In My Mother Let Me Be a Cowboy, Brian Keith Stephens brings a deeply personal body of work to Abend Gallery, exploring the cowboy as symbol, not costume, a stand-in for freedom, uncertainty, and the courage to choose an unpromised path. These paintings move between instinct and intention, balancing quiet resolve with the thrill of the unknown.

Stephens approaches painting as a lived experience, where marks can be soft or forceful, careful or unruly, and meaning arrives through repetition, risk, and trust. The resulting works feel both grounded and open-ended, like fragments of a larger story still unfolding. This solo exhibition invites viewers into that space, where independence meets vulnerability, and where the pursuit of what “feels real” becomes its own kind of mythology.

I remember Johnny Cash or maybe Willie Nelson singing the verse, “Mammas don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys.”

My mother did. She gave me room to follow the pull of my curiosity.

Artist and cowboy overlap in the mythology of “the wild one.” An artist’s life, like a cowboy’s life, is a life chosen without guarantees, out in the wild without assurance of easy survival, a regular paycheck, or planned vacations. Not a mother’s ideal.

The cowboy is a loose symbol for stepping into territory that does not promise clarity. The artist often occupies a similar space, moving through ideas, moments, and fragments that do not line up neatly. Both roles carry a mixture of wandering and focus.

Painting, for me, is pure freedom. I choose how to put the paint down, soft, hard, careful, sloppy, calm, wild, however I feel. There is ecstasy in doing something that doesn’t seem to have a reason and repeating it again and again even though it makes no promises.

There is no fixed order in painting. It gathers what comes toward it. Being a painter is being alone with yourself, alone with your own decisions. It is courage and vulnerability and purity all at once. That’s the cowboy spirit.

My paintings rise from that blend of direction and uncertainty. They reflect the way meaning arrives through instinct rather than instruction. This body of work I dedicate to the freedom given to me, the permission to head toward what called me. I was allowed to move this way, to work this way, to follow the line that felt real. My parents gave me that beginning. The paintings continue it. - Brian Keith Stephens