“To be a frontiersman, I thought I needed a horse and a rifle,” artist Doug Hall says of his childhood in southwest Missouri, where he did his best to imitate his heroes, Daniel Boone and Simon Kenton. That meant spending his days in a tipi in his parents’ backyard and, at age 15, skipping school to buy a flintlock rifle. “I’ve been shooting one ever since,” he says.

That story is a fitting example of how Hall has lived his life, bucking convention in favor of the way things used to be. He has won black powder rifle matches, roamed the country on horseback in 300-mile loops, and lived in hand-built log cabins for most of his life. It’s not surprising, then, that his luminous oil paintings center on Eastern Woodland Indians and the American frontier. “This is my passion, what I think about all the time,” he says. “I’m just letting it out.”

Hall grew up in Neosho with a brother and seven cousins, and his mother always had an easel set up in the house for any of the children to use. “By the time I was 16 years old, everybody knew it was my easel,” Hall says, adding that he began taking art lessons when he was 7 years old and sold his first painting a year or so later. “A young couple wrote me a check for $2.50, and I thought it was like a million dollars.”

Read the full article in the September/October 2024 issue.

Scouting Martin Station

Oil
30″ by 40″

Woodland Artist

Oil
40″ by 30″