20"x 20" | Oil on Canvas | 2026
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The stories we tell about the American West are full of motion — cattle drives, gunfights, land rushes, men on horseback riding toward something. Those stories are true, and they matter. But beside every one of them stood a woman holding something just as heavy.
She gave birth on the trail. She buried children in unmarked ground and kept moving. She worked the land with the same hands that braided hair and mended harnesses and coaxed fire from wet wood in a February wind. She didn't ride into legend. She built it from the inside out, one ordinary, extraordinary day at a time.
Handfuls of Purpose is a portrait of that woman. Not a specific woman — every woman. The one history didn't overlook so much as simply forgot to turn around and see. She's still there. She never left.
She doesn't flinch. She doesn't soften. She just looks straight through you and waits for you to finally look back.
 
This work is currently entered in Unbridled: An All-Women Western Art Exhibition at the A.R. Mitchell Museum of Western Art. Inquire for availability.