A Fellow Texan Is One Of Our Best Western Artists

Howdy folks and greetings from the Great Plains of North Texas!

I was delighted to find out that one of my favorite Western artists lives just a couple hours South of us here in Texas. He's from Clifton and has stayed there though his painting career although he travels alot doing research of course.

His paintings are very historically accurate and he does Cowboy as well as Indian paintings.

Very savvy Sir Grelle

His story is very cool because he became interested in Western art while he was in high school and at the age of 18 he contacted two famous western artists, James Boren and Melvin Warren for their advice and criticism.

What's amazing is they just happened to settle down in the Clifton area. By the time he was in his early 20's he was able to make a fulltime living painting Western scenes and is still going strong today and lives on a ranch outside of Clifton. Talk about a dream job!

Simple but brilliant

I wanted to share one of his paintings that grabbed my attention. This one is called Valley Guardian. Obviously it is of a warrior who is on guard duty for his village on an early morning winter day.

The way his body and horse is lit up by the sun's rays is incredible and that makes a magnificent contrast in colors to the mountains in the background, it highlights the warrior and his horse beautifully and the details like the horse's breath in the cold air is perfect.

I don't think I've ever seen an Indian wearing gloves before too so that's interesting as well. It's a simple but beautiful painting.

"Valley Guardian" by Martin Grelle:

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Something else that makes Mr. Grelle interesting is that he is part Indian himself and uses family members or relatives as models in some of his paintings! This next piece is such a painting. His model is a relative.

This gorgeous artwork is called "With Wonder She Waits" and is of a wife waiting for her husband to come back to her.

"With Wonder She Waits" by Martin Grelle

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Mr. Grelle gives generously of his time and resources to help others including conducting workshops and guiding other young artists. He gives credit to God for his gift and is dedicated to sharing it and helping as many people as he can.

Kudos to you sir, you are a great American and a great Texan!

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Thanks for reading folks, God bless you all!
-jonboy
Texas

"The value of experience is not in seeing much, but in seeing wisely." -Martin Grelle