Windows into the West

What do you do when you’ve never painted before and an old friend from high school slides into your Instagram DMs and asks you to paint a portrait for them? If you’re Jacob Lovett, you say yes and figure it out.

Fort Worth native Lovett has loved drawing since childhood and took drawing classes in high school and college but had never painted. “My grandparents lived out in the country near Granbury, and when we would go visit, my grandfather would give us a drawing pad and pens and send us outside,” says Lovett.

“Through middle and high school, I took art classes. Drawing came easy to me, and I always enjoyed it. I was the kid getting in trouble in math class for drawing instead of working on math problems,” he said with a rueful chuckle.

photo credit: Jacob Lovett

After graduating from Paschal High School, Lovett attended Ole Miss, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in marketing. He took a job in the marketing department of a credit card processing company and then pivoted to a sales and marketing position in the hospitality industry. The Covid pandemic hit the hospitality industry particularly hard, and Lovett was laid off.

The timing of his friend’s out-of-the-blue portrait commission was fortuitous. When asked to do something he’d never done before, Lovett, a natural risk taker, did what few of us would do. He accepted the challenge, hopped on YouTube, bought some supplies, and jumped in with both feet. After finishing the painting, he sought out a painting teacher in Fort Worth and began honing his craft. “I was extremely lucky during Covid. I turned it into a thriving experience, and I wouldn’t be here today without it.”

Just five short but busy years later, Lovett has evolved into a world-class painter of the American West. Lovett describes himself as “a contemporary western oil painter who employs stylistically modern techniques to achieve a striking realism” that has earned him such distinctions as Southwest Art Magazine’s “21 Under 31 Young Artists To Watch” as well as accolades from Western Art and Architecture, Cowboys & Indians Magazine, Western Art Collector, and Cowgirl Magazine.

Lovett’s signature style is a perspective on the American West Lovett calls his “Western windows.” Verging on the architectural, Lovett’s paintings offer a view on the American West from the outside looking in. Or rather, from the perspective of one who does not live the cowboy life but is offered a glimpse into it. “I don’t pretend to be a cowboy. I’m not cosplaying the cowboy life,” says Lovett. “Growing up in Fort Worth, we’re surrounded by Western culture. As a teenager, I resisted that. I resisted being put into any category. When I came back from school and Covid hit, everything changed. The vastness of the West, the values of the American cowboy, and the cowboy ethos inspired me to see a different perspective. The windows are my perspective on and relation to the West. They are my way of interpreting the subject matter.”

photo credit: Lane Womack

Lovett’s fresh take on the American West in general, and the American cowboy in particular, is double-takingly eye-catching. The paintings are at the same time familiar and novel: Remington- and Russell-inspired, sure, but phrased differently. Foundational, yet extraordinary. The aural analogy would be like hearing Stevie Ray Vaughan playing Beethoven on a Stratocaster. And who wouldn’t want to hear that?

To the delight of generations of Fort Worthians, Will Rogers famously said, “Fort Worth is where the West begins, and Dallas is where the East peters out.” Setting the humorous aspect of that sentiment to one side, there is real gravitas in the notion that in Fort Worth we live on the edge of the American West. Not too far out of town on I-20, you are met with vistas that terrified early pioneers. The European mind simply could not wrap itself around such vast emptiness.

The vistas have changed, of course, but the spirit of those pioneers lives on. Jacob Lovett’s art is proof of that. Like those who came before, he said yes to the unknown, and through his paintings, we are given “an entrance into or a peeking into the west.” Or, as Lovett himself put it, “a returning home.”

You can find Lovett’s work at the Gallery at Bowie House here in Fort Worth or at the Commerce Gallery in Lockhart.