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November/December 2011
www.aotw.com
For All Fine Art Collectors
24th Anniversary
John DeMott
Back In the Saddle By Barbara Coyner
Against the Painted Sky, oil, 25˝ by 30˝ “I enjoy the great sunsets off my studio deck every evening in the summer. I was thinking of the Colorado skies and cowboys.”
ART of the WEST • November/December 2011
Autumn Splendor oil, 14˝ by 18˝ “This nice bull had come into camp every morning one year up in Teton National Park and put on a show. It was a time I remember well, not just for the great time photographing this handsome bull, but I was in the company of artists Bob Kuhn, Tucker Smith, and Ken Carlson.”
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hen he was 12 years old, John DeMott was invited to visit the home of Western film and music star Roy Rogers. It was a pivotal occasion, and today DeMott regards it as a strong influence in his life and his art. Growing up near Chatsworth, California, with its movie sets and Hollywood flare, the DeMott family lived in the same neighborhood as Rogers and his wife Dale Evans, and young DeMott routinely played with the couple’s children. “We went to a small school, and we’d see Dale drop the kids off in her Lincoln Continental every morning,” he says. “We didn’t hang out with them all the time, or anything like that, but we got to know them.” It was a big day, when DeMott visited the famous couple’s home and saw the Hollywood cowboy’s guns and saddles.
He strives to paint what he calls “the spirit of the Western frontier.” “It was like a museum,” he says. Today DeMott has an expansive studio outfitted with the same Western flare, and he admits that, in a way, such places serve as museums of a bygone era. Fresh from winning a third-place trophy in his division at the Cowboy Mounted Shooting Association’s World Finals in Amarillo, Texas, last year, DeMott continues to burnish his own Western cowboy credentials. It was his first time competing nationally in the event, which pairs riding and shooting skills in one exciting competition. “I took to the sport like I’d been doing it all my life,” says the 57-year-old Colorado painter. “I grew up around animals and wildlife and
November/December 2011 • ART of the WEST
Robbin’s Pond, oil, 16˝ by 12˝ “It always amazes me what you get out of painting outdoors and from life. This is a special place in Utah.”
Last Light Bison, oil, 25˝ by 30˝ “This was on a trip taken last spring to the Tetons. The beautiful greens this time of year, with the warm contrast of the buffalo back lit against the Tetons, inspired me.”
watching all the old westerns,” he says of his years living on California horse ranches, where his father was a horse trainer. “Guns and saddles have always been fascinating to me.” While a lot of kids ride horses and even draw horses for fun, when they are young, DeMott had a more intimate look at the cowboy life. His father, raised in an Italian immigrant family of 12 children, dreamed of escaping the modest family farm near Denver, Colorado, and heading to California. A more exciting lifestyle beckoned, and the natural-born musician leaned on his ability to play several instruments, as he sold accordion lessons door to door to pay the rent. He met John’s mother that way and, as the DeMott family grew, the senior DeMott found a way to get into horse training, working for a variety of ranches. Horse racing came to be part of the family’s lifestyle, and young DeMott met legendary jockeys, including Willie Shoemaker and Johnny Longden. He got to know horses and Western ways, as well, and fixated on riding, shooting, and wandering the vast outdoors, often expressing himself in drawings. At school, he squirmed at being forced to be indoors.
November/December 2011 • ART of the WEST
“I had my own mind, and I was always drawing,” DeMott says. “I wish now that I’d paid more attention in history, because so much of my art revolves around that. I just wasn’t much good at school, unless it involved sports or talents. In the shop classes, while others were turning out tool boxes, I was making brass roses and sailboats.” He also was paying a lot of attention to a young lady named Cindy, the girl he eventually married in 1973. As for the metal art, it morphed into an actual business, after DeMott initially sold metal sculptures at the beach and later parlayed it into a full-fledged entrepreneurial venture. At age 18, he was running a factory with dozens of employees and
marketing a full gift line of his creations to major department stores throughout the country. “I had early success in business,” he says, noting that he sold out to his older brother in the ‘70s. Known for his dramatic paintings of historical events and figures and his accurate portrayals of cowboys, Indians, wildlife, and Western landscape, DeMott’s art education was anything but formal. After selling the metal sculpture business, he and Cindy promptly moved to Big Bear Lake in the mountains above San Bernardino. “We had a cabin on the lake, and I pretty much taught myself to paint,” DeMott says, describing his studio as not much more than a garden
ART of the WEST • November/December 2011
Pride of the Plains, oil, 12˝ by 16˝ “Nothing inspires me more than the stories in the face of an American Indian.”
shed. “We’d taken a trip all over the West and had looked at museums and galleries. We were getting royalty income off the gift business, so I was free of that worry. I pretty much forced myself to learn to paint. I studied and found I had a knack for seeing things in art. I had no formal training, and it was mostly hard work, starting at the bottom and working my way up. I did street shows at the start.” At one of those street shows, DeMott met established artist Richard Thomas, who encouraged
End of An Era, oil, 30˝ by 40˝ “I did this painting for the Buffalo Bill 30th Anniversary Show. Buffalo Bill Cody was one of the most noted figures around the world at the turn of the century; he was America’s first celebrity. The end of the Buffalo Bill Wild West Shows truly marked the end of the American West as it was.”
him to keep painting. By the late ‘70s, DeMott had earned a first place award in watercolors at the annual art show at Death Valley. Emboldened, he took his creations to the George Phippen Show in Prescott, Arizona, and, pleased with those results, he hit the galleries in Scottsdale. “I was pretty brave,” DeMott says now, admitting that he didn’t get quite the results he wanted at the start. Eventually, he landed a
“A hundred years from now, people can then see how it was. This was our heritage.” gallery and has since shown his work in several well-known galleries throughout the West. He even had his own gallery in Vail, Colorado, for 15 years, closing it a couple of years ago, when the economy soured. The road to success seemed to grow wider, when DeMott moved his family to Loveland, Colorado, in 1991. Painting with such Western greats as Richard Schmid and Clyde Aspevig, he benefited from the company of other artists and did his share of plein air painting. Cindy tended the home front, raising the couple’s three daughters, training horses,
and running a business selling her husband’s prints. She started a little art show for the locals, as well, with the endeavor eventually evolving into the gallery in Vail, which was run by the couple’s son-in-law. Meanwhile, DeMott painted with enthusiasm, sometimes staging huge mockups for his larger paintings. That meant scouring museums and locations for just the right subject, then developing costumes and settings to pull the look together. It was akin to a Hollywood production in intensity, and DeMott focused on the lifelike accuracy of his subjects.
November/December 2011 • ART of the WEST
The Silent Hunter, oil, 12˝ by 24˝ “The silent approach from the water in a canoe proved successful on this hunt.”
“I’d get a vision, work it out in my mind, and then get the models and costumes,” he says. “A hundred years from now, people can then see how it was. This was our heritage.” Obsessed with details of dress, scenery, and expression, DeMott admits he is still most enthralled when he can paint large and assemble the actors and the look from a bygone era. He strives to paint what he calls “the spirit of the Western frontier.” Despite the rosy outcomes in the art world, DeMott couldn’t envision the personal heartache coming his way three years ago. He and Cindy, married for nearly 40 years, were drifting apart. Caught up in the web of separate interests and a tanking economy, the couple separated. “I’ve been three years on the dark side,” DeMott says. “Those were the worst years of my life. I kept painting, but I wasn’t turning out my best work. I’d like to say that I just poured myself into my work during that time, but I was just forcing
myself to paint. It’s been a very humbling experience, but in a nutshell, it’s taken me where I am today. Sometimes you have to go through things to get where you’re at now; they’re building blocks.” Getting to today has brought DeMott to a new energy, and he claims he’s painting a lot more now. “I have a 3,000-square-foot studio on a 10-acre lake, and it’s the number one bird-watching area around,” he says. “There are horses and an arena. I can see something on the horizon, almost a dude ranch, almost like being on a movie set.” DeMott is filled with enthusiasm as he talks bold about new paintings, grand paintings, paintings that will use the vast collection of costumes he’s designed. He imagines assembling dozens of models for the big paintings, bringing out the old muzzle loaders, furs, feathers, and moccasins, and staging it all for a grand creation worthy of hanging in a national gallery.
ART of the WEST • November/December 2011
“It’s an interesting life, certainly not boring,” DeMott says. “I’m thinking on a grand scale. This year, so far, I’ve painted more paintings than I’d painted during the past three years, and my work is selling. I’m experimenting more and painting to please myself instead of just painting to please the galleries. I am definitely back in the saddle again.”
Barbara Coyner is a writer living in Princeton, Idaho.