No, he doesn't have a cow face, he paints pictures of cow faces.
Glenn is an old friend, the older brother of my best friend from high school and after. He grew up in Hale Center, now lives in Plainview. He told me years ago how the ranchers loved his paintings of calves drinking from a water trough.
He's done a lot more, including a personalized painting that my parents commissioned as a gift to my wife and I. It hangs in our living room.
Check out his work if you get a chance. He's really good.
"The Cow Face Guy"
Glenn is an old friend, the older brother of my best friend from high school and after. He grew up in Hale Center, now lives in Plainview. He told me years ago how the ranchers loved his paintings of calves drinking from a water trough.
He's done a lot more, including a personalized painting that my parents commissioned as a gift to my wife and I. It hangs in our living room.
Check out his work if you get a chance. He's really good.
"The Cow Face Guy"
quote:
By Mike Barnett
Editor
Cows pay the bills for Hale County Farm Bureau member Glenn Lyles.
But saddles and spurs, lassos and chaps aren’t the tools of his trade. He plies an easel, a pallet and canvas, a brush and an imagination as big as Texas to make more per head than any cattleman he knows.
Glenn’s cattle aren’t sold to the auction barn. His bovines hang out in art galleries across the Lone Star State.
"To this day, I wish I had a herd of cattle," this West Texas artist says. "But I don’t. I paint them instead."
Glenn is known in art circles as the "Cow Face Guy." The faces of cows drinking from water troughs—singular or in groups—are the mainstay of his 17-year career.
Fine details—water dripping from a calf’s chin, its reflection on a neck, the shifting shades of light dancing across the faces of crossbreds—keep his paintings fresh over mantles, in parlors and on office walls across the United States.
Glenn called his first cow face painting, "Drinking Buddies," and it immediately sold to a friend in Houston. He painted another for the Texas Cattle Feeders Association to sell in a benefit auction. A man from Oklahoma unsuccessfully bid on that painting, and later called Glenn to order one for himself.
"I thought maybe I’m on to something," he says. "I did a third one, and decided I better have one for the shows I was in. They began to get a lot of attention and began to sell."
He’s painted 63 of those since.
Artistic success hasn’t come easy for this flatlander from the Texas Panhandle. He was raised on a family farm in Hale County, and majored in animal science at West Texas State University. He wanted to be a rancher, with dreams of running a commercial cowherd and a small registered operation. But none of that happened.
His father needed help farming, and Glenn answered the call. Using the good earth as his canvas and the plow as a brush, he proudly colored the landscape year after year with the richness of harvest.
Then fate stepped in.
Glenn developed arthritis and surgery was due to fuse the bones in his left foot. After 19 years, farming would no longer be an option.
"I was driving the tractor one day and I just had this very clear thought about painting for a living," he recalls, noting that he had painted and drawn his entire life.
He sold his equipment, paid off the house and car, and gave himself two years to make a go of it.
Those two have turned into 17. But it took awhile before Glenn achieved his ultimate goal.
"For the first 10 years, when somebody would ask what I did, I’d tell them ‘I’m a painter,’" he says. "But about five, six or seven years ago, I began to say, ‘I’m an artist.’"
So what’s the difference?
"One of my great aunts who painted... I can remember when she took me aside and told me very matter of fact, ‘Artists see things different,’" Glenn says of a lesson of his youth. "At the time I was saying, ‘Whatever.’ But now I know exactly what she means."
As an artist, Glenn’s vision encompasses much more than the subject he’s painting. Sometimes it’s a whisper of shadow at the bottom of a cliff, or sunlight glinting off the side of a barn. Maybe it’s the white face of a newborn baby calf shining from a flush of green grass that attracts his eye.
"I’ve found out that if I’m driving down a road and my head turns, I better go back and see what made my head turn," Glenn says. "I love cattle and horses and animals, but I’m getting to where it’s more about the color and the light that intrigue me."
Cows aren’t the only captivation of this West Texas native. He is a renowned horse artist and has been commissioned for family portraits. He’s painted Hill Country scenes, cottonwood trees turning yellow in Kansas, a Chihuahua—even a bullfight in Mexico.
But it always comes back to cow faces. So far, that hasn’t lost its spark.
Though the dreams of ranching haven’t faded, Glenn admits there are benefits to painting cattle over owning them. He never has to break ice to water the cows in his pictures. The cattle he so vividly portrays never kick—and the artist never hauls feed.
"And they never get out. They never get out on the road," he says. "It’s a lot more fun to paint cows than it is to own them."
Editor’s Note: Glenn Lyles’ paintings may be found at Griffith Fine Art in Salado, Fredericksburg Art Gallery in Fredericksburg and River’s Edge Art Gallery in Kerrville. If you know a Texas Farm Bureau member with an interesting story, contact Mike Barnett, Editor, Texas Neighbors at mbarnett@txfb.org, 254-751-2244.
