Kenneth Pauling Riley

Ken Riley was a good enough drummer that music nearly topped painting as his life’s work. Riley eventually studied with Thomas Hart Benton in Kansas City and Harvey Dunn in New York. After a tour as a combat artist during World War II, he went on to illustrate paperbacks and periodicals, but it was a National Park Service commission and a teaching post at Brigham Young that led him to paint the storied places of the American West. Riley was inducted into the Cowboy Artists of America in 1982, received gold medals four times, and won the Prix de West in 1995. His paintings can be found in the White House, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Booth Western Art Museum. The line connecting the early masters of the West, the Golden Age of American Illustration, and contemporary Western modernism runs straight through Riley’s easel. Absaroka Warrior has all the elements you’d ask of a Riley portrait: the chiseled modeling of the face, the attention to the adornments—the beading and hair wraps—and an abstract background in colors that enhance the figure work.

-James D. Balestrieri