He looks at you the way a man looks at you when he has nothing to prove and nowhere in particular to be — directly, steadily, with the particular quality of attention that belongs to someone who has learned to read people quickly and accurately and has long since stopped being surprised by what he finds. The Drifter is a western fine art portrait of extraordinary presence and narrative depth: a frontiersman of evident history and complete self-possession, seated with the easy, watchful stillness of a man entirely comfortable in his own skin, his worn leather gloves held loosely in his hands, his paisley neckerchief rich against the dark vest, his bolo tie the single elegant detail that speaks to a man who has his own ideas about style and has never particularly cared whether anyone else shares them. The face is the portrait's entire subject — weathered and open and completely unguarded in its directness, the grey mustache and long hair framing features that carry the accumulated character of a life lived entirely on its own terms, in its own time, answerable to no one. The sepia palette wraps the image in the warm, timeless tones of the frontier, the dark doorframe behind him suggesting the threshold of a saloon or a sheriff's office or simply the boundary between inside and outside that a man like this has always treated as entirely optional. There is no menace here — only the calm, level authority of someone who has seen enough of the world to know that most of what people worry about does not deserve the worry. Together with its natural companion The Gambler — Western Fine Art Portrait and Dust and Dignity — Western Cowboy Fine Art Portrait, The Drifter completes a portrait of the western male character across its full range of expression — the absorbed working cowboy, the watchful frontier gambler, and this most self-contained and direct of western archetypes, the man who moves through the world on his own terms and leaves it exactly as he found it. On ChromaLuxe Metal or Lumachrome HD TruLife Acrylic, the rich sepia tonal palette, the extraordinary detail of the worn gloves and vest and neckerchief, and the penetrating directness of the gaze render with exceptional warmth, depth, and presence — making The Drifter one of the most characterful and humanly compelling portraits in the entire western collection.

Limited edition print of 50. Photo © copyright by Tamara Gooch.

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