Under a lavender sun…
Chroma Cowboys bucks the masculine mythos of the American West and recasts it in a high-chroma, feminine color. This vocabulary destabilizes the visual canon of the Wild West and the expected aesthetics of rugged conquest.
Outpost Companions
Chroma Cowboy
Family Portrait
Neon Buck
Young Cowboy
Colorful digital portrait of a man in vintage western clothing with a large hat, vest, and patterned pants, holding a red bandana, against a teal background.
A colorful painting of a woman wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a blue vest with embroidery, set against a pink sky with a desert landscape in the background.
Colorful painting of a man with a mustache and goatee, wearing glasses, a large hat, a scarf, and a jacket, smoking a pipe against an orange background.
A colorful drawing of a man wearing a hat, with his arms crossed, standing outdoors with a sunset and trees in the background.
Stylized colorful portrait of a man with a hat, mustache, and overalls holding a stick or staff, against a pink background.
A colorful digital painting of a man wearing a wide-brimmed hat, a brown jacket, a vest, and a green tie, against a blue background.
An illustration of two men wearing cowboy hats and white shirts, playing guitars and a violin, against a purple background.
Painting of a man sitting on a chair, holding a banjo with dollar bills on the headstock, wearing a brown hat, white shirt, blue vest with pink flowers, and green pants, against a solid blue background.
Colorful painting of a cowboy riding a bucking horse through a grassy landscape at sunset.
A colorful painting of a person riding a horse through a landscape with mountains in the background.
Colorful painting of two cowboys riding horses in a grassy field, with mountains and stormy clouds in the background.
Colorful painting of a man riding a bucking brown horse, holding a lasso and wearing a cowboy hat, with a cloudy sky and some greenery in the background.
A colorful painting depicts a late 1800s or early 1900s outdoor scene at dusk featuring a saloon, general store, and people and horses gathered outside. The sky is vibrant with orange, purple, and green hues.
Colorful painting of a cowboy riding a bucking bronco, set against a pink and purple sky with clouds, and green grass in the foreground.
Chroma Cowboys takes on one of America’s most enduring emblems—the cowboy.
For generations this heroic figure has been cast in raw umber dust, burnt sienna leather, and graphite grit: a masculine archetype of endurance, conquest, and self-determination. People have immigrated to America chasing those same ideals—freedom, expansion, reinvention—turning the cowboy into both national symbol and a global telos.
Now the iconic cowboy is subverted. At first the paintings echo stock photographs of the West—familiar and immediately legible—but that accessibility conceals a fiction: the American West we know was more fantasy than history, where the myth rode taller than fact.
Now rendered in feminine-coded palettes—saturated magentas and pastel lavenders—the color doesn’t reject earth tones; it collaborates with them. Lined ornamentation is a strategy and softness is a form of defiance. Through pastel lines the cowboy is redrawn—not to erase masculinity—but to extol femininity that carries endurance, expansion, and a steady focus–the very ideals that the American West was built upon.
By stripping inherited visual codes of American Western iconography, Chroma Cowboys opens room for alternate narratives in which identity remains in flux. Color becomes the agent of revision—collapsing binaries, destabilizing archetypes, and with gritty lines the cowboy is drawn anew.