GRETCHEN SAMMIS, 1997, STONE LITHOGRAPH
LINDA JARRAD, 1999, STONE LITHOGRAPH
The 1993 engraving of Lois Stevenson, with cattle from
her Eugene-area Knee Deep Cattle Company in the back-
ground, goes another route in its depiction of a strong woman
of the West. The drypoint engraving uses that medium’s
characteristic blurred lines to create another, less detailed but
equally personal image of a strong woman, looking directly
into your eyes. More than half the portraits in “Tough by
Nature,” like this engraving, are black and white.
“I love black and white,” Lanker says. “It has a certain
level of abstraction. I think it shows character particularly
well.” Color can be distracting, she says. “You have to have
a reason to use color.”
Lanker admits that she didn’t realize at first how unusual
it is for a portrait artist to work in such a diversity of media.
“Part of it is keeping myself
challenged,” she says.
Her portrait
of cowboy poet
Georgie Sicking is
a 16-by 20-inch egg
tempera, while
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LYNDA LANKER, PHOTO BY BRIAN LANKER
some of her charcoals, including one of barrel racer Jenna
Johnson of Oregon’s Warm Springs Indian Reservation, are
36 by 66 inches wide.
“It’s five-and-a-half feet wide.” Lanker says, gesturing
to one of her broad charcoals. “You can immerse yourself
in it. The size is kind of exhilarating.”
Stevenson, in an oral history interview that accompanies
her portrait in the book, voices the concerns many of the
women ranchers shared with Lanker, saying “I don’t agree
with the problems environmentalists have with ranching
because I think we are environmentalists as well as
anybody. Most ranchers have to take care of the land. I
mean it’s how they make their living.”
Lanker agrees. “All the people I dealt with are very
careful about the land,” she says, adding that, that ranchers
are “pretty much demonized” by some — not all
— environmental groups. “It’s such a treasured way of life
to them,” Lanker says. “They love being outside on a horse
with the sky overhead.”
Stevenson’s Knee Deep Cattle Company is known these
days for its certified humane, grass-fed, free-range cattle.
The animals are herded on horseback, with the family’s
border collies and on Honda four-wheelers. Stevenson will
participate in August in a panel on land use and
preservation as part of the JSMA exhibit.
It’s not hard to see how Lanker’s project became
not just paintings but oral history. Petite, with graying
hair and a charming smile, she doesn’t just answer
questions about her art; she converses, asks
questions herself. Lanker is interested in the
women she depicts not simply as objects of art, but
as people and as a culture. She says that the idea to start
recording her conversations with the cowgirls and ranch
women came from her husband, Brian Lanker, after she
would come home from her trips around the West and tell
him about the lives of the women she was working with.
Another theme that permeates through Lanker’s
paintings and interviews is the mingled pleasure and pain
Ranch Women
and Cowgirls
Tell their Stories
2 pm Sunday, July 1
With bull rider Jonnie
Jonckowski, Eugene-
based Eastern Oregon
ranch-owner Susie Papé,
cowboy poet Georgia
Sicking and local rancher
Lois Stevenson
PA N E L :
BEV WALTER, 2004, STONE LITHOGRAPH
of ranch and rodeo life. “I’ve walked out of the arena with
broken legs before,” two-time women’s world champion
bull rider Jonnie Jonckowski told Lanker, “because the
crowd gets so flattened if a gal gets hurt.”
Still others tell of raising children and of warming frozen
calves in the kitchen, and Lanker’s portraits show them
with their working dogs, their horses, their trucks and their
kids. Some of them look tired, others pensive and still
others purely joyful.
And tied to the topic of what is the highest and best use
of the last of America’s open spaces are the worries the
women voice about losing their ranches to development or
to large corporations that raise animals on feedlots instead
of on the range.
“Ranching isn’t about to die, because of demand for the
product,” Elizabeth “Bet” Kettle, who raises Hereford cattle
in Colorado, told Lanker as she sat for her portrait in 2007.
“But the future of ranching will be big ranches,
agribusinesses.”
Lanker also knows about loss, if not the loss of the
land. “I’m an urban person,” she says. “I’d never been on
a ranch or a farm.” She’s survived the loss of a loved
one. Her husband, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer
Brian Lanker died while work for the exhibit was still
under way.
“He was so supportive,” Lynda Lanker says. “At the
beginning of 2011 he said ‘This is my project for the year.’”
But Brian Lanker died in March of that year, though not
until after he had designed a mock-up of the book for the
show, and asked McMurtry, Maya Angelou and retired
Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor to write
pieces for it.
“He had the vision,” Lanker says of her husband. “He
was definitely my biggest fan.”
Now that her nearly two-decade project has wrapped up,
Lanker says her next work is a commissioned portrait — a
lithograph of Betty Roberts, the first woman justice on the
Oregon Supreme Court.
ew
A RT I ST TA L K :
MUSEUM AFTER HOURS:
Lynda Lanker
2 pm Saturday, July 7
Hoedown and Film
6 pm Wednesday,
August 8, $5;
free for members
Dancing, film and tours of
the museum; free outdoor
screening of Cat Ballou at
9:30 pm
Family Art Round-Up
1 pm Saturday, July 14
Explore the West in
“Tough by Nature” and
make “cowhide” paintings
and wire sculpture
horses.
Land Use and
Preservation
5:30 pm Thursday,
August 9
With Gerda Hyde, Billie
Roney and Lois
Stevenson
PA N E L :
EUGENE WEEKLY MAY 31, 2012 13