(Walter Piehl) I want people to know how fast a brushstroke was put on, or that paint is a fluid medium, that it drips, and it splatters, and those aren't collateral damage; drips and splatters oftentimes are collateral enhancements.

(woman) Funding provided by the North Dakota Council on the Arts, and the members of Prairie Public.

[mandolin & piano play] (Walter) I want them to look like they were done in a frenzy of activity, that the paint was applied with great energy, and that it was maybe done in an hour or so, but the truth is most of them probably take 6, 8, 10 hours because there's a lot of looking at it.

This is where you get into trouble.

You make a big mess, you make a big chaos often on the canvas then you've got to come back and bring it back and get rid of the parts that aren't working and keep the parts that are, and that is where your intuition as a painter, as a designer, as an artist, as a person involved with the concept has to enter into it, and that is the mystery of painting for me-- solving that problem.

If I knew what these things were going to look like when I started them I would never paint them.

There'd be no challenge in that for me.

There are other people that know exactly what they want, and that's fine-- their art is just as good as mine; it's just different.

It's exciting because I don't know where it's going to go.

Some are more abstract than others.

Some get pushed too far.

I should've stopped earlier, but I'm okay with it.

Some of them maybe I could work a little more, but I'm not sure and I leave them that way.

I don't know; there is no recipe for it.

Every one is different.

Even if the subject matter and the composition may look very similar, there will be enough differences in there to keep me interested in it.

I think I could start 20, 30, 40 paintings of exactly the same basic drawing and I wouldn't be bored with it because every one is going to be different in enough of a way to keep me interested in solving that problem.

(woman) I think of Walter as being like Matisse and Jackson Pollock in North Dakota.

With his interest in color, line, expression, action painting.

I think he really is a treasure of this area.

I think his significance isn't as much about the work as what he's given to the art community in his teaching and just support of art in a state that really doesn't support art a lot.

Walter Piehl broke the mold.

He's not a traditional artist, but he is a guy who knows a lot about the Western lifestyle.

He can conceptualize and he can put that idea on canvas, and he can make it sing, and a lot of people may not like the kind of art that he does, but once they look at it and look at it long and hard and they notice that detail and the vibrancy of it, they become Walter Piehl fans too.

He's one of a kind, and he's our own; he's a North Dakotan.

(Walter) I will always be a painter of Western Americana in some form or another.

The horse culture, the ranching culture, the cattle and horse culture was always so important to me.

As a kid, it was part of my fantasy.

It was part of my everyday life.

Pursuing art and pursuing that subject matter, which was so important to me, naturally led me into all sorts of themes of the wild West, of the tame West, of the rodeo, of historic West.

When he started painting things from his life, from rodeo, from horses and riders, I think it really freed him up as an artist.

"The Sweetheart of the Rodeo" was I think a breakthrough for him, and it was inspired by the old Byrds album and Jo Mora who's a Californian artist who did those posters that the Byrds drew that title from for their album.

So he would use that title, "Sweetheart of the Rodeo," and did a long series of paintings that would incorporate hearts and bucking horses.

He understands the subject that he is painting very, very well.

He just doesn't sit there and conger up something and look at a book and come up with a picture and say hey, we'll transfer this to canvas.

He has actually seen the images that he puts on that canvas, and it shows.

(Dan Jones) Most good art shows the artist's life, and the whole rodeo experience has been such a huge part of Walter's life since when he was young.

It brings such an honesty to his work.

Hey, hey!

Walter Piehl is a cowboy at heart.

He grew up that way with his dad who was a rodeo producer and had rough stock.

They took horses and bulls and what have you around to rodeos in parts of North Dakota.

I was in college when we started doing it, and I was teaching in college here in Minot at the end of that period, then we got out of it, but I continued on as a rodeo announcer, and my sons got into rodeo in a very big way, especially in the rough stock.

Both were I think quite good saddle bronc riders.

(Shadd) Most of the paintings that he did that maybe were inspired by me, it was wrecks.

So it was a guy getting thrown off a horse rather than, let's say riding them, or having a horse come over top on him or something and falling on him, and I always wondered why he didn't put me in a painting where I was actually riding instead of getting thrown off one.

Oftentimes that stuff will come into maybe the certain pose of the rider.

Or what a particular horse did on a certain trip will maybe end up in the work, and he will rework different horses and bucking patterns and different riders, I think, over and over again and recycle them in different ways.

(male announcer) There you go, partner!

(Dan Jones) I've heard some people say that they're all the same, he keeps doing the same thing over and over, but they're really not.

He told me once that they change for him, the mood of the pieces change, and he said it usually has to do with whether or not his sons are actually riding in rodeos at the time.

When his kids are involved in the rodeo, when they're out riding bulls and horses, there's a certain kind of anger that comes into the poses of the horses, and they're angrier, and when his kids aren't, then it softens somewhat.

(Walter) Well, I was born in Marion, North Dakota, in a small town on a livestock and grain farm operation without electricity, without running water, indoor plumbing like so many rural kids of my generation.

My family was small.

I was the oldest of 3 children.

Those were a very tough first few years living out all by myself, out on that farm.

I craved childhood companionship, so going to church on Sunday and any social event where I could get together with my cousins was the highlight of my life.

But it also made my imagination very strong because I was always outside hunting, in my own mind, or playing war games, and/or investigating nature.

One of the things that I did for my entertainment was draw, and I can remember filling up tablet after tablet of these blue-lined newsprint school tablets with drawings of heroic cowboys and Indians, of scenes of war, of airplanes, of tanks, of battles, all those things, which I had heard about.

Drawing and imagery always did interest me, and so when it came time to think about going to college, and I wanted to go to college because I wanted to get out of the haystack, I knew there was more world out there, and even though I loved the horse angle, the cattle angle of where I was at, I wanted something more.

A friend of mine had gone to Concordia.

He knew I liked art because I was one of those guys that was picked out as-- well, he's the class artist, he can draw--there were a couple of us that could draw things.

So we did little drawings for the school paper, or posters or something.

Jim said "Well there's a good art department at Concordia."

That was as much as I knew about it, and I thought well okay, that's a good place to go.

My folks liked the idea of Concordia also.

So I went there and that was a terrific shock to me going from this small town, a class of 10 in graduating, and then being put on a college campus with students who had had an art education from preschool, kindergarten, all the way through.

So many of them were the equivalent of graduate school artists by the time they came to an undergraduate school.

I was the equivalent of junior high or lower so there was a bit of a shock there, and the only thing going for me was that I was stubborn.

I didn't want to go back to the haystack, not right away anyway, so I hung around, not understanding a lot of what they were trying to teach me.

Cy Running, my major professor there, was a wonderful teacher.

I was not a good student because I was resistant, I think, to a lot of his concepts, but the technical part of it, the design part of it, the thoughts of composition that he was so good at teaching, I took those to heart, and I got through Concordia.

It was a good school and gave me a great foundation, but I felt very incomplete as an artist, and I decided I needed more art training before I went out to teach, or even as an artist, I felt very unfulfilled.

So I went to UND graduate school.

I'm surprised they even allowed me in; I had such a weak portfolio.

(male announcer) It's gonna be a nice day out.

One of the instructors there said "We hear that you go to rodeos on weekends," and I said "Yeah, my family's involved in rodeos."

He said, "Well, why aren't you using that as a subject matter?"

My reply was "I didn't think it could work.

I thought cowboys were inappropriate.

They're too romantic; they're too full of adventure in a bad way."

He said "No that's not true-- Any subject is appropriate, and if you want to paint that, you should paint that."

He said "It would be better than seeing you continue to paint those lame and insipid landscapes."

That was a tough pill to swallow, but I knew the limits of what I was doing also, and I looked at that as a challenge because I did want to paint those things.

Cy Running really cautioned me against going anything that way, that it would be too sentimental, but this instructor, Dave Brown was his name, said "You can paint this subject, but you have to find your own voice, you have to find your own way."

So I looked to art history for people painting in styles that I thought I could somehow appropriate into the subject of rodeo and say what I wanted to say.

His work really is the study of line and shape and movement and composition.

I think he has really successfully merged elements that artists have been interested in in the 20th century-- light color, bringing bright colors in and colors that weren't the true colors of objects.

The part about rodeo that was the most obvious to me was the action part, the bucking horses, the bucking bulls, the dynamics of horse and rider, and so I looked to the Italian futurists of the early 1900's.

They took cubism and they applied it to moving subjects.

Also, I looked to the abstract expressionists of the New York School of Abstraction, also sometimes known as the action painters, who felt that the way in which the artist applies the paint to the canvas is important to the look of the finished work, that the energy that the artist brings to the paint application should also be communicated to the viewer in the end.

That was important to me.

And so when I paint, I want people to look at it and say wow, it looks like he did that application of paint with big brushes and a lot of energy, which hopefully enhances the movement of the subject also, and the energy of the subject.

I no longer really paint in a futurist, cubist style, but I do use some of the same devices that the cubists and the futurists use, which would be multiple imagery.

1, 2, 3, 4.

I might have a horse with 6, 8, 10 legs, 2 or 3 heads that might be visible in here as this horse is moving through space, as the rider is moving through space.

If you go back to Muybridge who did the photographs, where first you have a foot here and then a foot here and a foot here and a foot here, that's what Walter is doing, and you have to learn to read his paintings.

Once you learn to read them, you see what's happening, and there seems to always be, in the best paintings, a rotation of movement.

He also likes the diagonal, which brings a strong sense of movement to the painting.

His drawing is very quick, and he races as he pleases.

You have a sense of freshness about it.

It's not labored, it's quickly executed, and again, that contributes to his motion.

(Walter) The process involves a chalk drawing with colored chalk.

I'll do a basic composition.

After that, I will go into it with a dark linear painted outline of that to refine that a little bit, to make changes, to give myself something to go by, something that will still show through the first applications of paint.

And then, generally speaking, I go to the most fun part, that really spontaneous primary application of paint where I am applying paint with great abandon, where the energy, most of the energy, will come into the canvas.

The lines went down with a gesture, and the paint is going on with a gesture as well.

Then I let that dry.

Then I go back into it and see what I can do to resolve it, to get rid of the bad stuff, keep the good stuff.

After that, it's mostly fine-tuning adjustments.

As this rider moves through space, we'll see this green repeating.

I like polka dots, and I like angular patterns on shirts for my riders; they add action.

I want to see details in my paintings, but I want them to be very, very abstract in the same way.

I don't like the idea that somebody could walk to the painting the first time and just identify everything in there.

I want them to find the paintings reveal themselves as they look at them several times perhaps, that it's not easy for them.

Well, do you see any of the image in this one, folks?

My favorite paintings that I do are ones that are more abstract, but my tendency to be fussy, I think causes me many times to go back and work on paintings more than I should.

I take them too far.

Some parts of it, I might've gone a little too far, and I may regret it a little bit now, but in the end it may be just fine.

Oftentimes as a painter and as a teacher, you have to talk to students about knowing when to quit on a painting.

I have no doubt you can probably take it and make a really nice painting out of it, but it is a really nice painting right now.

They have such a strong mental image of what they think this thing is to look like that they give up some wonderful, fresh, spontaneous, simple images to begin with.

You have to recognize when you have something that's good and stop on it at that point, even if it doesn't match that mental image that you have for an idea of what I want to do on this painting.

I always tell students, if you've got a good thing going there after working on it a half hour or an hour, set it aside.

If you have a mental image that you want to pursue, do another painting; do 6 more paintings.

Taking a painting too far is the easy thing; recognizing when to stop on it-- that's the difficult part.

He has never dropped his own artwork.

He has continued to pursue it and pursue it and pursue it, and it's very seldom that someone in North Dakota will continue doing that.

Usually people take teaching jobs and they become teachers instead of artists, and Walter always remained an artist and a teacher.

(Walter) Sometimes I'm an artist teacher; sometimes I'm a teacher artist.

I've been here since 1970.

I've taught almost every discipline or subject, however you want to call it, from art appreciation to sculpture, 2-dimensional, 3-dimensional drawing, printmaking, basic design.

I've been very fortunate the last few years that I've been able to specialize in those areas that I really am better prepared to teach and also love to teach, drawing and painting.

I see more contrast.

Most good abstract painters come out of a formal background where they learn how to draw first, and I think the good ones have that underlying structure in their abstract painting.

Some of these students come from small towns where they've never had an art class.

They were like me; maybe liked to draw and paint as a kid to entertain themselves with it, and they come here with a totally different notion, or no notion, except that they like to do it, and I can really identify with that because of my own background and lack of formal training.

(Shadd) He takes a lot of pride in teaching, and I think he keeps finding new reasons to be engaged and draws a lot of energy, I think, from working with students and working with people in those creative settings.

(Walter) What do you think about this one as a finished piece?

Giving them the freedom to find a subject matter that is important to them, giving them the luxury of finding a technique they can apply to that subject matter, I think that's what the big picture is for me and what I want to see come out of students in my classes.

This is such nice painting here.

I also have not seen students coming out making work like Walter makes, and that's a sign of a terrific art teacher.

I think Walter is driven by an inner need to make art.

I think he's at peace when he's doing it.

I think his life is fulfilled by doing it.

I think when he's not working, he's not as happy.

He truly is driven by the process.

That drive, in a sense maybe sets him apart from a lot of artists I've known because he's in a studio, and that's what he does.

(Walter) Going to the studio is a lonely business.

A lot of people think art is an exciting business, and it maybe has its moments that way, but when it comes down to it, unless you're Andy Warhol and you're working in the factory with 50 people making your art for you, feeding you ideas and you selecting or not selecting, I go there and I work alone, and a lot of people can't handle that; they don't like that.

They want the camaraderie that they had in class.

They want the social life that they had as an art student; they get out there and they have to go make this stuff all by themselves, they have nobody to talk to, and they quit making it.

So it's not an easy thing; it's a lonely place.

I think one of the things that has helped Walter is, he has a wonderful marriage.

I met her at the pencil sharpener in the first grade at Marion public school.

It's my first memory of Becky, Becky Bartch is her family name, and we started first grade together and started dating in high school and continued as a couple off and on through the years.

Got married after, when I graduated from Concordia.

We have 2 older sons and 2 younger daughters.

The 2 of them have made a terrific marriage, and I think that has helped him in that it's given him the stability that an artist sometimes needs to really pursue their own work.

[guitar & bass play] (Walter) The reason we started that place is because it was an interesting building.

Love this old building that was probably gonna get torn down.

(Walter) It is the oldest wood frame construction business left in downtown Minot-- it's over 100 years old.

And we could decorate it and do something with it to make it an interesting social place.

(Laurel) The bar looks like his home; it's full of artwork.

(Shadd) I think the art in there is worth much more than the building or the bar itself, especially the Fritz Scholder that's on the wall.

Fritz Scholder painted a couple images right on the wall, and it'd be tough I think to sell that place because you maybe have to go in there and cut that out.

I have the first painting that he did of a bucking horse and rider, and he doesn't like it and threatens to burn it.

The horse doesn't have legs on it, so he's cut that off.

I want to hang on to that 'cause I can see where it began and where it's gone.

(man) Every year, he always has work in our Midwestern annual show.

Two years ago for the show, he did a fine piece of work that he and Marjorie Schlossman worked on it together; as far as I know, the first time he's ever done a painting with another artist.

Marjorie first painted on the painting in Fargo, then shipped it to Minot, and then he painted on it after that, and it turned out quite well.

(Darryl Dorgan) I always wanted a Walter Piehl.

He painted this; it's called "Orange Crush."

It's a beautiful piece of work.

It has a lot of different color in it, and I like a lot of color, but his color really adds to the vibrancy of what he's doing, it adds to the motion.

If you look at "Orange Crush," what you see is a young kid who's riding saddle bronc, and it is technically correct from the word go.

He's marking him when he's coming out of the shoots.

Notice his toes are pointed out, his boots are pointed out, his spurs are up on the horse's shoulders, his arm is thrown back, and he's leaning way back, and you can see the horse's ears are back, and you can see the motion.

You can feel the ground moving in that arena, and you can feel what this kid is going through, and you can feel what this horse is doing.

It's just a great piece, and every time you look at that you notice something different.

(Laurel) Early on, I looked very carefully at the work of Walter Piehl, and I decided this was an artist I would place my money on, and I made a very good bet.

He is one of North Dakota's most important artists now, and he will be that historically as well.

(Walter) "Orange Crush," "Sweet Mama," "Bash Me;" "Cash Me"-- these are all potential names.

I have pages of them.

"Snuffy the Pig."

I don't know; where would I come up with a title like that?

"Try Me; Fly Me."

That's a good, that's a good title.

That'll get people's attention.

"What's that mean?"

"Trigger Happy," "Mike the Hammer," "Lights Out," "Punch-drunk," "Creepin' Jenny."

They love horse names like that.

"Creepin' Jenny"--wow, that's a great name for a buckin' horse, a mare of course.

(woman) Funding provided by the North Dakota Council on the Arts, and the members of Prairie Public.