Ricardo Moreno Beasley 1908-1994
Going Wild: Those who work in nature must move to the rhythms of the beasts. – Ricardo Moreno Beasley
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Ricardo Moreno Beasley was born on December 10, 1908, in Kingsville, Texas, the third of five children to Richard Jameson Beasley and Concepcion Moreno Beasley. Ricardo grew up on Rancho Irapuato, the family ranch three miles outside of Ben Bolt, Texas. At an early age, he began working on the family ranch, helping his father tend to the cattle, manage the crops, and perform any other daily ranch duties. One early morning, as dawn was breaking, the twelve-year-old Ricardo saw, in the distance, coming out of the brush, a Vaquero on horseback. That insightful vision would inspire him to become a Vaquero, a decision that would forever alter the course of his life.
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His mother, Concepcion, a voracious reader, gifted her young son with his first art book, El Pintor, and other books that would help him navigate his way to the great authors and poets. His fascination with the written word grew as he began to express himself through his poetry, reading the works of esteemed writers such as Thoreau, Emerson, Keats, Aristotle, Delacroix, Socrates, Da Vinci, and Michelangelo. He began to express himself through his poetry while continuing to hone his craft as an artist, drawing and sketching farm animals and wildlife on his family's working ranch.
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In 1942, Beasley relocated to Duval County, where he lived alone for 10 years in a cow camp several miles west of San Diego, Texas. He immersed himself in his art and writing, declaring, "Duval is my heaven!" and crediting this particular period as his most productive. While working as a Vaquero, he captured the often challenging Vaquero way of life and all that it entailed in the rugged South Texas Brush Country. Every one of his drawings and sketches is either autobiographical or biographical, mastering his unique signature style of day-to-day Vaquero life. His highly stylized medium of pen & ink, pencil, and charcoal served to mirror the raw and rugged landscape itself. He encapsulated the energetic, poetic beauty of the wild steers, mustangs, and other wildlife that roamed the barren brush country.
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Beasley's lifelong devotion was to express the heart and soul of the Vaquero way of life through his art, poetry, and narrative writings. He remained active, and his art was prolific through the 1980s. He sketched day and night, capturing animals in the wild and those brave men who worked to drive their cattle through the rugged South Texas land. He was an artist who drew as if he had a camera in hand, capturing the adventure as it unfolded. He recorded those adventures and ways of life in his journals, small notebooks, and any available scrap of paper.
All came together to inspire Ricardo Moreno Beasley, an artist, poet, and storyteller of a bygone era of the Vaquero.
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Additional Photos Courtesy of Connie Beasley.
