Ol’ Max Evans Tells Literary Stories in Paintings and Drawings
By Johnny D. Boggs

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Four numbered artist prints, crisply told in stark black-and-white from the watercolor and ink originals created more than a half-century ago, tell the story of the working cowboy’s West — at least, Max Evans’s vision of the working cowboy’s West.

And few, if any, have ever argued with Max Evans’s vision.

Today, he’s best-known as a writer, author of The Rounders and The Hi Lo Country (both turned into critically acclaimed movies), the irascible rapscallion who once broke director Sam Peckinpah’s ankle — “I was trying to break his neck.” — (Evans had a small role in Peckinpah’s The Ballad of Cable Hogue), winner of multiple Spur Awards, multiple Western Heritage Wrangler Awards and the 1990 Levi Strauss Saddleman Award for lifetime achievement in Western literature. He’s also the subject of Slim Randles’ biography, Ol’ Max Evans: The First Thousand Years.

During ten centuries of living (in Max Evans years), he has done it all: working cowboy, soldier (he hit Omaha Beach on June 7, 1944), miner, actor, mystic, but mostly, writer. Yet before he became a literary icon, Evans was an artist in Taos, New Mexico. His knowledge of cowboys is quite evident in the numbered series of prints. Evans describes his creations:

Late For Supper: A weary cowhand rides to the bunkhouse in late night. “Working cowboys like this one because they know how that ol’ boy feels.”

In My Valley: A mystical city rises on a cowboy’s once-spartan ranchland. “That was a prediction I had 57 years ago: the building up all around the ranches. I had this vision of what was going to happen to the ranches.”

Look Out Ma!: A mare strains against barbed wire to eat hay during a snowstorm while her colt stands guard. “I actually saw this on my way from Taos. It was cold, and this late colt was just watching me, like he was protecting his mama.”

Bustin’ Drifts: A cowboy herds along a cow, all weary from being pounded by snow and wind. “I did a lot of this myself, cowboying on Glorieta Mesa and up in the Hi Lo Country,” the name he gave mostly northeastern New Mexico because of the landscape and a popular poker game.

Born in Ropes, Texas, in 1925, Evans arrived in Taos in 1949 with this vague idea of becoming an artist. “I don’t have any idea how I got interested in art,” he says. “As a little kid, I was always sketching or drawing something, but I’d had only three art lessons in my whole life.” He brought one painting, a World War II scene titled Normandy Night Fire. The expressionistic oil-on-canvas not only was accepted into a juried art show, it won the honored placement alongside several “Taos masters.”

Eventually, he met Potawatomi Indian artist Woody Crumbo, who became Evans’s mentor. Honing his craft, Evans learned to mix mediums and take chances, which he would also learn to do in his fiction.

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