Ask James Bama why he went into Western art and he will tell you quite plainly: he didn’t. “Norman Rockwell lived in New England and so he painted small town scenes and harbors. I happen to live out West, so I paint the Indians, ranchers and landscapes I see.” Bama’s portraits of today’s denizens of the West are thoroughly modern, but their occupations, dress and spirit echo those of their predecessors centuries ago.
More than any other animal, the buffalo embodies the rugged tenacity required to survive on the frontier. The day Bama encountered this buffalo, the snow was fourteen inches deep and the animal’s coat and hooves were crusted with ice, but still the animal ventured on.

 "I imagine someone, somewhere in the annals of history, has witnessed this scene first-hand; however, they certainly weren’t likely to survive it and wouldn’t be able to tell anyone about it.  But I wanted to relay to you, the viewer, what that someone might have felt.  I was able to get a glimpse of it at an annual bison round-up here in Montana.  I took some artistic liberties with added dust and arranging the bison as I saw fit for a strong composition, but this is basically what I was able to see from the safety of a ramp, atop the corrals and chutes into which the bison are herded."

Sioux hunters pursue a rare white buffalo, its robe considered “big medicine” to be passed reverently from generation to generation and could command the price of 10 to 15 horses. Estimates based on hide trader’s records indicate that a white bison occurred only once in every five million animals. Plains Indians trained their best horses to hunt buffalo. But the white buffalo was elusive, often seeming to be sheltered by the rest of the herd as if the others had an instinctive sense that its color made it somehow special. These Sioux hunters may be close but the outcome is far from certain.

Artist Daniel Smith had yet another stellar year in 2009. He enjoyed a two week research safari to Kenya last summer and in September, both of his entries to the Jackson Hole Art Auction sold. Also in September, Dan was included in the Eiteljorg Museum's Quest for the West Art Show and Sale, an invitational exhibition featuring 50 of the country’s outstanding artists. There he won the Harrison Eiteljorg Purchase Award for "Stillwater Crossing," a face-to-face with a buffalo in mid-stream—look for Greenwich Workshop’s fine art edition of this painting in 2010. All of this in addition to gallery shows and invitationals including the November “Small Works, Great Wonders” show at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum and an entry accepted at the prestigious “Birds in Art” exhibit at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum.
"Out of the Dust," Daniel Smith newest fine art edition, is a SmallWorks™ gem of North America’s giant icons. You can almost smell the animal and feel the dry heat in this image. “My paintings are a reflection of many years of field work combined with a passion for the natural world,” says the artist. “My objective is to share my passion through a scientifically accurate realistic painting while maintaining artistic integrity.”

Slow Bull was a respected Oglala Sioux subchief who joined his first war party at the age of fourteen. At the age of seventeen he captured one hundred and seventy horses from the Apsaroke. That same year he received medicine from buffalo in a dream as he slept on a hilltop—not fasting or meditating, but resting from hard travel on the warpath. Over the course of his storied lifetime he engaged in fifty-five battles with rival tribes and his distinctive features can be seen in the shoulder of Judy Larson’s bull buffalo. “I personally ‘met’ this bull buffalo in the middle of a thunderstorm, roaming wild with three hundred other buffalo on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in Montana. Some of the oldest buffalo were nearing thirty-five years of age and most of the old bulls stayed by themselves, but this seasoned veteran had come to join the herd as rutting season began. He was massive and awesome.”

Of all the innovations of the nineteenth century, none changed the landscape of the American West more than the steam locomotive. A monument to speed, industry and westward expansion, the locomotive charged across the landscape, changing the face of frontier life forever, but it did not happen overnight.
Past and present collided in the prairies and plains, as workers laying tracks for the trains met with resistance from local wildlife. Even the mighty locomotive engine itself, with all its power and might, occasionally ran into the unstoppable force of nature.
“Huge migrating herds of buffalo could stall a train for hours,” said Frank McCarthy. “For sport, travelers sometimes took potshots at them from the cars while they waited for the procession to pass.” It would not be long before progress and professional hide hunters rendered the threat of buffalo on train tracks nearly extinct.

Many people do not view the buffalo as wild. Tourists drive through Yellowstone, see buffalo grazing at a distance and think they are domesticated like cows. Nothing could be further from the truth. They're incredibly strong willed and fierce when they feel threatened. This image juxtaposes these powerful animals with a gentle setting-a typical, beautiful spring day in Wyoming filled with sunshine, flowers and (what buffalo really love) mud wallows.