308 Vista Hill Drive, El Paso TX, oil on canvas on board, 300 x 500mm
From El Paso to Encinal: The John Wayne Tour
9 February – 9 March 2021
The series was inspired by a journey McWhannell made through South Texas, the borderlands between the US and Mexico, in 2019.
An epic landscape in every sense of the word, the territory has been a site of revolt and revolution for centuries. Traces of past and present conflicts are everywhere, from the Spanish colonial architecture and shrines, through to the border patrol vehicles and Trump’s ill-fated wall.
The territory also looms large in McWhannell’s personal history: the land of cowboy films and their tales of bandits and desperados, of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, the ballads of Marty Robbins and, of course, the Uber Cowboy, John Wayne.
Every town, every road, every name evokes a song, a film, a Cormac McCarthy novel and McWhannell’s paintings are populated with the faces and places of legend. However, the vast and resolutely untamed desert remains the star of the show.
View of Christo Rey, morning. New Mexico - Mexico from 308 Vista Hill Drive oil on canvas 660 x 1675 mm
A review of this exhibition by John Daly Peoples can be found here
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