Although it may seem like Duke Beardsley’s lone riders are galloping into the future solo, the Colorado artist imagines three masters in their company. Gustav Klimt, Jasper Johns and Jean-Michel Basquiat join his current series of cowboys in their pursuit of bold new trails.
Ever his own disruptor, Beardsley has added complete unpredictability into the core of his practice. Each painting now begins with a series of thick layers—acrylic paint, modeling paste, glaze. He then assaults this confection of mediums with fire—bubbling, cracking, burning texture into canvas. “I can’t walk away from what appears,” he says. “The surface becomes undeniable.”
Thus he manifests the knife edge between freedom and chaos as a material reality, challenging conditions he must contend with as he adds his signature cowboy iconography into the unwieldy composition.
