♪ MAN: I like to paint every day.

There are some days where I just paint because I feel like I need to paint.

It's like exercise.

There's some days where I'm more inspired than other days, but I like to paint 'cause I like the act of painting.

I like the act of applying paint to paper.

It's a dance.

Things are constantly in a state of drying.

You are constantly painting against time.

Things used to be much more precise.

I used to be much more careful.

I've come to allow a messiness that I never did.

I just like things to feel a little bit less finished, refined, stiff.

I've always enjoyed the unpredictable.

And I've always kind of resisted things when they became predictable.

When I first decided that I wanted to be a serious watercolorist, it was certainly long before I knew that about myself.

I just loved the way it looked.

Just loved the visceral quality of it.

♪ There's a lot of moving around because you can't really work on the same painting endlessly.

You have to wait for it to dry and be ready for the next stage.

I spend a lot of time shaking it out.

I spend a lot of time, kind of letting go of the tension that gets -- that builds up in my hands.

There are times when you just nail the value, the likeness is just exactly captured.

It's always about getting some kind of element, some kind of an idea, I mean, out here there's just so many paintings and it takes a while to edit down and figure out exactly where the right painting is.

You know, one of the things about painting in the studio is, you get to paint under controlled conditions and watercolor really needs controlled conditions to be able to use it to its fullest.

That said, there are times when you get something which is better than I would've gotten in the studio.

So, you know, there are no rules.

♪ ♪ I have an upcoming show at the Denver Art Museum.

When they offered it to me, there was no particular agenda.

The idea that I could do anything that I wanted was really exciting.

I've been working with Thomas Smith over at the Denver Art Museum.

Thomas is really extraordinary.

He's a young man with an old man's eye.

Well, there's no shortage of things to choose from.

We've pulled out a bunch of things that we feel, that I feel really proud of.

THOMAS: I think one of the challenges, Willy, is this question of what you want to make it.

You know, people know you for the cowboy paintings and that's an important part of your body of work.

There's a statement that you're trying to make about your place within Western American painting today, what that is and what it is to you, the West looks different than the day of Charles Russell or Maynard Dixon.

You know, it doesn't look like that anymore.

And you're painting what the West looks like today.

♪ THOMAS: Putting a show together of William Matthews' work was something that I probably thought about when I knew I was gonna be coming to Denver.

We spent several years, sort of thinking and talking about an exhibition and what kind of form it would take and really in, say, the last two years we began to hone in on works that would be in the show.

This is good, this is a different composition.

Sort of, it's a portrait that's a horizontal.

Did we end up with this?

Yes!

We ended up with this.

I love that and I like how loose it is.

THOMAS: What we ultimately gravitated toward was something that is retrospective, in a sense, but also is really heavy on what he's doing right now.

You actually see one painting from the very first show that he ever had.

WILLIAM: I'd love to have that in the show because I think it really introduces my use of type and adding design and...exactly.

It's a good sort of full circle.

I think so.

WILLIAM: I've never really wanted my work to be like other people's work.

I've always been much more interested in finding my voice and making it original.

I've never really felt like I was part of the Western art world.

That's never really been my interest.

I'm much more interested in paintings of humanity.

They might be from the West, but they might be from China, or they might be from Ireland.

You know, I love to paint in many different places.

That said, I love the West and this is my home and this is where I live, so this is the area that I'm really the most interested in and the area that I keep coming back to.

When I was six, my sister and I and my mother and father took the Super Chief across the country and saw the West.

We landed in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where the streets were dirt streets still.

And we went through the deserts and we went through the mountains.

So, when we moved to the West in the late '50s, the fantasy of being out there was palpable.

Willy was the oldest and I was born 16 months after Willy.

Willy and I were really raised sort of like twins.

We've always been very close.

I think in a lot of ways, our childhood was pretty typical.

Our parents were pretty conservative and conventional.

You know, my father was a businessman; my mother was maybe not typical, she was an artist, she was a painter.

WILLIAM: She taught us in subtle ways and she taught us mostly to see.

She taught us about lighting and really to see with a painter's eye.

My dad was in advertising so he was around a lot of artists and I got to know a lot of his art directors and that also had a big influence on me.

My mother didn't encourage me to paint, in fact, she was discouraging me to paint.

She never really thought that I would, should be a painter.

She thought that was no way to earn a living, you know, she wanted me to go to business school and, you know, and be a businessman, and if I wanted to be a painter, I could sort of do that on the side.

Well, that was pretty silly.

♪ KIM: Willy was very much the black sheep of the family.

He was not behaving.

He was not doing what he was supposed to do.

So he was always in trouble.

He got that label as a child and I think he probably started living up to that a little.

Oh yeah, total troublemaker.

My family couldn't agree on much, but they could agree with the fact that I was a total (bleep) up.

I definitely was a clown and I liked being silly and I didn't take much seriously.

You know those kinds of kids.

That's the kind of kid I was.

I liked playing music and I liked painting, but I was not a particularly good student and so the things that people wanted me to do were not what I was interested in and the things that I was interested in were not necessarily what people wanted me to do.

So as a result, I developed a sense of persistence.

I mean, there certainly have been plenty of situations where I have been a jerk, but I've always been determined to succeed on my own terms.

And sometimes it was sort of, "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead."

So I went through one school, went to another school, got kicked out, didn't finish high school.

Ended up going to one year of art school in San Francisco, which I didn't find very interesting.

So when I was 20, I packed up everything in San Francisco and I moved down to Hollywood.

I didn't have any contacts, I really was, in hindsight, doing something that was probably pretty foolish, but I wanted to be in the music business and I wanted to do album covers.

So I started hoofing around my 40 pound portfolio full of what I thought were interesting drawings and prints and you know, with big, heavy mats.

It was ridiculous, what I was doing.

I started getting work at Capitol Records.

Initially, it would just be an illustration or a drawing and then it became, you know, some lettering and then I talked them into being able to do a whole album.

One of my first album covers was for Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks called "Where's the Money?"

I was involved in every step along the way, including coming up with the title.

I mean, you know, I did that with Dan.

I sort of learned by the seat of my pants, learned how to use mechanical instruments and do really beautiful, graceful hand lettering, which played into projects in the future when lettering became an important part of the work that I wanted to do.

I did a big double album cover with Kenny Rogers, called the "Ballad of Calico" that Michael Murphey wrote.

He was struggling and I was struggling, but we shared this bond of friendship and we also shared a bond of the West.

We shared this enthusiasm and interest in history and interest in characters.

Willy went out to Calico, which is a ghost town on the Mojave Desert.

Took photographs and met a couple of people that were still more or less living the life of the old miners out there.

And Willy, he helped me get the vision of the whole thing together.

I was still writing it and finishing it up when I met Willy, so he helped me shape it.

WILLIAM: Murphey and I spent a ton of time working on that project and he and I have been great friends ever since.

Initially, I was most interested in doing artwork in a collaborative way, and being involved with musicians and being involved in projects.

I then moved into the graphic design world where I was really excited about being involved in other design projects.

But after a while, I got tired of it.

And almost by a process of elimination, the only thing that I really wanted to do was paint.

KIM: I was actually very interested that Willy got into painting Western art.

He wasn't a cowboy.

He looks, he looks like he could be.

Wears those great hats.

But it wasn't, it was really interesting to me.

WILLIAM: In 1983, Kurt Markus, invited me to come out to the first cowboy poetry gathering.

Kurt was documenting the West.

There was something about his ability to shoot that was different.

He certainly was journalistic in his approach, but he was incredibly artistic when it came to how his photographs were designed.

There's a core of what Kurt captured that has always been hugely inspiring to me.

Kurt introduced me to Waddie and Larry Schutte.

I met cowboys, buckaroos who were living in Elko County and Waddie in particular invited me out to his ranch and I got to see what a working ranch really looked like.

And then he introduced me to a number of different people along the way and that was the beginning of my interest in painting these guys.

And it was always Nevada buckaroos.

The more I got to know cowboys all over the country, the more I kept coming back to those guys.

I don't know whether it was that group of men or the way they rode or if it's the way they looked or the way they acted, but you know, I was always drawn to that group.

♪ (off-key) ♪ Move around the bend But you come back again ♪ ♪ For that good old mountain dew ♪ Aren't you glad he's a painter?

When I first met Willy Matthews, he came out wide-eyed, as this artist that wanted to paint cowboy pictures.

He was bigger than life, and a little pushy.

We kinda backed off a little bit when we first met him, but by the end of that first weekend, he had endeared himself.

And then once we started seeing what he was seeing through his paintings, we were going, yeah.

And all of a sudden, guys started dressing their horse up just a little more than they used to and guys started wearing just a little bit more... they're lookin' good on horseback.

And then they'd look at those pictures and say, "I need a new hat."

MAN: The first time I met William Matthews, we were weaning at Connelly at a place called Rough Creek.

The livestock manager, Greg Richards shows up and Willy was with him.

Yeah, he'd like to take some pictures and we were like, well yeah, whatever.

We did our thing and he's everywhere.

He was here, he was there, he was, you know, he has that camera going a million miles an hour, we're like, "Whoa, this guy, he's a busy fella."

He said, yeah, I was doing some painting.

These paintings are awesome.

You could tell right where it was.

The trees that are just starting to turn.

And, "These are kinda junk."

We were like, we wanted to go through the trash and salvage them all.

It was just awesome.

He can capture the element, whether it be horses, cows, a landscape, but you know exactly, if you have been there, you know exactly where it is.

MAN: After he painted me a time or two, it made me realize some quirks that I had that I never noticed.

Talking to somebody, you know, BS-ing somebody around the brandin' fire, and I do that quite a lot and I never noticed that about myself.

But when I saw that, I thought, oh yeah, yeah, that's right, huh?

Yep, I do that.

WADDIE: Willy came into this world, yes, as an outsider, but also with this yearning to know more about it.

He came not only asking questions, but very willing to answer questions.

What were you looking for?

How did you get this movement?

This same thing happens when you're branding 250 times a day, how come I never saw that?

I know exactly what's going on, but how come I never saw this?

The way he'd explain it was almost musical to me.

I was looking at these paintings and all of a sudden, the love for my job started coming back.

I wasn't seeing the light and the beauty, I wasn't smelling the sage.

It was a job.

His art and Kurt Markus's photographs made me re-examine.

When you've got this romantic looking at your lifestyle, all of a sudden, your lifestyle starts getting pretty romantic.

♪ MAN: When we started this, it was just a personal reaction that I'd had to hearing the poetry of working cowboys.

And I was just so flabbergasted that that even existed.

Cowboy movies had stopped being made.

Country music had sort of divorced Western music.

And it was all about Nashville.

WADDIE: Nobody knew cowboys recited and wrote poetry because John Wayne never did it around the campfires, and Jimmy Stewart never just went off on a poetic deal, but we did sit around and tell stories.

The cowboys that could recite a poem would.

We didn't call it cowboy poetry.

Didn't call it anything.

It was just, Ol' Shorty was going to tell us about tying knots in the Devil's tail.

That fascinated me and it fascinated Hal.

(singing) WILLIAM: When Kurt Markus invited me to come out to the cowboy poetry gathering, I jumped at the chance and I've never missed one since.

It seemed like such a novel idea, but what it became was a real community and a communion event.

It brought together people who were interested in that way of life, it became a place where musicians wanted to come, and now, after 30 years, it's really a reunion of a lot of people who have become part of that community.

WOMAN: I don't think it's surprising that so many people are susceptible to that yearning to be immersed in stories and poems and testimony to what it is to live in a connected way.

For people who do not live on ranches or who only live on ranches because it's a second home and they visit from time to time, it is really a sense of this is what it is like to be held together and tied to places in really lasting ways.

♪ HAL: A life on the land is sort of foundational to any society.

At the turn of the 18th century, about 90 percent of Americans made their living on the land.

The turn of the 20th century, about 50.

Now, about two percent.

WOMAN: Buckaroos working for large ranches?

I really don't know if that will be here in a hundred years.

I think it's very possible that it will because it's a model that works on this huge, arid land.

WADDIE: This world and this life is going to be here in some way, it's preserved in paintings and poetry and writings, but the world has changed immensely in my lifetime and I'm sure it'll keep on doing that, 'cause I think that's the way of it.

It is the West, and there's something about the West that you get along, and there are all of these different ideas and demands and elements that meet each other head on.

PATRICIA: The contemporary West is all over the place in chronology.

So maybe 30 years ago we had in mind a much clearer transition.

Some of us who were thinking about the West thought, ok, the Old West of extractive industry, outdoor harvesting of resources, that is fading away, and a new West of tourism and second homes and telecommuters is coming into being.

Now we know that those co-exist in many situations.

So for me, Willy's painting of the cowboy brushing off the solar panels... Well, there we are.

♪ (horse neighing) (laughter) WILLIAM: So here we are out on the ranch that Martin Anseth and his family live and work on.

And it's time to do some branding.

Cowboys have come in from the neighborhood and, you know, it's a big cooperative, wonderful, ritualistic celebration, which is an important part of work, but it's also a way of connecting with each other.

I mean, these guys are back having a great time in a way that they don't necessarily get to much during the year.

Oftentimes, it's what people will invite me out to as being the special time that they want to share.

♪ (cow mooing) The cowboy world is really built on respect, on mutual respect.

Martin has a really nice, light touch.

But he's very attentive to potential problems, situations that can come up.

He doesn't miss anything.

You know, the whole key to being a cowboy is anticipating where the problems can be.

You've got some good ropers, but you've got a bunch of real greenhorns, so you're anticipating potential problems all the way down the line.

Anything can go wrong, especially when you're working with these big animals that are not tame, they are all wild.

You know, even the horses, even good horses can do things that you don't expect.

(cow mooing) Done a lot of paintings of branding in the past, but I'm working on this big installation right now, which I'm really trying to tie together as if it is a movie in itself.

You know, I want it to have really cinematic qualities.

I want it to tell a lot of different stories and a lot of different angles, so it, so you really get a sense of, you know, what that burning hide smoke smells like.

You know, the calves in total panic, and the relief of being free of it.

JON: There's lots of words for folks that herd cattle on horseback.

It's kind of a regional deal.

Buckaroo is the typical person in Nevada, the Great Basin Area.

Comes from the Spanish word "Vaquero."

WADDIE: The Californios, the great Vaqueros, they were very high on the ladder of importance in their society.

Important people owned horses and if you were very important, you became a very fine horsemen.

And to be a very fine horseman and important, you dressed as such.

But if you were a horseman, your dress wasn't near as important as dressing your horse.

WILLIAM: When the Vaqueros moved up into California and had established the grazing patterns there in the 19th century, that land was too valuable to use as cattle country, so they were then moved north and east out into the Great Basin.

WADDIE: Over the years, we became Buckaroos, holding tight to a tradition and the pride of the horsemanship and the pride of being able to handle cattle one certain way.

♪ MAN: When I was growing up in southern Idaho, Twin Falls, Idaho, my family was a row crop farmer, feed lot operator, had a little cow permit, and I kept lookin' south.

It was just too small in Idaho.

Want to be a horseback, read a lot of stories, got all messed up dreaming about Nevada.

These are horsemen in this country.

They understand livestock.

It's not a farm.

And I always had a inclination to be that way instead of farming or something gentle or small.

MARTIN: My dad cowboyed all over, like down here on the reservation and then up north.

And then growing up, we worked for people and it just, it's something you can't get rid of.

My dream was to do this.

And I feel very blessed to be able to do this.

Just paying respects to the men that handle thousands of cattle, efficiently, when there was no such thing as a four wheeler, I mean, so that's pretty neat I think.

JON: This particular ranch is a mid-sized Nevada operation.

It's around a couple hundred thousand acres.

It's fairly rough country and there's not many roads.

We have a real short window of when we grow feed and to have it come back the following year and to conserve it for the wildlife that we share it with, we have to move those cows a lot, especially in the spring of the year.

And that takes folks a'horseback.

We still do it, not unlike it was done a hundred years ago.

There's not as many of us doing the same work as was done a hundred years ago, and we have horse trailers to convey us to certain points on the ranch that, where times past, people would've camped there.

But the actual work and the gear we use is pretty much the same and I really value that.

And the good thing about it to me is that it is still the most efficient.

There's still not a way to do our work better than a capable person on a decent horse with a dog or two.

♪ MICHAEL: Why do these guys do this and why would somebody do this lifestyle?

Because they're just like Willy.

It's not the money.

It's the shape of the mountain.

It's the open prairie.

It's being on horseback, out there where you're an independent cuss that's not connected to a committee, a union, even your boss is way on the other side of the ranch and usually gone.

It's that lone feeling that you're self-reliant inside and I think that's why cowboys like him and why he likes them.

THOMAS: Why don't we put over here, things that we know we want, like, we know "Hard Candy" is one of our favorites.

One of the works that I've always been drawn to is a painting titled "Hard Candy."

It's a classic sort of William Matthews scene of a cowboy today.

When you first see it, you say, oh, there's this cowboy who's masculine, but he's got this sucker which is really childish.

But when you know the narrative that goes along with it, it's this guy who's trying to stop smoking.

It's the opposite of the Marlboro Man.

So did it go here, Willy, from this just total sepia to... Exactly, yes.

THOMAS: I think there's roughly about 30 paintings that we settled on for the exhibition.

And they run from say, the mid-'70s, things from the late '80s, from the '90s, all the way up to today, and I think that's one of the interesting things about the exhibit is you see those early works.

His palette was very muted.

It would have sepia tones and then you see a kind of a blue-green wash start to come in.

And you just see him evolve, with color especially.

Midway through, you see this painting called "Bottlecaps," where you still have these muted tones of this cowboy who's looking at these propane tanks and they have all these different colors.

I'm seeing a lot of cowboys here, from especially the earlier work.

Do you think we have enough landscapes?

You know, this is a fairly early landscape, I mean, it kind of tells the story.

What is it?

Well, it's kinda the alleyway behind the cookhouse on the MC Ranch.

And it has architecture, which I always love, but it's, you know, it's a landscape.

WILLIAM: I remember very clearly the day that I drove up here to see Martin Black and his family.

And I was focused on finding Martin and focused on finding the cowboys, but all of a sudden I found this building and it just stopped me in my tracks and I'll never forget that moment of looking at it and just knowing in my heart that I was going to paint that thing... and paint it over and over again from all different angles, I just knew it.

I was just instantly drawn to the form of it.

I love the way it sits right here.

The way it kind of looms like a church, like a castle, you know, it's just majestic.

Take a left on this little road right through here.

Just pull up a little ways and you can see.

Yeah, ok, so stop right about, sort of right around in here.

Isn't that fantastic?

Isn't that just fantastic?

♪ ♪ I love the sound of those hard, crisp flakes of snow.

See the way the snow is sort of defining the grass.

I mean, just at this moment, where there isn't much snow, but there's just enough to kind of isolate the road... it's exactly the right time to find the painting.

♪ You know, that's the thing about this building, is that it's just this big plastic model and it continues to change all the time.

And it's old, it's about my age, a little younger.

Maybe it's me, maybe it's my, maybe it's my metaphor, maybe it's my big mirror.

It never ceases to get me excited.

Ok, let's go down and uh, let's go down to the barn.

MICHAEL: Willy Matthews is a modern-day Leonardo Da Vinci.

He could've done anything, he's got that kind of a mind.

He just decided to be a fine artist.

I love modern art.

I love rock n' roll music.

I just don't play it.

What I learned from Willy Matthews is love it all, but always remember what your area of expertise is.

It is part of that curiosity about human beings.

That's why he could paint anything, anywhere, because he loves people.

He's curious about human nature.

It goes by his, the line on his voicemail -- "Who are you, really?"

It's a terrible cliche to say someone is larger than life, but uh, but Willy is.

He is an outsized personality.

He has this joyous way of accosting you.

It's, you know, "I'm Willy Matthews, tell me about yourself."

I've seen him melt down even the sort of sturdiest, WASP reserve of people and suddenly, you know, you're chatting with him like an old friend.

He's digging when he's talking to you and seeing what's making you tick and he wants you, more or less, to perform the best you can.

He wants you to be excellent in what you're doing.

JON: He has a real rapport with guys of talent like himself, not sharing the same talent, but people with talent seem to be drawn to him and him to them as well.

So people that I respect, very good cowmen and horsemen, he's friends with a lot of those kind of guys.

WILLIAM: Why I stop and paint in places is as much a mystery to me sometimes as anybody else.

Sometimes, it's purely that the place feels good and it's a place I want to stop.

It's not unlike fishing in a river, dropping a line in a river because the river just looks...I wanna get in it.

Sometimes you go in thinking you're gonna catch fish, sometimes you go in and you catch a lot of fish, sometimes you go in just because it was a really cool place to get in the river.

(bird chirping) Part of what interests me about this little arrangement, you know, it's a big chunk of sculpture.

It's a Henry Moore with texture and color.

I've just been over painting stone walls and rock cliffs in Ireland.

And you know, it has a sense of those Neolithic dolmens.

You know, the great thing that we love about painting is being in the zone, being in that meditative state where you disappear and you become the process, and everything else goes away.

And it's without a doubt, my drug of choice.

It is the thing that keeps me coming into the studio every day and wetting the brush.

I mean, musicians live in the zone.

The cowboys who ride out on a beautiful morning, you know, with dew on the sage and the sunlight coming up over the hills, I mean, they're in the zone.

Maybe that's one thing that I can really relate to about these guys.

Oh, here they come!

(humming "Bonanza" theme) THOMAS: I think when I began to really know Willy's work, I was first drawn to it for the painting quality, the quality of the watercolor itself.

Oftentimes, you see painters of watercolor that are really precise.

Willy's not that way.

He works in the medium with some immediacy.

There's nothing fussy about it.

But I think what will ultimately make Willy Matthews' work important is not what a great practitioner of watercolor he is, what will ultimately make it stand the test of time is that he painted the West today.

He dodged the obvious in what so many artists do, is they paint the 1850s or the 1880s and they don't give us the American West.

They give us this idea of the Old West.

And Willy hasn't done that.

If you wanna know what cowboys look like in the 1990s, working cowboys, there they are.

If there's such a thing as a storytelling painter, Charlie Russell, a storytelling painter, but he's not the minimalist that Willy is.

Willy's eyes see things different.

And consequently, he gives us a chance to all see things different.

SUE: He does stand out in the whole way that Russell did for me.

As an artist who lived the West, became a part of it, and loved it, you know, became enmeshed, entrenched in what that Western life was and celebrated it without glorifying it.

Willy's paintings have a visual beauty to them and even a romance to them, but it's coming out of the authentic working culture.

He knows these people, they know him and it's a body of work that's born out of a deep, mutual communion.

PATRICIA: Willy Matthews, I think, is given options that people who are less defiant, and less graceful about being defiant wouldn't have.

By being aware of this heritage of Western Art, he I think, is much less trapped.

I know a number of artists who simply refuse the label of Western Artist.

They will spend the rest of their lives trying to define themselves as not being a clone of a very familiar style.

I think it takes something about being true to yourself that allows you to say, ok, Western Artist with the baggage, but not trapped by the baggage.

If you had asked Charles Russell or Frederic Remington to illustrate a book that had a open discussion of homosexuality, I cannot imagine anything that would have scared them more.

(laughs) I mean, just the masculinity thing was so much their anchor and their point of orientation and how they got their bearings.

So just that collaboration with Annie Proulx and doing sketches for the book that includes Brokeback Mountain, and that not being a -- oh man, what a wild rebellious act, but here's an interesting writer, she's writing about places that he cares about.

It made sense.

TERESA: You look at Remington and Russell and they admitted they were depicting the romance, the nostalgia of a West that was gone.

I feel like what Willy's doing with some of these silos and grain elevators, he is painting what the West is and I think the way Willy paints them and presents them to us has been, for me, a great lesson in the history of place.

(humming) Here we are out on I-80 outside of Salt Lake City.

It's this wonderful, industrial site that I have been stopping at and painting for many years.

One of the things that's amazing about this spot right here is that, you know, we're about, I don't know, three miles away from it.

The size of it is just enormous.

It's set against this massive hillside in the Sawatch Mountains and yet, it seems to fit in proportionally, you know, that tower, I don't know how tall it is, but I'll bet it's 1000 feet, more?

You know, that's pretty extraordinary.

When I think of how the natural Western landscape embraces industry, this is probably my favorite place.

As much as I love open land and the natural environment, I also love seeing this element of industry.

Kind of an important part of who we are.

(train horn blasts) Look at this.

(train horn blaring) Today, Thomas Smith is coming over and we're going to organize this group of 46 paintings that I've done and consolidate them down into a grid of 35 paintings and that's going to be the branding arrangement.

Let me just show you basically how things start to interact, OK?

So these three are connected.

These two are connected.

But then there are other things that work, like this, and that, which I think is really cool.

I really like that.

You get these diagonals.

Exactly, it's kind of a big abstracted thing.

This works.

THOMAS: This was an idea that he had and he said, what do you think about this?

Because we have this very large wall in the back of the exhibition so you need something that has some presence to hold that wall.

This guy, did he make it in?

This guy made it in?

Yeah.

This is good, I like this.

I like this corn, just very abstract here.

That's nice.

The branding scene is like chaos, there's things happening over here and over there and over there.

It's not something an artist can easily get a composition on.

So I thought with breaking it up into this grid, it would give him the possibility to express that there's a lot of things going on at once.

It's kind of work that he's done before in its subject of branding, but also something new in working in a new format.

I think it's great.

Oooh, I see something else I could do.

If I have to stop, you have to stop.

(chuckling) Today is a really important day because we finished that, and so the complete checklist is finalized and I think we have a really great show.

I think the best came out.

And he really tested himself, he pushed himself, and I think those who know Willy Matthews and think they know his work, they're going to see new things that they've never seen before.

♪ WILLIAM: So this whole process is so interesting.

It becomes a giant mirror.

To be able to look back and recap where I am, what I've done and be looking, really, towards the future.

I feel like I am in mid-career, I feel like there's a whole lot of work, maybe my best work, in front of me.

There are still combinations of colors that I've never tried.

You know, there are still many stones I've never turned over.

There's certainly many, many places I've never been.

You know, I never run out of goals and things that I want to make and places that I wanna go.

♪ ♪♪ Hey, Willy boy, whatcha gonna do?

♪ ♪ When the wild blows cold and the moon turns blue ♪ ♪ Gonna build me a fire Gonna dance and sing ♪ ♪ A little bit of winter don't mean a thing ♪ ♪ A little bit of winter don't mean a thing ♪ ♪ ♪ But hey, Willy, when the birds arrive ♪ ♪ And the flowers bloom while the clouds float by ♪ ♪ Gonna tell my puppies and turtles and things ♪ ♪ All God's children need a little spring ♪ ♪ ♪ Well, hey, Willy Boy, where you gonna go?

♪ ♪ When the grass gets sticky and the wind blows slow ♪ ♪ Down to the river, gonna jump right in ♪ ♪ Little bit of summer can't be no sin ♪ ♪ A little bit of summer can't be no sin ♪ ♪ ♪ Well, hey, Willy, how you gonna feel?

♪ ♪ When the leaves turn gold beneath your heels ♪ ♪ Gonna twirl and spin, never gonna fall ♪ ♪ Falling just won't do at all ♪ ♪ No, that wouldn't do at all ♪ ♪ ♪ Hey, Willy boy, how you gonna feel?

♪ ♪ Hey, Willy boy, where you gonna go?

♪ ♪ Hey Willy boy, whatcha gonna do?

♪♪ ♪