The kitchen tabletop was smooth, white enamel, the perfect surface for a child to use as a canvas, and Don Coen didn’t hesitate to grace it with his early drawings.
“Never once did my mother say, ‘Don’t draw on the table,’ ” recalled Coen, who is the featured artist at the 2016 Coors Western Art Exhibit & Show, running throughout the National Western. “My parents were my biggest supporters.”
Coen, 80, grew up on a farm in Lamar where there was no electricity or plumbing. After milking the cows and finishing other morning chores, he attended a one-room schoolhouse.
His gritty background gave him an eye and a passion for subjects that open a window on life in the West, without romanticizing the difficulties that surround it, said art exhibit curator Rose Fredrick.
“He is painting what he knows. This is how he grew up. He knows how difficult it is to work these ranches,” she said.
Eleven of Coen’s paintings will be on display on the top level of the Expo Hall.
He is one of more than 70 contemporary artists who work in a variety of media to be
All of them depict the West in uncompromising reality, Fredrick said. “What they’re painting, they know. They’re not making this stuff up.”
Subjects range from human encroachment on the land to the difficulties faced by ranchers who lose stock to wolves and coyotes. “It is not sugarcoated,” Fredrick said.
Much of Coen’s early work in the 1960s and 1970s was abstract. In the early 1980s, while visiting Lamar, he was inspired by a sunset, he said.
“A friend said, ‘You love this area; you should paint it,’ ” he recalled.
Over the next three years, he painted the Lamar series, which is a group of 15 studies of agrarian life that has been shown at multiple museums throughout the Midwest and purchased for permanent and private collections throughout the world.
His “Hush of Evening Snow,” a painting of cattle standing in a snowfall, will be on permanent display at the Coors Western Art Exhibit.
Coen also has documented America’s migrant workers in a series of paintings.
He traveled throughout the nation, meeting the migrants, and painting those he met and the landscapes in which they work. The paintings are showing in Phoenix.
Tom McGhee: 303-954-1671, tmcghee@denverpost.com or @dpmcghee
Updated Jan. 8, 2016, at 12:30 p.m. This article has been revised to reflect the following correction. Originally, incorrect information was given about Coen’s work on the Lamar series. He worked on it over three years.
