Cowboy Storyteller

“I need a wife,” laments accomplished New Mexico oil painter JaNeil Anderson.

She is mostly joking; she has been happily married to her husband Walt for many years, working side by side with him on their cattle ranch beside the Gila River. But, as she notes, it’s not uncommon for the wives of male artists to take on much of the ancillary work that surrounds making and selling art: marketing, framing, accounting, and other supportive and administrative tasks.

“My men artist friends all have wives,” Anderson says. “The wife does all the show entries and all the paperwork; the men just paint. My husband, he’s busy on the ranch. For years we had a custom cabinet shop and I told him, ‘Hey, you could make frames.’ He didn’t want to make frames.”

So it is that Anderson does all the support work for her art in addition to cranking out as many paintings as she has time to produce in between the day-to-day workload of running the ranch. She paints, she markets, she travels to shows every year and, somehow, she still has the energy to be excited and inspired about making art. “I’ve gotta paint,” she says. “It keeps me sane.”

Read the full article in the May/June 2024 issue.