Cowboy artist Joe Beeler died Wednesday in Sedona, and his passing was as characteristic as his painting.
“He was in the saddle when he died,” friend Steve Todd said. “He was working on a ranch with friends and neighbors, branding calves . . . and he slumped forward in the saddle and died of a heart attack.”
The last remaining founding member of the Cowboy Artists of America, Beeler was 74. According to Todd, he frequently visited the ranches of friends to help out at branding time.
“He really lived his life as a true Westerner,” said Ed Reilly, owner of the Bronzesmith foundry in Prescott Valley, where Beeler had his sculptures cast for the past two decades.
“Unlike some other members of the Cowboy Artists of America, Joe really was a cowboy,” said Maryvonne Leshe, partner of Trailside Galleries in Scottsdale, where Beeler had showed his work since 1977. “And going through his home was like visiting the history of the West.”
Beeler was named an Arizona History Maker in 1994 by the Arizona Historic League, an honor that meant a great deal to him.
“It put him in the company of such important Arizonans as Carl Hayden and Ben Avery,” Reilly said.
Beeler joined forces in 1965 with three other Western artists to form the cowboy artists’ group, which has grown to two dozen artists. The group has an annual show in October at the Phoenix Art Museum, where their work sells for up to six figures.
Beeler was born on Christmas Day in 1931 in Joplin, Mo. His art talent was discovered early and he attended several art schools.
He had his first one-man show in 1960 at the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, one of the premier museums of Western art in the country, and since then has been one of the most prominent members working in the genre.
“He had his own voice and style,” Leshe said. “He was a warm and humorous person and it showed in his work.”
Unlike some artists, Beeler worked in all media, including painting and sculpture.
“Joe’s art has soul to it. It has a certain feeling,” Reilly said.
“He was never interested in showing something in such minute detail as he was in conveying a feeling or emotion in his art. He had a signature style: You look at a Beeler painting or a sculpture and you could see they both came out of the same person. Whatever flowed through him flowed through everything he did.”
One difference is that Beeler never used a camera to help him out. Many artists will take photographs and project the images onto their canvases to help them get the drawing right. But Beeler didn’t use short cuts.
“He’d take a blank white canvas and with charcoal, he’d put all the things he wanted in there,” Reilly said. “It was a different style, just shoot-from-the-hip sort of style.”
That quality characterized him as a man, too.
“He had no pretense about him,” Todd said. “He was comfortable being Joe Beeler with everyone.”
Beeler lived in Sedona since the early 1960s. His wife, Sharon, died in 2004. He is survived by a brother, two children and one grandchild. Services will be held at 10 a.m. Thursday at the Church of St. John Vianney in Sedona.
