Denny Karchner's "Western Artwork" was spawned from a deep passion for the love of
a pencil and paint at a very young age. He has been producing "pencils" since the
tender age of three-years-old and after a 34-year hiatus, has recently returned to
paints.
Denny's passion and love for "pencil and paints" are gaining him increased
notoriety among museums and private collectors. Over the last several years, Denny
has worked closely with the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming and has
had art included in their Annual Art Auctions. In the Fall of 2005, Denny had two
pieces accepted into the prestigious "Booth Western Art Museum" for their permanent
private collection. Those pieces are "Horse Capture" and "Chief Tosh~A~Wah." In 2008,
the Booth purchased another piece from Denny of Jim Dunham who is one of the directors
at the museum. In 2006, the family of the late, great Curt Gowdy commissioned Denny
to paint his portrait which is the only portrait ever done of him. Lastly, Denny
has been hired by Art Rooney, Jr., owners of the 2008 NFL Superbowl Champions Pittsburgh
Steelers to paint many of the old Steelers from the 1940's on up to the 1970's Super
Bowl Teams. In 2008, Mr. Rooney purchased Denny's pencil study and the oil painting
of Pittsburgh Steeler, Troy Polamalu. He donated the pencil study to the John Heinz
History Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and he donated the oil painting to the
NFL Hall Of Fame, in Canton, Ohio. What an honor for a "Lifetime Fan" and former
resident of "The Steel City."
Artist Statement:
My closest family members have sacrificed
many, many things through out my lifetime to get me where I am today. Everything
from "sacrificing" that "favorite pencil" to draw with as I sat in church at the
age-of-three. To those closest to me "going without" while I was attending art school.
To
not having my time and attention when I thought that running a company was more important.
To making life-altering moves that helped an art career elevate to another level.
The sacrifices from that pencil at the age-of-three to where I sit now in my life
are countless. But not once did anyone of them ever try to discourage me from going
down that artistic path to success.
As a client or buyer, I want you to know where
the talent and determination originated. You need to know with whom you are dealing.
I am a man, made early on in life by all those who surrounded me on up to the fellow
artists that I create with this day. Almost everyone that I have had contact with
in my life has left their mark. More good ones than bad. They both teach. My family
and friends have instilled an ethic of honesty and trust that I use everyday as an
artist and as a person.
Lastly, I dedicate all my art to my children, Lindsay, Hillary
and Dillon. Each one, so gifted and talented. They are by far my greatest creations
ever. Also to my wife Leigh, who made life-altering moves that helped an art career
elevate to another level. For it was they who sacrificed all that time and attention
when I thought it was for a better future. Little did I know that the future was
the next minute of a day when I could have, should have but didn't. Nevertheless,
I know they still love me and I just want them to be proud of me. It is they who
inspire me to go on striving to improve my art skills as well as myself in every
single piece that I create. I thank God everyday for them and all the others here
and the ones who have gone before me, who made me what I am. May God bless each and
everyone.
Pittsburg Steelers Collector Cards
RV: What have you been involved in lately?
Denny: I have been doing a lot of t-shirt graphics lately. Anytime I can get involved with that it’s great because they pay me really fast. I’m actually working on a few new paintings for Mr. Rooney with the Pittsburgh Steelers. I’ve been working on the layout for the collector cards with the older Steelers on them and almost have them completed now for an auction to be held April 22nd in Pittsburgh. The Steelers and Mr. Rooney are auctioning prints of the Rooney Collection to support stroke survivors and also to promote Mr. Rooney’s book, “Ruanaidh,” a biography of the Rooney legacy.
RV: Where do you distribute the collector cards?
Denny: Mr. Rooney has a thousand of them printed and then he gives about 250 of them, I believe, to the players. He keeps part of them and then mails a lot of them to the NFL Hall of Fame voters, players and sports writers.
RV: Do you get season tickets to the games?
Denny: Not always. My biggest problem is getting up to Pittsburgh. I did get to one game and was lucky enough to sit in the owner’s booth. If I was closer to Pittsburgh, I’m sure that I could get in there more often. When we were out in Wyoming, Pittsburgh was going to play Denver. Mr. Rooney said, “I can get you tickets.” I didn’t realize that it was 8 hours away. I had just driven the whole way from Florida to Wyoming and I didn’t feel like driving another 8-9 hours, but I did get the tickets and I gave them to someone out there who is a big Steelers fan.
RV: Where does your inspiration come from? What goes into it? Why do you do that certain painting?
Denny: Mostly the inspiration is the people that I meet, or people that lead me. A lot of time, people would walk into our store in Cody, Wyoming. Leigh, my wife, knows the types of faces that I’m looking for. The interesting faces, the aura about them, how they’re dressed, how they carry themselves. Just the character in their faces alone is sometimes what I look for and she knows exactly the kind of people that I really love to paint. She’s my photographer and has developed a knack for being able to spot great faces over the years. That’s how I got to meet a lot of the people that I’ve painted. I either ran into them or she did. It’s a process that involves setting up a time and a place to take photographs of them because I work strictly from photographs. We’ll take anywhere from 40 to 100 photographs. With Michael Terry, we spent 4 ½ hours with him. Leigh took over 350 photographs of him. From that series alone, I found 119 worthy of painting.
Michael Terry “First Snow”
RV: That’s a lot!
Denny: He changed outfits quite a bit. He was in Pinedale, Wyoming at the annual Mountain Men Rendezvous there. He does lectures all over the United States, talking about the Plains Indians and the myths of Native American lifestyles. He has all kinds of regalia, guns, spears, all kinds of headdresses and tomahawks that he uses in his demonstrations. We scheduled a shoot with him on a day that he wasn’t doing one of his lectures. Of the 119 photographs out of the 350 for painting, so far I’ve done only three paintings of him.
RV: Do you think that you will do any more paintings of him?
Denny: We took some really interesting ones that I want to do. I just got an email from him the other day and his prices have gone up considerably for modeling. He’s a professional actor and stuntman. He makes a lot of the clothing that is worn on movies sets. He did a lot of the stuff for “Dances with Wolves.” Michael was actually an actor on “Last of the Mohicans” television series with Linda Carter. I’ve seen him on the Discovery Channel several times. They did a thing on William Cody; he played one of the Indians. He played the Indian that William Cody supposedly killed. Accordingly, the history behind this was that Cody got into a fight with a Native American and killed him. I think his name was Yellow Hair if I’m not mistaken? Michael played that part, and then we saw some other stuff on Mountain Men and it came on right after that on the Discovery Channel. Michael was in that as well. He is always playing the part of the Native American. I recognized his horse right away because he has this Paint horse that’s 20 some years old now. Actually that horse was included in a painting that I did with Michael, called “First Snow.”
Stan Bearpaw “Ned Christie”
RV: I spoke with Stan, from your “Stan Bearpaw”, painting over the phone and I spoke with him about his photo shoot with Western Horse Magazine.
Denny: As a matter of fact, we were out there when they scheduled that with him. He went down and had those pictures taken. Man, what an honor and just the connection through his Uncle and Ned Christie! That right there is mind blowing to me when you read a lot of what went on with that! You know the typical “kill the Native American” and ask questions later. You know, because he didn’t kill that Sheriff that they accused him of doing. There’s another friend of mine, Dave Hagstrom. He might be another one that you might want to talk to. Do you remember the series Deadwood? The one episode where Seth Bullock went some place and as he was coming back, he got attacked by a Native American and they got into a big fight that went on and on and he ended up bashing the Indian’s head with a rock. But there were a few arrows that were shot. Dave was friends with the guy on the set and he had Dave hand make 6 arrows and they only used one or two of them in the scene, but Dave made the arrows for that scene. In a couple of shots they showed the arrows really close because I believe they put one into Seth’s saddle. Dave makes a lot of wearables too for a lot of big artists. Dave is a really interesting guy. His brother is a fairly famous western artist out there also. Their father, I do believe was Swedish, but their mother was full-blooded Cherokee and when you look at Dave, you see nothing but Native American. The funny thing with Dave is that he has blue eyes. He’s got the long hair and is always wearing the cowboy style hats and stuff. He would probably be another interesting guest on your site.
Chief Plenty Coups (Crow Chief)
RV: When you’re painting or sketching, because we’ve just talked about some of your subjects, what is it that intrigues you about painting Native American profiles?
Denny: Everybody always says, yeah, you know I’ve got Indian blood in me and that’s something that I don’t really know. I know that when I look at photographs of my grandfather and all his brothers together you would swear that they all just walked off of the Res. My one uncle lived in Arizona. When he’d come back to Pennsylvania, we always thought that he was the Indian man. I wear a buffalo nickel around my neck to this day. When I look at that buffalo nickel on the backside, that Indian head is my grandfather’s silhouette profile to a “T.” There have been a lot of things that have inspired me to do paintings. My grandfather and grandmother went out west every year from where we lived in Pennsylvania and they would come back with 8mm movies of everything out there; Yellowstone, Native Americans, etc. As a little kid, I was always inspired to get out there and wasn’t able to until 1980, when I was in my twenties and was able to see it for myself. The other thing that really inspired me to start painting Native Americans was sort of by accident. I was illustrating for a magazine for the Pennsylvania Game Commission. It was a monthly type of magazine mostly on hunting and outdoors and that. I started illustrating for them, mostly illustrating stories. Occasionally, I did three different covers. They would always send me a manuscript of the story, a typed written manuscript from the writer and they would tell me that they need a full page and a spot drawing to compliment the article. They liked my graphites so I would do them in graphite whereas some of the other artists did them in pen and ink. Most of that stuff was done in black and white, never in color. This one writer was from Pennsylvania. His name was Joe Perry. He actually lived for several years in Wyoming on an Indian reservation. It seems like the magazine would always gave me his stories to illustrate. He always started his stories out with a story about Native Americans and he would then go into some kind of hunting story and that’s how I found myself for the art I was to do. He would start talking about Sitting Bull or something and so I would start doing these illustrations of Sitting Bull or somebody else to compliment his articles and that’s how I actually started out doing Native American portraits and stuff. My best friend that I grew up with kept hounding me to do something about my art and he ended up taking it upon himself to call the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody. It ended up that a guy got in contact with me, who is now a good friend of mine by the name of George Mongon. He was one of the Deputy Directors of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center at the time. He talked me into donating a couple of pieces for their annual art auction in 2004. That’s when I really started hitting it heavy. I was doing pencil illustrations for maybe 5 or 6 years before that.
RV: How old were you when you began doing art? Were you taking courses? I mean, when I first saw your sketches and was thinking ‘these are photographs’ and then I had to look closer and thought ‘these aren’t photographs?’
Denny: I actually started drawing at around the age of 3. My mom would always try to keep me quiet at church so she would hand me a pencil and paper and I would sit in church and draw. There were always a lot of good friends who were good artists but their parents didn’t encourage them at all. They’re the ones that are doctors and lawyers now and now I’m the starving artist. Mom and dad always encouraged me to do artwork. By the time that I was in the tenth grade, I knew what I was going to do. I wanted to pursue commercial art. I knew I wasn’t going to make it as a fine artist and starve. I knew that I was going to go to the Art Institute in Pittsburgh, which is strictly working ads and photography and that. We had a couple of life classes, but they didn’t really teach anything much. You just sat there and drew or painted live nude models most of the time. I sort of got bored with that anyway. You’d have a life class that would go on all day doing a charcoal drawing. I got to the point where I was getting bored. I’d do a full figure then I’d start doing a hand, a face or something just to keep from getting bored. A lot of kids in school didn’t get it. To make money, you have to work fast and they just didn’t get it. If nothing else, I learned that you have to work faster or you starve. A lot of them graduated and still didn’t realize that if you are going to make any money, you better be fast. I’ve never actually had lessons on drawing other than a grade school teacher telling me how to do this or how to do that. I’ve never went and really took lessons or anything like that. It’s just something that just sort of came natural to me.
William F. Cody
RV: Where do you start, I mean when you are looking at a portrait, where do you begin?
Denny: I work strictly from good photo references. A lot of the reference that I have was given to me by the Buffalo Bill Historical Center. As matter of fact, the one portrait that I did of William F. Cody was something that I found in Washington, D.C. and I’m not really allowed to say where it came from because they couldn’t identify who the photographer was. It was from a well-known organization that gave me a photograph to use and in turn all they wanted was to have a print from it. It’s the one of him looking up that’s on the front page of my website. They must have a quarter of a million photographs out there at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center that are archived. A lot of them haven’t even been scanned into digital media. They just have tons of photographs of William Cody. They had never seen that particular photograph I used for Cody before. The Deputy Director, George Mongon, inspected the photo and confirmed that it was definitely William F. Cody by some of the marks that were in his face. They blew the photo up for me so that I could get the details. That’s why it’s so focused and clear. He confirmed a couple of flaws in his face and ear and said that it was definitely Cody’s.
RV: So that’s really important to you to be authentic and as close as you can to the subject vs. something that you just have to work with in order to fill in the gaps?
Denny: Right, I don’t want someone coming back and saying this isn’t right. You know, this isn’t the way my hair was or this isn’t the way that my nose is. I want it to be absolutely, totally perfect and as of now, I have yet to have done a commission that somebody wasn’t happy with it when all was said and done. The one lady whose ranch we lived on, I did a commission for her grandkids. That went on for two months until she was happy with the one kid that was like 12 or 13 years old and every two months he changed in physical characteristics, he cut his hair different or something. We ended up changing that kid’s face 3 or 4 times. Finally, one time I just handed her the brush and I said, “Here, you paint it.” There was just one little mark on his face and she wanted to put it on there, after she did it she said, “There, I’m happy now.” The funny thing is that I went up and took the photograph. Leigh was busy that day. We posed them on the fence rails in their cowboy wear. The oldest kid wasn’t there and wasn’t able to get back in time. Later on, I directed his father how to pose him, what to have him do and how to face him which way with the sun and everything. I then pieced his photograph into the photo photograph that I was using of the other boys. The funny thing is, the kids were posing in front of a canyon and there was a mountain that was further over in the corner of the photo that she liked so I took the kids out of the photograph that they were in and put the mountain and spires behind them and that’s how we painted them. Another thing was that we put them on the fence initially to pose them. It ended up that one of the horses got loose from the corral behind them. In case I wanted to use that as a background, they were there. Well, when one of the horses got loose and ran about 300 yards away and they said, we’ll go get it. The ranch manager said, “They’ll never catch that horse.” So they grabbed a bucket and went over with big chunks of grain and darned if that horse walked right up to them. As they were bringing it back, I snapped a shot of them walking straight at me with the horse. As soon as they saw the photo they said, “That’s what we want.” So that’s what I did. I had them have their oldest son face south, this time. It ended up being 7 different photographs pieced together. There were a couple of eagles flying around before I got there so we pieced together a picture of an eagle in the sky and I actually put a more dramatic sky in behind the mountains, a little bit different background than they were actually in. That piece went on for about 2 months.
Castle Rock, Cody, WY
Like I said, I work from photographs just to make sure that everything is correct. Your client looks at that photograph and says, “That’s me,” and okay then, I’m going to paint you like that. A lot of times I’ll put a different background. In a lot of my portraits have just plain backgrounds. Sheldon, the old mountain man friend of mine, we posed in the valley right there above the ranch with Castle Rock in the background. Then, I did another painting of him; I put the Grand Tetons above Jackson into the background. I’ve done two of Sheldon now with his horse, Junior. One of them is horizontal with Castle Rock in the background which is just up the valley from our ranch and across the river from his house where we took the photographs. The gallery owner in Jackson said she would like to see another painting of him done with the Tetons in the background because the Tetons are right above Jackson where the gallery was. She figured that it might sell better with the Tetons in the background. Leigh photographed the Tetons and I took the background that was in his photograph out and used the Tetons as my background that I painted from.
RV: If someone wanted to commission you to do a painting of him or her, how long does it usually take? What’s involved in it and what would they have to do on their part?
Denny: It’s all setting up a time. Most of the time, what I do is interview somebody, talk to them first. I find out what they do, what are their favorite types of clothing that they like to wear, do they have anything that they really treasure like a nice rifle or a nice saddle or something like that. I always try to find something that they are really proud of and then we setup a photo-shoot. Sometimes, we’d have a photo shoot in the studio in our store in Cody. In some cases, we’d photograph them outside at a particular point of interest or scenery. If they wanted a different background, I’d PhotoShop something. If we were inside taking shots, I’d PhotoShop something that they desired in the background with mountains, the plains or trees or something special in the background. Most of the time, what I do is show that to them and say, “Now, this is what I’m going to paint. Are you happy with that?”
RV: I bet you ask that question over and over?
Denny: I have yet to have somebody to tell me that doesn’t look like me. I’m very, very tedious of how I paint. If you look at the work in progress on my site, you’ll see that I’m very meticulous of how I put down my pencil lines and stuff like that. If you look at my website right now, there’s a good friend of mine I painted from here in Florida. His name is Gordon Bond. When I do a painting of somebody, I send a photograph of the painting every night so that what you see is a work in progress, you’re seeing it from beginning to end. I kept sending them to Gordon and I really didn’t hear anything back from him and then all at once when I finished it I got a phone call from him and he said, “You know Denny, I don’t want you to think that I’m a narcissist, but I can’t stop staring at the computer screen. I can’t believe that I’m looking at this painting that you painted of me.” If you look on my website, you can see the work in progress for this piece. He wanted a photo of him on the site too so that he could show people how close I got his face to the detail on the painting. To me, that’s just worth it when you knock somebody off their feet because there are just so many people who have done portraits and then people say, that doesn’t look like me. The funny thing to is that people look at themselves in the mirror. Most people see themselves backwards because of their reflection compared to when people look at you, you look different. There a lot of times people can say, no, that doesn’t look like me. Well, you’re looking at your right eye and your left eye in a different form. I have yet to have somebody tell me, that doesn’t look like me.
Example of Denny’s t-shirt graphics
RV: How come you chose to paint portraits? There are artists that prefer to do abstracts, landscapes, nature, things like that. How come you prefer to do portraits?
Denny: As a little kid I did a lot of portraits. I won my first art contest, doing a portrait of my father. I think that I was only about 10 years old. From there on I was always asked to draw someone’s portrait.
RV: Do you prefer the social interaction vs. going alone in nature or something like that?
Denny: I’m going to be the first to tell you that a lot of these portraits don’t mean anything to anyone else other than the people that I paint from. I keep aspiring to the artist who is my mentor and that is James Bama. James Bama started out pretty much like I did. He was a graphic artist in NYC. He was an Illustrator and did a lot of the covers for the “Doc Savage” series. They’re very realistic paintings. He also did a lot of paintings for Major League Baseball. He went on vacation in the late 60’s to Cody. It ended up that he and his wife fell in love with it and went back home and decided to move out there permanently. He started painting the locals and he just lives over the hill out there from me and just in the last couple of years he’s begun to lose his eyesight. He’s 80 some years old now and he can’t paint anymore. His portraits are photographic-realism. The thing is, all these years he’s been trying to paint all these locals out there and he’s losing his sight now. This inspired me to start painting the locals and finish his work portraying them. A lot are friends of mine that I have met out there that are the locals and that I’m trying to record them for history. I know I’m not selling tons of them but I keep thinking that every one of James Bama’s paintings sold, no matter who it was. People just bought it because they like his artwork. I have a ton of his prints. Between my daughter and I, my wife and my ex-wife, we have a ton of Bama’s prints that have all been re-signed. I got to meet him back in the 80’s and again when we moved out there. He would even come into our store and we would see him downtown all the time. His paintings would average anywhere from $20-60k a piece. They’re just portraits of people like I’m doing. Some of them are the same people that he painted. Don Hershburger, “The Bronze Cowboy” that I painted, Bama painted him years ago when he was just young in the 70’s. James took pictures of Gene Hartung, from my “The Last of The Real Cowboys” and never painted him. As a matter of fact, I posed him in the same clothing that Bama did and I ended up painting him. He’s the old guy holding the saddle.
Example of Denny’s t-shirt graphics
RV: How do you get established in your field?
Denny: That’s a pretty broad question. I’ve been doing this for years and years and just now getting to the point where I’m beginning to get a little notoriety. I finally got into a couple of museums but it is just trying like crazy to promote yourself and trying to show everyone I meet my artwork; getting my art on the Internet, sending it out to galleries and buyers and stuff. It’s very, very hard to get yourself established. I’m still nowhere close to where I want to be. I aspire to be like Bama and have my paintings go to the top like his. I think he set a record and sold one of his paintings for $100,000. It was a really obscure painting or something. Most of his work went around 20-60k. If I could just get somebody to throw me that much money! Maybe that’s just a gauge to determine if you are established when you have people that want your work. It’s kind of nice though because I give Mr. Rooney a lot of credit for helping me. He’s been sending stuff all over and sending it to the NFL Hall of Fame. That’s a big deal when you have your artwork hanging out there. The other museum that I was accepted into was Booth Western art Museum in Cartersville, GA. They have three of my pieces there now in their permanent collection.
RV: Who else have you been commissioned by that you would like to mention?
Denny: Mr. Rooney is my biggest buyer and then the one piece that I did of Troy Polamalu with the Steelers Organization. Actually, the Steelers had me do that for their 75th anniversary a couple of years ago. Mr. Rooney actually bought those after the shows. There were a couple of different shows. One was at the Hall of Fame in Canton, OH and one at the John Heinz Sports History Museum in Pittsburgh where I have other artwork that Mr. Rooney ended up buying both the oil painting and pencil drawing. He donated the oil painting to the Hall of Fame and the other one back to the John Heinz Sports History Museum.
Troy Polamalu
RV: Do you have more than one project going on at once? Do you do three different paintings at once?
Denny: I usually do just one painting at a time. I paint very, very thin layers and my oil paints dry really fast. So I’m not just waiting here for them to dry. Plus I designed a tool to suspend my hand above the painting so I can lay my hand on this bar and I can keep painting whether the painting is dry or not. I try to just concentrate on one painting and finish it up and then onto the next one.
RV: How long do you stay on one particular painting?
Denny: Most paintings take me over 50-100 hours to do.
RV: How long do you stand up all day doing this?
Denny: I’ve done it for 7-8 hours standing. I don’t paint on an easel; I paint on a drawing desk or a Plein Air easel lying somewhat flat. I’m an old-school graphic artist and I have a desk that’s tipped up. I have it raised really high so that I can stand at it. I exclusively paint on Masonite. I don’t use canvas. I use only Masonite and that’s what Bama always painted on. Masonite is much more stable, it
The Old Cheyenne
doesn’t get loose like a canvas does. It’s actually museum grade Masonite that’s covered with white gesso. I buy them already prepared. They’re really easy to lie down on my desk. When I’m working on the tops of my paintings, I’m usually standing up. Once I get down to the middle or the bottom, I’m able to sit down. Most of my paintings are usually 18” wide and 24” in length, or close in that realm. I usually start up and work down. I work in pieces and you’ll see this if you look at my site. The Booth Western Art Museum actually saw how I was painting and had me come in and do a seminar in their theater. They wanted me to explain to the crowd how I did my paintings and gave me a laser pointer. I sat there and showed them how I work in pieces. They all thought that was pretty good.
RV: Is there a big difference in your interest in computer graphics vs. painting? You are great in both fields.
Denny: If it’s working on a MAC or picking up a paint brush I found that they both translate into use of color, how I lay things down, contrast and that type of stuff related to each other really well. To be honest, I like to do graphics as much as I do painting. It keeps me from getting bored. My desk is only 6 feet away from my MAC. I’m just as happy doing one as the other. I’m doing all kinds of things right now for religious wearables, truckers, bikers, etc. It’s really kind of high-end artwork also and is my mainstay between commissioned art pieces.
I’d like to thank my friend Denny for providing time towards this interview. A month or so ago I was speaking with a widow on Facebook who was really drawn to one of Denny’s sketches and was wanting a photocopy of one of his sketches to commemorate and honor her deceased husband. Denny sent her an enlarged graphics file that she was able to print out and frame. Denny is not only a high class artist but a high class human being.
The work that has been exhibited in this article is a mere fraction of the work that Denny has accomplished. Please be sure to visit the following sites to get a full reel of what this remarkable artist has created: