On Desert Slopes

Additional Information

Provenance:
Private collection, Houston, TX

When it came to a Bob Kuhn image, composition was king. Every subject, every color, every form—everything was placed in the composition to the benefit of the image. “I don’t know why I paint animals. All I know is when I was a very little boy, there was something about animals that grabbed hold of me,” he wrote in Profiles in American Art in 1982. “To me, the fun of painting animals is to be the stage manager, the arranger, the fellow who selects out the stuff that doesn’t abet the subject and the mood, and to bring in the things that would enhance the mood. Having the temerity or courage, having figured things out, to bend them or change them when the painting calls for it, is the final test of whether you're functioning as a naturalist or a painter.”

Mountain goats and sheep were common subjects for the artist, who completed many of his best wildlife pieces from his studio in Tucson, Arizona. “To paint mountain sheep one must portray the lofty reaches of their habitat,” he wrote about a similar work in Wild Harvest: The Animal Art of Bob Kuhn. “I know good painters who are obsessed with mountains and paint little else. I love to look at them, and to live at the edge of them, but I’m only a painter of mountains when my animal subjects haul me up (via magic carpet) to their otherwise inaccessible crags and alpine meadows.”

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