Steamboat

TOUGH BY NATURE
Portraits of Cowgirls and Ranch Women of the American West
by Lynda Lanker
Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon, Eugene 2011,
Oregon State University Press
Hard cover 132 pages $39.95
Foreword by Larry McMurtry
Introduction by Sandra Day O’Connor
Afterword by Maya Angelou
Lynda Lanker received her degree in art from Wichita State University
and has lived for the last 34 years in western Oregon. “Tough By Nature”
was published in conjunction with an exhibition that is currently being
shared with museums around the country. With a rare combination of
her own artistic skill and the spoken words of the women she interviewed,
Lanker has recorded the reality of women’s place in the American West.
What began as a collection of landscapes and portraits became a
learning process that drew upon the full resources of the artist’s versatility.
For 19 years, through 13 states, Lynda Lanker journeyed to those outlying
spaces where cowgirls are more than fancy hats and shiny boots. In
charcoal drawings, oil pastels, egg tempera, pastel and pencil, stone and
plate lithography, 49 women take their places in and on the land, letting
the urban-oriented reader stretch into an otherwise unreachable world.
The women speak for themselves.
A fourth-generation New Mexican rancher says, “People who think
cattle are bad for the land don’t know what they’re talking about.”
A 32-year-old wife, mother and rancher tells of the satisfaction of working
with new life and “realizing, at a very young age, that dying is part of the cycle.”
They are modern and traditional, some with master’s degrees, one
creating promotional videos of a successful breeding program, and
another winning awards for excellence in range management.
Lanker’s subjects live where they work. They handle cattle and horses,
work like hired hands and know how to take care of themselves. “Cowgirls”
represent the hundreds of women in the West who run cattle ranches,
compete in rodeos, train horses, take care of families, advocate for the
environment — and their way of life.
“I learned from them, and they changed me … the resilience, character,
and quiet strength of these extraordinary women will be with me forever,”
Lanker says.
THE LOST CHRISTMAS GIFT
by Andrew Beckham
Princeton Architectural Press, New York 2012
Hard cover 40 pages $29.95
“The Lost Christmas Gift” transports readers
to a long-ago time in the mountains of Colorado’s
Western Slope. Two days before Christmas, on a
traditional search for the tree that will be “just right,”
11-year-old Emerson Johansson and his father
become lost during a snowstorm on Rabbit Ears Pass.
The mysterious happenings of the night that
follows are brought to mind again many decades
later, when a package, having been somehow
lost in the mail for 70 years, arrives, ironically, on
December 23.
The old, now brittle paper with its antiquated
postage stamps contains an exquisite gift sent by
Johansson’s father from a place some miles from the
front line of World War II in Europe. Photographs
made by the boy with his new camera during the night
they had shared, pictures thought to be lost those
many years, now reappear, awakening memories.
Present and past overlap, and in the telling, three
points of view create a magical connection with what
has been. The boy, now old and a great-grandfather
of four, recognizes himself in the drawings and
watercolors. A second layer is interwoven through
the pages of the extraordinary gift itself, and finally
author Andrew Beckham entices the reader into
a suspended state of disbelief and a wondrous
Christmas story.
Nine years ago, during his annual ski touring visit
of the backcountry near Rabbit Ears Pass, Beckham
took photographs that would become part of the
story Johansson asked him to write.
Beckham chairs the visual art department at
St. Mary’s Academy in Englewood, and his work is
represented in collections around the country. n
STEAMBOAT MAGAZINE | SKI SEASON 2012/13 | 95