RANDALL DEIHL: RANDY DOES THE WEST
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Even the legendary shoot-first lawman looks so calm in Deihl’s Wild Bill Hickok that it appears he must have tamed lawless towns by example. Deihl bases his portrait on one of the few photographs of Hickok’s final days in Deadwood, where he was later shot in the back and killed. The original James Butler photo (Deihl credits him in the painting itself) shows Hickok only from the shoulders up. Deihl makes this a full-length portrait, however, and dresses his subject in a foppish black velvet suit with purple trim and white ruffled shirt protruding from the sleeves. Deihl further emasculates Hickok by shrinking his famed gold-and-ivory-handled revolvers to half size. The town of Deadwood, sprung in the painting from Deihl’s imagination, surrounds Hickok. It too is shrunken. Deadwood’s buildings look like a newly finished model-railroad town: they stand pristinely regular, every board in place. The dirt road where Hickok stands alone looks freshly swept. The only other hints of life are the small, neatly lettered shop signs for the bank, saloon, and rooming houses. In the piny mountain backdrop, neat feathery trees seem to have come straight out of Currier and Ives. Skaters in mufflers and fur-trimmed coats dwell in these hills, not badmen and Indian spirits.
This is a dude portrait. Like the eastern heir to a western ranch, Deihl requires a degree of refinement even while working the land: he can civilize with a vengeance. And the irony –and strength–of Deihl’s work is the result of his resistance to the harsher edges and machismo of the western-style paintings that fill Santa Fe’s galleries.
101 Ranch is the equivalent of the bonsai wild West, trimmed and primped into a delicate display. In it, a red credenza table is set with western collectibles: a foot-long Indian rug, a clay pot fitted with a pint-size yucca plant, and a goofy wooden cowboy- and-horse toy. Behind the table Deihl has reproduced a broadside for the 101 Ranch, the west’s most famous dude ranch in the 1920s. The poster promotes the ranch’s “Real Wild West Show,” portraying cowboy riders and Indian sharpshooters–who at the time were already re-creating and sentimentalizing a vanished era. This faux altar to frontier days reduces history to an interior designer’s well-laid tabletop. Deihl paints it with an almost air-brushed softness in recently out-of-vogue Santa Fe pastels, mocking the tastes portrayed; his static style reinforces the tabletop’s ahistoric past.
