oil interact differently with the light than when paint is applied more opaquely, giving the work a different effect. That training also led me to really focus on form—using value relationships to create this illusion of roundness on the canvas. So I think my paint handling is just different than artists who like to paint more opaquely or graphically.”

Somewhere in Texas, oil, 18 x 24 in.

There are several works in this show that are less about light and more about shadow. He doesn’t shy away from painting the darkness of a scene. If anything, he embraces it. “I’ve always been very inspired by the luminous landscape painters of the Hudson River School like Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran. I enjoy experimenting and playing with different light effects in my work. I’ll want to figure out how can I make a painting so it really feels like the sun is blazing behind this rider, which looks very different in real life than in a photograph,” LaRock says. “So it goes back to the value relationships I mentioned earlier. By putting a figure in shadow, it means the values will need to be much more compressed, and it’s difficult to keep that narrowed value range in control as I’m building up the layers of paint. But I think it’s both interesting and satisfying to achieve that kind of light effect on the canvas.”