Statues are great for plein air painting for several reasons. The sculptor already did the hard work planning the composition, posing the subjects and giving them something meaningful to do. The bronze surfaces catch the light evenly, whatever the weather. The colors are monochromatic and can be painted with a very limited palette. And statues don’t move an inch as you are working. The biggest downside is that statues lack a sense of movement and energy. They look like . . . statues. The really well done works skip over that leaden quality entirely and come to life. You know them when you see them.
One of my favorite statues in Austin where I live does just that. The Cowboy Monument is located on the grounds of the Texas State Capitol building. The building itself is impressive, and thankfully the legislators were elsewhere the Saturday morning I went there to paint. The Capitol grounds are a beautiful place. The landscape architects did an outstanding job and created a peaceful, green place at the north end of the booming downtown. There are carefully tended trees from all corners of the state. It comes off as a shady, serene park with a heavy dollop of security presence.
Statues and monuments are everywhere on the Capitol grounds and always have been. For my money, the Cowboy monument is by far the best of the lot. I have loved this statue since 
I was a little kid and saw a color photo of it in the World Book Encyclopedia, long before I moved to town. The lively image of the bucking stallion tossing the rider as he waves his hat and hangs on has been in my mind for most of my life. To me, the Cowboy Monument just screams TEXAS!
A young female sculptor 
from New York living in Paris, Constance Whitney Warren, created this fantastic piece in the early 1920s. The complicated technique she used, lost wax casting, is something they don’t do much anymore for large, bronze equestrian statues. They certainly don’t do it as finely as Warren did. She came from a rich family and probably was not expected to do much with her life, other than marry well. But she botched that and made beautiful art. I don’t know how she acquired it but Warren had a spot on understanding of horse anatomy and the muscles that hold the animal together. You can almost hear the stallion bellow and smell the sweaty leather straps. The angry horse appears to lift off the ground, tangled in a thorny cactus. That cowboy really should have looked where he was going. The overall effect is balance, movement and grace.
I am not sure Warren ever visited Texas and likely never saw a real cowboy and his horse in action. The horse’s tack and the rider’s outfit do not look entirely authentic, to me. The cowboy is wearing thick woolie chaps, has no lariat and wears the bland expression of Woodrow Wilson.
Warren modeled the rider after a popular silent movie star who was huge at the time. That was entirely fitting. By the 1920s, the short-lived cowboy era was over. The famous cattle drives were history, the range was all fenced in and no settlers had been scalped for nearly 50 years. Then and now, most of what people knew about the Texas cowboy was a myth that only became popular when the era was ending. That’s when creative people began to write stories about it, make movies and create fine art like Warren’s sculpture.
Her sculpture won a prize overseas and she ended up donating it to the state of Texas 100 years ago. That was a good thing to do and the Capitol grounds were the perfect place for the big bronze statue. The states of Oklahoma and Arizona got Warren pieces, too. When the cowboy statue was unpacked from it’s French shipping crate in Austin, I am sure there were critics. At the time, the governor and others may have noted the cowboy carried no firearm. That item appears to have been a standard requirement for any statue on the Capitol grounds, at least until the Pioneer Woman statue was put up a few years ago (she holds a baby instead of a gun). From what I read, the unveiling of the Cowboy Monument in March 1925 was not much of an event. I found no photos of the day and Warren may not have been there. That’s a pity because her statue has outlived everyone who attended the event that day, and just about everyone around then who did not.
I set up my chair a few yards away from the concrete base of the statue to paint, using 5 colors of water-based gouache on card stock. The sky was threatening to rain and a few drops fell and left marks on the gouache. As I tried to capture the moment, the squirrels collected pecans, grackles squawked nearby, workers banged on the new copper roof for the Capitol building and mosquitoes did what they always do to me. The horse and cowboy stood there perfectly still, suspended in time for a century now. That poor pony will never get over the cactus.
