Cheatgrass Dreams

Theodore Waddell writes of his wild reverence for the land and the fellow beings with whom he shares Her as if he's slapping oils onto colossal canvases--unafraid to lay it on thick and gritty, and you bet, poetically musical and sentimental. -Paul Zarzyski The West has a storytelling history, and everyone has a story. This is artist Theodore Waddell's --an illustrated mosey through the landscape, livestock, and colorful characters that made up his life as a cattleman in a remote part of Central Montana. The essays that compose this memoir have much in common with his art. They are frank, evocative sketches that deftly combine the abstract and the literal to effectively communicate the persistent struggle and beauty of ranch life. Each essay is accompanied by a painting and line drawings. Though these illustrations share DNA with the super-sized abstract impressionist paintings for which Waddell is known, they are more narrative in nature. The words and pictures found in Cheatgrass Dreams are an authentic distillation of life in the West's rural and remote unflinchingly heartfelt, surprisingly wry, and brutally honest.