Bob Wygant  (1927 - 2008)

A Texas painter, Bob Wygant creates traditional and romantic, panoramic western landscapes, often with diminished figures of cowboys on horses in river valleys against mountain backdrops.  He also does an occasional still life as well as wildlife subjects.

His primary medium is acrylic, and the tone of his paintings is quietude.  Of his work, he has said:  "I am interested in establishing a mood in my paintings and not a meaning.  It is the viewer who brings the meaning to the work."(Depot) He is ever challenged by questions such as: "Who walked here? What was it like? What would I have been doing if I had lived in this place 100 years ago? What strangers have passed here?  Who owned this cabin, drank from the stream?" (Samuels 592)

Wyant, born in Houston, had early exposure to drawing and painting from his father, who was the Heights Movie Theatre manager and gave his son movie posters to copy.  Wyant's love of the outdoors was much influenced by his grandfather, who took him hunting and fishing.

By age 13, he had determined to be an artist.  He was offered many art scholarships to attend college but instead volunteered in 1945 for the next two years as a staff artist for the marines.  In 1947, he entered the University of Texas in Austin and studied art on a G.I. Bill until the money ran out.

Then he established a painting career in Houston where commissions from major oil companies such as Humble Oil Company and Creole Petroleum brought much attention to his painting skills.  For Creole Petroleum, he did a series on South America, made possible by them funding several trips to that continent.

For 16 years beginning 1960, he taught at the University of Houston becoming an Assistant Professor, and he also worked with the Houston Livestock Show as a judge of art submissions and scholarship applications.  By 1976, he had so many commissions that he gave up teaching.  Included were illustrations for True West, Saturday Evening Post and Fortune magazines.  In 1981, he received Best of Show at the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame.

He and his wife have lived much of their lives in a rural home north of Houston.

Sources
Peggy and Harold Samuels, Contemporary Western Artists