Represented Artist, Chuck Middlekauff, at Milan Art Gallery in Downtown Fort Worth Texas

I am an artist. Art isn't my job. It's a way of life. It's about feelings and emotions, concepts and observations, saying what I have to say with paint. I do my artwork for the love of it, and to share what I see and feel. Like Norman Rockwell, one of my heroes, I want others to experience the things of our culture, and of days gone by, but in a fresh and unusual way.

I have a passion for the open road, classic rock and roll, and the cultural icons of America (especially the American West). It's a mixture of my experiences growing up in the 1950s and 60s. I hope viewers will be entertained and reminisce with me as I paint what I grasp from all that nostalgia, with puns and twists in the combinations of shapes, colors, textures, and subjects.

Going back to Roy Rogers and the Lone Ranger, who were my heroes when I was a kid, the distinctive qualities of the cowboy touched something inside me. As I studied images of cowboys, I realized that their persona comes from the way their jeans fit, the dust and crust on their boots, the angle and shape of their hats, and their overall posture. But beyond all that, I focused in on what cowboys do when they're not chasing cows. They perch on fences, play with yo-yos, fix bikes, and eat M & M's. Almost immediately, I began to include other images in my cowboy paintings, mixing things that didn't necessarily appear together in real life, but in my mind, they could.