National Cowboy

Lipper’s fascination with the aggressive lifestyles of rodeo cowboys and ranchers in his home state of Oregon evolved into his sold out one-man show National Cowboy. The shows drew parallels between these men and the U.S soldiers at war. In his painting Exit Strategy, thick backgrounds of ochre surround a black bull and its red, white and blue rider as a rodeo clown crouches at the ready “I grew up across the road from a field with a couple of cows, framed in a barbed wire fence,” Gabriel muses. “The National Cowboy series brought back the memory of that dusty road in the summer heat.” The paintings are direct and vivid with bits of Gabriel’s signature purple line work showing through.