Bill Schenck

Billy Schenck has been known internationally for the past 33 years as one of the originators of the contemporary “Pop” western movement and an American painter who incorporates techniques from Photo-Realism with a Pop Art sensibility to both exalt and poke fun at images of the West.Like the heroes he idolized in B-Westerns, Schenck might well be called the “Good Badman” of Western American art. Early in his career he became known for appropriating cinematic imagery, which he reproduced in a flattened, reductivist style, where colors are laid side-by-side rather than blended or shadowed.Drawing upon narrative tensions that have attracted mass audiences to western fiction and movies, Schenck added hot colors, surreal juxtapositions, and stylized patterning to explore clashes between wilderness and civilization, the individual and community, nature and culture, freedom and restriction.Current career highlights for the artist include inclusion in the recently opened exhibit at the Denver Art Museum entitled “Western Horizons”, Landscapes from the contemporary realism collection. A retrospective of serigraphs created by Schenck from 1971 through 1996 opens February 12, 2011 at the Tucson Museum of Art.