In the Studio with Lucile Wedeking
Originally recorded October 14, 2022.
Lucile Wedeking walks through paintings rooted in the history and characters of Texas’s Flat Top Ranch, including “Yarning” and two works featuring “Scandalous John” Selman. View Lucile Wedeking’s artist profile and available work.
Transcript note: Speaker labels were assigned from the source audio where available and dialogue context otherwise. Paragraph breaks were added for readability, and verbal filler was lightly edited. Joint labels mark rapid or overlapping exchanges. This was prepared from an automated transcription, so minor transcription errors may remain.
Studio walkthrough—October 14, 2022
Watch the original video on Instagram (02:58)
Participants: George Irwin and Lucile Wedeking
Lucile Wedeking: And then here's Yarning. This is probably one of my first ones I started, the first sketch is up there on the wall and I just came across that old photo and I just loved it. I was like somebody has to... this has to be in color. Yeah and
George Irwin: then you've got your collage up there. Yeah I'm just kind of putting up
Lucile Wedeking: different images of things like that painting. That was like the first step of that painting and it went somewhere else but I really liked that. It was like okay there's something about that I want to get back to simplified this has
George Irwin: some of the iridescence on it this one doesn't have your essay but yes
Lucile Wedeking: hello these guys playing cards besides scandalous John Selman who is like one of my other favorite figures of the ranch he was the foreman of the flat top ranch for years and his name Scandalous John comes from when he was like 14 they put him on a bucking horse and he got bucked off and he got right back on. He said that's a scandalous son of a buck you know and so then the names stuck but then there's also like some of the things he did were a little scandalous because he was a wild cowboy my granddad always told me yeah there are stories about him but I'm not gonna be the one to tell you because they get like tall tales. My favorite one about him is he got put in they came into town and he and the Cowboys got drunk one night and um they got put into jail when he called his girlfriend to get him out of jail and she came down there and said I'm not gonna get you out of
Lucile Wedeking: jail unless you married me right here on this spot and apparently he got
George Irwin: married in the jail right there. I love the detail in the cards and the saddle blankets.
Lucile Wedeking: This is one that I'd love to do larger just for those details, and this is scandalous John again and this one was really heavily inspired by Cloud World by Maynard Dixon. I just love the colors in that and that's probably my favorite Dixon painting it is just like, that's kind of what I saw with those. Love all the kettle on the back. Yeah so like just layering different old images.
George Irwin: Yeah, that's cool. I like how you are not afraid of or opposed to or something like putting lots of other figures and action happening in a scene.
Lucile Wedeking: With the small paintings, like you can do a small painting quick but I love it when look at something small and it like it just captures your eye and there's so many different things. Look, it's a large world in a small window right um I don't know
Ranch-history clip—September 29, 2022
Watch the original video on Instagram (00:36)
Participants: Lucile Wedeking
Lucile Wedeking: pretty surreal because they kind of literally came from roomscapes. The history of the ranch is really fascinating and it's a huge part of Texas history. So, it starts with Fonte Magnus-Wenson who was the first Swedish immigrant to Texas before Texas was Republican. And he came here and started out handling words on the bicycle, you know, traveling or control business. um he's got a story that i'm not going to get into because i can sit and talk for about an hour about that but um he built a business
