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Guns and Art by Rich Horrell / Harold Journal
Guns and Art by Rich Horrell / Harold Journal
Guns and Art by Rich Horrell / Harold Journal
Darrell Edward Ehrlick Dec 27,2002 Harold Journal, Logan Utah
Any assignment where you get to shoot a gun isn't a bad gig. But that's how the old west was. Lotsa guns.
Winchesters, Colts and Remington's. They enforced laws, they helped gather grub and they settled squabbles between miners laying stakes on a claim.
But those rough and tumbleweed days are gone. Ghost towns are going the way of grubstake and the gully-washer. These momentary burgs are now abandoned by residents and claimed by the pages of ghost town books and relegated to archives of state historical societies. And committed to the handiwork of Rich Horrell.
But Horrell isn't a member of some preservation society. He doesn't have causes or bumper stickers. He doesn't shoot serene, melancholy photographs of leaning saloons or ramshackle hotels. He shoots his artwork. He's not a photographer, rather he uses a small gun for effect.
He recreates these old west scenes on canvas. Instead of using oil paint or watercolor, he actually uses old wood from barns and buildings to create a near-to-life miniature.
The wood looks old because it is. The paint is fading and the signs look hand painted because they are. And the glass in the windows of these replicas looks shot out because it is.
The art is in the details 77 and some of those details just happen to be provided courtesy of a BB-gun.
"Sometimes you blow the whole windows out and have to start over again," Horrell said.
The windows are shot out just right, so that they make a splintering, rock-like shattering.
The BB-gun is the product of trial and error.
"When I first started, I used a .22, but that didn't work out so well," Horrell said.
Guns 'n art. Sounds like something Charlton Heston and his gang might be interested in. It really doesn't matter who is interested in his art. For him, it was just something that was in his blood. His inspiration for creating these out-of-the-ordinary pieces of art might be genetic. These creations might be proof positive that more than just DNA is passed from one generation to the next. This western artwork has its genesis somewhere in the gold rush mountains of California, where, as a child, Horrell and his grandfather would pan for gold. Both of his grandfathers were miners and his great-grandfather was a prospector.
And it was in Horrell's younger days 77 days before children and responsibility 77 when he was working as a logger that the idea to create these miniatures came to life.
Maybe it was panning for gold. Maybe it was growing up in Old Sacramento, or hiking around the forests of '49 gold rush, but something in him urged him to create scenes of the old West.
He started off making eight recreations of old west scenes. Some of the places he'd seen in person, others he only seen in books. He even made a 14-foot long recreation of Main Street in Dawson, Alaska.
"This (old West) wasn't a time of real precision, it was a time of real roughness," Horrell said.
He took his eight creations to a restaurant to be displayed and sold. When arrived a week later, they were all gone.
"I thought that they had sold, but then the owner said someone had stolen them," Horrell said. "I don't know, it was kind of a bummer, and I haven't really done them since."
Until now.
For some reason, maybe it was the aging wood on the barns or the steep mountains around Cache Valley, something stirred Horrell to start recreating these western scenes again.
"All of the sudden, I got an inkling to start, I don't know why," Horrell said. "I hadn't thought about doing it again."
Among his first creations were a couple of barns in the valley, including one in Preston.
"It's not exact, but it's pretty darn close," Horrell said. "Cache Valley has some beautiful, good-looking old barns. Just go out to Plymouth or Benson and those barns have a lot of character."
His scenes used to be put together with bandsaws and jigsaws, but now he uses handsaws to cut the aged wood. Most of Horrell's creations take … well, he isn't exactly sure how long.
"I could be there for eight hours at a time and it would only seem like an hour," Horrell said.
He might be in the same mental place that cowpunchers were at as they rode the hundreds of miles across the West.
"Yeah, I'm in a zone. It's a peaceful place," Horrell said.
That's why his artwork usually catches the eye of those who were brought up in the West, who know the simultaneous ache and pleasure that comes with spending all day in the saddle.
"When you run into horse people or people who live in the old West, their eyes light up. It makes them happy," Horrell said.
As he begins to create more and more, he finds his interest in old west scenes waning and his interest in the more pastoral barns increasing.
"I enjoy and love the valley and I enjoy looking for (photographic) shots," Horrell said. "You can't find any other valley full of barns with so much character."
Horrell's artwork is on display at the Cache County Courthouse in Logan Utah.
Artist With a BB Gun / Sacramento Bee
Guns and Art by Rich Horrell / Harold Journal
Guns and Art by Rich Horrell / Harold Journal
By Herb Michealson Sacramento Bee
November 16,1979
ARTIST WITH A BB GUN
He was full of Confidence and joy and the woods as he walked towards meat the front desk in Artist Collaborative Gallery in Old Sac. Because I was wearing a suit and tie and probably, to this young man looked official, " he asked me if it would be all right to bring his art in tonight.
Artist Collaborative members in Old Sacramento were screening for new artist. Which means people who believe in their art, believe enough in their art that it needs to be hung in an art gallery. Auditions. Putting your work, and thus your soul and spirit, on the line in front of these peers, these strangers, these old, seasoned members, these already hung and already sold and already full-of-themselves artist.
I told the woodsy young man I was only visiting and pointed him toward someone not in a suit and tie but nonetheless truly official. I wondered what he had to show., and 45 minutes later I found out all about this fellow Richard. But first I viewed the auditions of a women lawyer, weary of the law and now into stained glass: next, a very nervous fellow who makes and sells hot tubs so he can make money so "I can give myself more time to do the things I like to do like work with my wood., nice things" He did not know what to show the judges first, and I sympathized with him. Do you go with what you think is your best? Or what you think they will think is your best? The two are not always the same.
And then came Richard. In his dirty Levi's. In his scuffed, frayed Adidas. In his bliss. He did not seem as nervous as the earlier auditioners. He was bold and sturdy as the lettering on his baby blue T-shirt: "Yukon Jack." Here was Richard, right out of Robert W. Service, as if he were killing time waiting for Sam Mcgee and Dan McGrew to join him for a boilermaker. Richard's craft was wood. His mother was an artist, he said. Lately he'd been logging and making good money up North. As if to say to say, "hey peers, what you see is what you get, and if you shouldn't happen to like it no sweat, no big deal, toodle-oo.
To be continued.
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