Known among his friends as the Saltwater Cowboy, Bob Graham is an artist based in Charleston, South Carolina, whose love of the West knows no bounds. Over his two-and-half-decade career, Graham has mastered art through storytelling in his emotionally expressive paintings and drawings.
“My goal is to tell a story to evoke an emotion in the viewer. I feel art is a journey whose elusive goal is to communicate beauty that the creator has placed before us,” Graham says. Combining his love of
Western art and horses, his work often portrays the rugged rodeo cowboy who sought to explore, tame and ultimately survive the challenges of the vast wilderness of America. He enjoys painting people, especially cowboys. “I’m intrigued by their love of nature, their bond with their horses and their cowboy code of ethics. They evoke a spirit of a bygone era. While my work is essentially realistic, I always try to leave something to the viewer’s imag- ination. I want viewers to leave with their own story about the painting and to finish it in their own mind. Accuracy, attention to detail and dramatic impact are all characteristics that I try to instill in my work. I want my art to sing. I want to capture that unique sense of feeling in that one moment in time.”
