14 MAY 8-14, 2025 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | LETTERS | CONTENTS | trating for a book cover is that the images have to be more vertical, which Manchess saw as a welcome challenge. “In the early days working together, we were still working with the old format of the cover, so the title was either at the top of the book or at the bottom,” Manchess explains. “Now, initially, the reason it was at the top of the book was so they could sit in the paperback stands, and the title would be above the shelf holder. So I would design the entire cover for the image, and then the type would obliterate fully a third of it.” As merchandising evolved, the need for a title at the top disappeared, and Manchess was given more freedom in how he could place things. It also allowed him to play more with the illusion of movement, resulting in a more dynamic feel to the covers. “What I’m looking for is the character in the body language, even in the animals, like horses and oxen,” he shares. “I’m interested in how they move in the painting itself, how they move in the composition, so I’m constantly looking at active horses and how people move through the landscape. And then costuming comes into play. And I don’t have what it takes to buy all that costuming, so I have to draw it and put it on people.” Manchess – along with Beau and a few of their friends – wound up serving as models for many of the men portrayed. “That helped with being able to pose the body posture, get the body language right,” he says. “I really tried to work at capturing that feeling of fl uidity and motion.” In addition to giving the cover images more movement, Beau wanted him to rely less on guns as icons of the period. “I thought that was a good approach, because we didn’t want them to look like shoot-’em-ups every single time,” Manchess says. “And also, we just need less of that out there right now, you know?” What he thinks we need more of out there is caution around Artifi cial Intelligence and its potential long-term impact on artists. Manchess is one of ten artists suing Stabil- ity AI in a class action suit aimed at “getting them to stop taking our work off the inter- net,” he explains. “The whole thing is based on a sampling of the work, the machines can’t create a work from scratch. I mean, it’s all about copyright, we’ve got to get this under control.” Because Western art often trades on a sense of authenticity and nostalgia, while AI-generated images are built on datasets rather than lived experience or human emo- tion, Manchess says he worries about the blurring of the line between original and derivative content. “It’s already starting to change everything in the art world, and not for the better,” he says. His name is one of the twelve now-famous “prompt gods,” and he says he was shocked when he realized how much of his work was being pilfered and used for profi t by peo- ple plugging in his name to access his work. “I mean, when I fi rst heard about it, my stuff had been sam- pled upwards of 150,000 times,” he says. “And since then, it’s gone way beyond that. And they’re trying to cover it up, that this is in- fringing on our ownership of the work we labored over to create.” He’s heartened by the fact that there are still so many original illustrators plying their craft, though. Manchess says he is ex- cited that the L’Amour collection is being of- fered alongside another comprehensive exhibit, Character in Context 2025, featuring nineteen other illustrators whose process journeys – from preliminary drawings to color studies – ac- company the fi nal artworks, all of which are available for purchase and represent the most comprehensive presentation of processes (more than 150 pieces) from liv- ing illustrators ever collected in one space. “We’re just all going to have to stick to- gether and support each other, and keep fi ghting until the bitter end to preserve our rights, because otherwise, it’s Handmaid’s Tale, right?” Manchess says. Which, let’s face it, is a far cry from Bonanza. L’Amour by Manchess runs through October 31 and Character in Context 2025 through July 19 at the A.R. Mitchell Museum of Western Art, 150 East Main Street in Trinidad. Artists include Gregory Manchess, Elliot Lang, Sarah Finnigan, Joanna Barnum, Cody Kuehl, Zak Pullen, Bruce Macpherson, Shawn Adomanis, Reiko Murakami, Tawny Fritz, Kaysha Siemens, Andrew Magrini, Kelley Hensing, Scott Brund- age, Patrick Stacy, Dan Chudzinski, Colin and Kristine Poole, and Jennifer Hrabota Lesser. Learn more at armitchellmuseum.com. Culture continued from page 13 Louis L’Amour was arguably the most beloved of Western wordsmiths. A.R. MITCHELL MUSEUM OF WESTERN ART
