She’s a Fourth-Generation Cattle Rancher. She’s Also a Master Painter.
Growing up in rural West Texas, Alice Leese remembers her journeys to city together with her grandmother, which all the time included a cease on the Odessa publish workplace, the place she was drawn to Tom Lea’s well-known Works Progress Administration mural titled “Stampede.”
Decades later, within the remoted West Texas sand hills close to Kermit, Leese creates oil work with the distinct sweeping model, fluid characters, and swirling skies so prevalent within the acclaimed New Deal inventive effort. That is, when she finds time to choose up a brush.
Leese is the fourth-generation stewafreelancertamal of an enormous cattle operation on the YT Ranch, a mix of a number of properties sprawling throughout the Permian Basin west of Odessa. (Her portrait confirmed up in Dan Winters’s latest photograph collection on the area.)
“Working cattle, taking good care of the land each day, I see numerous stunning issues,” notes the soft-spoken rancher and artist. “There’s acquired to be a method to get them out the place everybody else can see them, the place they’ll see the great thing about the land and really feel what it feels prefer to be on the market on the ranch.”
In this video from Texas Country Reporter, Leese invitations viewers into her distant studio, the place the wind is the soundtrack to a legacy of hafreelancertamal work and she or he lets her artwork communicate for itself.
