The sky at Chico Basin Ranch seems impossibly vast, befitting the rolling landscape it covers like a pale blue bowl: 87,000 grass-cloaked acres, studded with five spring-fed lakes and, depending on the season, up to 2,500 cattle.
The ranch, situated in an empty place on the map more than 30 miles southeast of Colorado Springs, is a cowboy’s paradise. That means it is also paradise for any cowboy artist worth his paint.
Which is where the two Dukes come in, a pair of princes in their respective realms and visionaries to boot.
Duke Phillips is the rancher. Duke Beardsley is the artist. Together, in a fusion of commerce and conservation that could only happen in the open West, the two do what is possible to summon art from the natural world.
The two men are mavericks of a sort. They operate within a tradition, yet stand apart from it.
Phillips, 53, was raised in the cattle business yet has jettisoned all hidebound notions of ranching: He is a land steward and educator as well as a working cowboy. Beardsley, 39, while a spiritual heir to classic Western artists Charles M. Russell and Frederic Remington, uses his time on the ranch to create eye-popping paintings influenced by modernists Andy Warhol and Franz Kline.
For nearly a year, Phillips has hosted Beardsley on his ranch. The latter drives from his home in Cherry Hills Village to saddle up with Phillips and his cowhands. Phillips and crew work the herds. Beardsley performs the field research — sketching and photographing ranch work — that will fuel his paintings.
“I try to think and paint outside the box, but can’t get away from the cowboy as icon, though I don’t want to sugarcoat it,” Beardsley said recently. “I think the tradition is worth whatever energy I can give to preserve it.”
The two men literally have a lot of ground to cover. At 136 square miles, the Chico Basin Ranch is the size of Seattle and San Francisco combined.
Phillips has run the sprawling ranch since November 1999, when he began leasing it from the Colorado State Land Board. The state’s criteria: Use the land for a traditional purpose, ranching, and develop an education and recreation component.
To that end, Phillips opens the land and its lakes to riders, fishermen and birders (315 avian species have been spotted on the property). The ranch is visited by about 1,500 young people in a year’s course, including classes and scout troops.
“The save-the-world side of us wants to bridge the gap between ranching and city life,” Phillips said. “They’re almost two separate cultures with a different language, and they’re growing further apart.”
And Phillips hosts artists, Beardsley chief among them. The two have become friends in the months since Beardsley began visiting the ranch.
“We have a lot in common,” Phillips said. “He’s from a ranching background. We have fun together.”
“I just love the way they’ve welcomed me in,” Beardsley said. “When I’m watching them work, I stay out of the way, but I know how to jump in and help if needed.”
Environment-minded
On an August morning, Phillips navigated his GMC truck down a rutted dirt road at Chico Basin, passing a prairie dog colony. The vehicle lurched past an expanse of sweet grama grass and sent a flock of cowbirds wheeling toward Upper Twin Lake. He pointed out plant and animal species, cataloging their traits with a naturalist’s ease.
“We don’t call ourselves environmentalists but we think about the environment and we act on it,” Phillips said. His progressive ranching, with pasture rotation, wildlife preservation and an almost pacifistic view toward predator control, has garnered state and national awards.
Beardsley sat behind Phillips in the cab. Pikes Peak loomed to the west. “OK,” the artist said with a grin. “Your office is better than mine.”
Phillips, married with four children, was raised on a Mexican ranch that his father managed. Although Phillips wanted to enter the cattle business, his father balked at paying money for him to study something he could learn for free.
“He told me to study what I wanted to study,” Phillips recalls. Phillips headed to the University of Puget Sound, earning a degree in creative writing. Scan his office shelves and among the bear and lion skulls you’ll find such cowboy-centric volumes as a history of Texas’ legendary King Ranch and a guide to Colorado cattle brands. You’ll also find the “I Ching.”
“I love how he embraces tradition but pushes the edges at the same time,” Beardsley said. “It does me a lot of good to come ride with these guys. It clears my head out.”
Ranching background
Beardsley grew up in a well-heeled family in Denver. His father, George, was a developer and rancher. His granddad was a Colorado Springs banker who ranched along the Fountain River. Beardsley went to Graland Country Day School and Kent Denver, graduating from Middlebury College in Vermont with an art history degree.
He has deep connections with area movers and shakers. Many are old family friends. In certain circles, Six Degrees of Duke Beardsley is the easiest parlor game in Denver.
“Duke Beardsley is among the very best of the new generation of Western artists,” said William Matthews, a LoDo gallery owner and acclaimed cowboy artist in his own right. “He isn’t satisfied doing what others have done before him. He seems intent on creating his own vernacular.”
Beardsley was drawing identifiable objects at 3. By age 12 he had drawn Russell’s famous “Whose Meat?” painting, which depicts a man and a grizzly squaring off, “about 100 times.” There were art lessons.
But he didn’t move directly into an art career. His 20s found him kicking around the West. He worked on his family’s Douglas County ranch, joined the Steamboat Springs ski patrol, took an MCAT prep course with thoughts of going to medical school.
“That didn’t stick,” he said.
In 1995 he enrolled at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif. Four years later Denver gallery owner Elizabeth Schlosser saw his paintings at a show. Impressed, she took him on.
“The paintings really sold, and it was this incredible validation,” Beardsley said.
Prestigious Western art exhibits followed: The Coors Western Art Show in 2000 and the Buffalo Bill Art Show in Cody in 2001, where he won the people’s choice prize. Galleries picked him up, including Visions West in Denver and Bozeman, Mont.
Beardsley turns out about 100- 150 works a year, from large color-field paintings to small pen- and-ink studies. The bigger oils sell for $6,000-$8,000; the Denver Art Museum owns two.
Back at home
A recent afternoon found Beardsley in his studio. It is attached to his house, where he lives with his wife and two preschoolers, off a cul-de-sac in Cherry Hills Village. The room is sprawling but simple, with a bare concrete floor. Light pours in from north windows.
Beardsley was putting the final touches on a painting of a mounted cowboy fiddling with his lariat. Titled “Baile de Reata,” the image evolved from a photo Beardsley took at Chico Basin in July.
“I’ve tried drawing at the ranch, but when the cattle and cowboys are moving and there’s lots of action, you’re just burning daylight,” he said. “So I try and capture it with the digital camera.”
Beardsley uses the image as a springboard for an ink sketch about the size of a legal pad. From this he produces a charcoal drawing on canvas, typically about 3 1/2 feet by 5 feet. The charcoal is dampened with water to produce a light gray tone. Its lines are made bolder with black acrylic paint thinned to the consistency of a watercolor.
Then the two-stage application of color: an oil glaze for the cowboy’s body and a contrasting oil for the background. “I kind of just stumbled on that technique, but it’s really fun,” Beardsley said.
In the painting, cowboy and horse are in profile, the figures rendered in a dark-brick shade called Perylene Red. The paint is made by Gamblin and sells for $45 per 5-ounce tube. The background is an orange hue Beardsley concocted on his glass-topped mixing table; the color is that of a Dixon Ticonderoga No. 2 pencil.
“The body color is a favorite of mine,” said Beardsley, whose studio boots look as if they were spackled by Jackson Pollock. “Red means so many things to so many people. It’s a color of strength and so Western. I gravitate to it.
“The orange came through trial and error,” he said. “I started liking it the more I played with it. A lot of this is shooting from the hip.”
Beardsley stepped back from the painting, eyeing it.
“Putting the figures on a big color field is an invitation to put yourself in the painting,” he said. “It plays up the cowboy mystique.
“We’re all cowboys at some point in our lives.”
William Porter: 303-954-1877 or wporter@denverpost.com
