Watching the Iron Horse 1902

Charles M. Russell made this watercolor, Watching the Iron Horse, as an encounter, maybe even a clash, between cultures. Look at the dry brushstrokes and the way the ochre of the dry grass bleeds into the white of the page. The paper is thin, and you can imagine the artist tilting the board to let the colors flow, pooling into the right form. Russell is concerned with the way the light bounces off the plains and the distant mountains—the bright, washed-out sky bears down on the scene. What was he thinking when he painted this? Was it just a recording of a scene or something more profound? Think about the figures on horseback, poised between two worlds. Maybe they represent how human beings are continually negotiating the present and the future. Russell is using the history of painting, the conventions of a landscape, to ask how we frame a scene. It is as if he were speaking to other painters, inviting them to think about how an artist can create a record of a changing world.