My Rick is a painter.

He’s also a poet, a cartoonist, and a lover of the “wild west” of his imagination. He’s read every Larry McMurtrey novel ever written. Ditto for every Elmore Leonard western. Double-ditto for Cormac McCarthy.

Half a ditto for A. B. Guthrie, Jr.

Maybe that vein of wild-west yeehaw! is merely resonating with his artist/philosopher/cartoonist self.

Nobody else paints like this.

In one horse’s head, you can see just a handful of the many Ricks that live in those curly white locks.

There’s Rick, the grade-school daydream doodler… sketcher of form.

There’s Rick, the confident manipulator of texture and stroke and chroma, whose seemingly effortless precision with a flick of white highlight captures the soft orb of a horse’s eye with such gentleness and love… That one is where Rick, the student of art for five decades, meets Rick, the complete mushpot lover of animals.

And who uses the color and contour of the underpainting to craft a believable shading of a horse’s neck?

Never seen that one before.

That seems to be one of his own personal magic tricks: knowing when leaving something out—a “helpful” comment, a glance at my ridiculous morning hair, paint—can make a moment more, not less.

Like choosing to leave the strong “earth brown” horizontal stroke of the underpainting to anchor and nourish the bold uprights of mountain sage green—and yellow, and robins egg blue. And just in case the brown needed a little help, let’s lay in some brilliant violet to add some color weight to the blue of that shirt…

There’s Rick, the cartoonist, who believes people can be trusted to fill in the lines for themselves.

It takes a man confident in his inner ‘toonist to pull off a painting technique that allows a galloping horse to escape gravity.

Good guys wear white… unless it’s just a smarty-pants perfect highlighting of the dang hat, and using the tumultuous underpainting stroke direction to indicate both believable arm muscle flex and cloth folds, accurate at a gallop.

I used to ask him if he did things like that on purpose. (That, and outrageously insightful puns, and intelligent questions that jump you directly to the end of the conversation, where the Big Questions of Life live.) He’d humbly answer, “I don’t know how come I come up with these things, honey… I just do.”

I’ve stopped asking, because I believe it now.

Like, he just knew how to encourage the horse’s tail to use pressure against the perpendicular angle energy of the underpainting to help with lift off…

… and how six apparently random skinny white lines above his signature that looks like part of the painting would move the whole thing to “the wild west” in my imagination.

Thanks Rick.