Mark Sublette Medicine Man Gallery | January 24-February 8, 2025 |Tucson, AZ

Authentic West

Medicine Man Gallery brings together two authentic artists—Howard Post and Teal Blake.

By Michael Clawson

Plenty of artists know a thing or two about horses, but you could write a hefty tome on horses with the material floating around in the brains of Howard Post and Teal Blake. The two artists bring considerable history to their work: Post, a former rodeo rider, has been around horses his entire life, as has Blake, who occasionally works as a real cowboy and rides with the Cowboy Artists of America. Between the two of them, their Western depictions of horses don’t get much more authentic.

Teal Blake, P. Hayden Bronc Twister, watercolor on original 1900 ledger paper, 14 x 8½ in.

Both artists, who have never shown together before, will be presenting new works in the show Howard Post & Teal Blake: Paintbrush Cowboys, opening January 24 at Medicine Man Gallery in Tucson, Arizona.

On view will be Post’s quiet Western scenes with his unmistakable palette, and Blake’s watercolor works on antique paper. The pieces, almost all of them with horses, show the animal as the cowboy’s companion on the range or a passive subjects in pens.

Howard Post, The Big Pens, oil, 11 x 14 in.

“I guess you could say we’re both involved with horses,” Post says. “Teal’s the real cowboy. He’s still doing it. I’m kind of retired and I don’t have horses anymore…I quit competing a couple years ago. So it’s different for me. But I still admire horses and paint them frequently.”

In The Big Pens, Post paints two pens with horses, but the high-up angle of the scene turns the squarish pens into diamonds joined at their corners, which makes for a pleasing design. “I don’t think that would be allowed by traditional art rules,” Post says, laughing when he’s told that rules are made to be broken. “I guess so. I just like the way the pens were divided in that way, so I just let it roll.”

Howard Post, Turned Out, oil, 11 x 14 in.

For Blake’s P. Hayden Bronc Twister, he paints a bucking horse with a cowboy clinging to a saddle. The painting is on a piece of P. Hayden Saddlery Hardware Co. paper from 1900. Inscribed behind the piece is an inventory on an invoice with a total that seems to read $54.97. Blake has long been a watercolor artist, and recently has seen success with these ledger-like pieces on antique paper. The works tell three stories: what’s on the paper before Blake paints, the painting itself and then the complementary story that both tell together. In P. Hayden Bronc Twister, Blake’s bucking horse adds significant narrative to the saddlery paper.