The Artistry of Charles Schridde

Story & photos
by Gregory L. Peterson

pro bull rider cover He still wakes up early in the morning to catch the sunrise, something he was programmed to do when working as a commercial photographer.

He goes down to the local YMCA, where he swims three times a week in the outdoor pool and enjoys the quiet of the morning.

He hears the birds singing, and watches the sun striking the hills that slope down toward the ocean near his home in Laguna Beach, Calif.

After a swim, it's back home to do yoga exercises. He can do 95 pushups in one sitting. While most people want to relax and kick back at this point in their life, artist Charles Schridde, at 71 years young, wants to be a cowboy when he grows up.

Two years ago, Schridde decided to go back to his love of painting after 25 years. He started to paint landscapes and figures, achieving dramatic effects of light, color and movement. But that wasn't enough. He wanted to paint action and drama, the feeling he got when shooting fast automobiles in the afternoon sunlight of the desert. A year and a half ago, he discovered the subject that would become the most important element in his paintings: rodeo.

charles schridde artist The discovery came as a surprise, since he found it a thousand miles away in Abilene, Texas.

"To me, rodeo really depicts the life and times of a cowboy out West," Schridde said. "I love the action and try to capture that energy when the chute opens up and the bull comes out charging.

"A friend of mine was selling my Western landscapes up in his art gallery In Detroit. He talked me into going to Abilene to do a portrait of an old rodeo star from the 1930s, Bob Estes. It turned out to be one of the best paintings I have done. Bob had his own rodeo in the 50s, went to Paris, and down to South America. He still lives in Baird, Texas. He must be 86 now and is still feisty, I'm sure. He had his own pet bull, bigger than any they use now. It must have been 15 feet long. Bob would go up and feed him, put the food on his own tongue, and the bull would take his tongue, which was about 30 inches long, go swoosh and just lick the food right off Bob's face. It was so funny. I talked to him awhile back and he told me the bull just died. He was really sad. Anyway, that is how I got interested In rodeo. I started to go to local rodeos in California, and now it is the main subject of my paintings."

Schridde was born in Chicago and moved to Michigan when he was 3. His family lived there until he was I I years old and his father died.

I was brought up in kind of a desolate area where there weren't many kids to play with, so I got started painting when I was real young," he said. "I started to copy Wait Disney. It was in Decatur, Michigan, that at that time had a population of 1,600. This was back in 1938. 1 guess I developed my imagination there.

charles schridde artist "My father was an amateur artist. He was a color photographer and was taking pictures of things people wanted to print, the plate separations needed for their printing process. My mother said he was one of the best at what he did. This is how I developed my interest in art."

He got a scholarship to the Chicago Art Institute when he was 14 years old.

Schridde never had a chance to use it, because after high school, he was drafted. After the service, he went back to night school at the Chicago Art Institute. At 20, Schridde got a job as an illustrator, and soon became known for his detailed line drawings. The man he was working for at the time got a job in a large studio in Detroit, where they had 150 artists working. It was the largest studio in the world at the time.

"He offered me a job, so I moved to Detroit and then I started to do line drawings for all the major automobile manufacturers," Schridde said. "it was feast or famine back then. You worked 60 to 80 hours a week, or not at all. I lived in this little apartment in a terrible neighborhood in the city and slept on a mattress on the floor. I didn't have any furniture. I picked up this book, 'Lust for Life,' and I stayed up all night reading it. I was so excited about what this book had to offer. The next day I went into work and quit.

"I went back at to Chicago and lived with my mother. I just wanted to paint. I was about 24 or 25 at the time. I painted everything, the first thing I saw I would paint. If it was a garbage can I liked, whatever, I would paint it in watercolors. I thought I would be real arty, so I used to drink out of the water I cleaned my brushes in. I got wrapped up in being an artist. If Van Gogh did it, I thought well, what the hell, I'll do it, too."

Charlie painted for a year and decided it was time to get back into the real world. He moved back to Detroit, and during the next 20 years became a very successful, award-winning car photographer, shooting ads for all of the major automobile manufacturers, like Chevrolet, Oldsmobile, Dodge and Mazda. You have probably seen his work, photographing cars against the red-rock cliffs of Sedona and Monument Valley, charging though stream beds and racing across the dry lake beds of the desert. The ads and catalogs were all shot during the months of April through June, and because of the weather, everything was photographed in the West.

Five years ago Schridde packed everything up and moved to California.

He shot everything at sunrise and sunset, building sets in the middle of the desert because the light makes the cars look shinier. He worked 18 hour days for weeks on end, on three hours of sleep a night. It was not glamorous by any means, but it was fun and very lucrative.

"The car business was changing, the budgets were getting tighter, and they always seemed to go to the lowest bidder, recalls Schridde. " I just started to paint Western landscapes. In a short period of time I sold 20 original paintings. I had a lot of control over the subject matter. With rodeo, I don't have that control. I just take a lot of photographs. I don't have very much control in 8 seconds. "

Schridde has looked at all the other Western painters working today, and noticed that most of them are painting the history of the cowboy. They are going back and making up things from the past. Like others of his generation, Schridde matured thinking he knew all about cowboys from the way they shot their way through TV and movie scripts. Actually, they were seeing lurid accounts of the Wild West that first appeared in the dime store novels of the 1870s, and were later drawn upon by the painters Frederick Remington and Charlie Russell.

Schridde thinks Russell and Remington were the best. Russell crammed his paintings with details because he feared that the artifacts of the brief cowboy period would go unrecorded. Remington portrayed the cowboy as a man of mythic proportions. They both created paintings that were larger than life.

"I looked at their work, and I thought they were out West while it was happening. All that stuff wasn't history that they did, they were there," Schridde said. "So I thought, 'Why not try and do something out here where the cowboy is really big time? The only places are the rodeos.

"I want to paint history while it is happening and the cowboys are the kings of the rodeos. I don't want to do cowboys and Indians from the past, I want to do paintings on what is happening now and in the future. I want to portray the real history of today, and that is why I decided to go with rodeos."

Schridde got married in Canada last July.

"Susan wanted to get married in Canada and I wanted to photograph the Calgary Stampede, so we made it a joint trip," he smiles. "I took photographs, 36 rolls of film, for the subjects of my next paintings. The weather was terrible. It rained most of the time. But I got a lot of good material. It was dramatic. I did not know about the PBR at that time. I didn't realize it, but I painted a couple of images of J.W. Hart from one of his rides at Calgary. I had no due who he was, or anybody else for that matter. I just wanted to paint action and cowboys.

"I feel like it is a good niche for me and I don't think anybody else is doing this type of action. I have had a chance to meet some of the riders now, I.W., Tuff and Troy Dunn. I would eventually like to do portraits of these guys. I would like to be the forerunner of painting rodeo as we know it today. There are people out there doing this, but I don't think they have the art background that I have. The people that have the art background and are illustrators are all doing Indian paintings. That is real popular right now. There is this whole new art area out there at this time."

Schridde had the opportunity to paint Jerome Davis' boots that he wore on his last ride at the Tuff Hedeman Championship Challenge in Fort Worth this past March 14.

"it was like painting for Superman," Charlie recalls. "I wanted to be a part of helping him in some way, and really didn't know how at that time. I am a big Van Gogh fan, I know a lot about all the artists. Van Gogh had painted this guy's work boots, and I had a card of that painting. Susan and I were thinking about donating a painting to him at the auction they had as a tribute to Jerome at Caesars Palace the night before the 1998 PBR Finals. Instead of just donating a painting I had already done, we decided to do an original painting of Jerome's cowboy boots. I have always wanted to paint something like Van Gogh did, and I thought about doing it with cowboy boots but I could never find any good worn cowboy boots. We talked to Jerome and he thought it was a good idea, so he shipped us out his boots with the spurs still on."

"These Boots Were Made For Walkin"' is the title of the painting.

One of Schridde's rodeo paintings, "If Looks Could Kill" was published in a book that was released in January of this year, "Art of the American West."

"What I am basically trying to do in all my paintings is put a lot of detail in the things that count, and the things that count are the bull's head and the cowboy. Then I make the rest of the painting more impressionistic."

It takes Schridde about 40 to 60 hours per painting, and they sell for $6,500 to $15,000. Limited-edition prints are $ 100 to $750.

"I paid my dues in the art field and would love to be known as a rodeo artist," Schridde says. "Nobody has really been known as a rodeo artist before, except Charles Russell. That was way back when. I think I have a great opportunity here since rodeo, and in particular the sport of bull riding, is growing very fast."

Note. Cover art for this issue of Pro Bull Rider was created by Charles Schridde from a photo of Cody Hart in Salt Lake City by Andy Watson.

Our Paintings and Gicle on Canvas Prints are shipped C.O.D.