Artist and eighth-generation Texan Matt Tumlinson paints the changing rural landscape of his home state.
Matt Tumlinson sees himself as a translator who uses a paintbrush to navigate between landscapes old and new.
“A lot of times there’s this romantic vision of the Western lifestyle, but the world we live in has cell phones and Wi-Fi,” Tumlinson says. “I’m more interested in telling that story and what that lifestyle looks like in a modern context.”
Instead of a historical scene of an Old West stampede, he paints an image of a grizzled cowboy with a cigarette dangling from his finger, standing at a bar next to a younger man holding a cell phone. The older man’s eyeing the other suspiciously, but it’s unclear which one has strayed into the other’s environment.
Tumlinson knows the scenes he paints. He grew up in the small town of Early, southeast of Abilene, Texas, where his parents taught school. He lives in San Antonio now, but he spends time at his wife’s family’s ranch near Stratford, in the Texas Panhandle.
“That inspires my work,” he says. “I’m not a cowboy, but I know what the real ones look like.”
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[Left] Curious Encounters [Right] Saturday Morning Light
The artworks, he says, are his way of dealing with the fast pace of change. “They’re themes I’ve experienced that I just need to paint to work through it, whether it’s gentrification or urbanization or city people moving to the country or vice versa,” he says.
Tumlinson, 34, earned a history degree from Texas Tech University, then moved to Nantucket for a year with his wife, Allison, in 2013. He worked in landscaping and painted on the side, until someone purchased a hand-drawn historic map he created. He began to rethink his plans to get a job as a history teacher. When the couple moved back to Texas, Tumlinson gave himself a year to see if he could make it as an artist. At first, he painted by day and led boat tours on the River Walk at night. When he landed a commission to paint a mural in Fort Stockton, he realized he could support himself through art.
There to Greet You
He’s best known for a series of murals in tiny Rankin, Texas, that depict modern twists on iconic subjects like Willie Nelson, John Wayne, and Gus and Woodrow from Lonesome Dove.
“The whole deal was, ‘If I’m terrible at this, then nobody will see it,’ ” he says. But people did see it. The murals popped up on social media, then in magazine articles. Actor Matthew McConaughey dropped by to have his photograph snapped alongside one that featured him.
Today, Tumlinson, an eighth-generation Texan, has turned to the more traditional format of oil paintings. His work illustrates the quickly changing landscape of rural Texas: an Allsup’s gas station, women with beehive hairdos walking out of a Luby’s cafeteria, clouds building in a West Texas sky, and a cowboy helping a father and son whose SUV has broken down on the side of a rural road.
“I can paint stuff that happened 150 years ago, or I can paint stuff I see on a daily basis,” he says. “If I don’t do it, who will?”
Summer Shade Island
Visit Matt Tumlinson online at instagram.com/matt_tumlinson and tumlinsonart.com.
HEADER IMAGE: Dawn Sentry
From our April 2024 issue.
PHOTOGRAPHY: Courtesy of the artist