As a child, on weekends, Dani Vergés watched John Wayne movies on TV with his grandfather. And when he came out with The End, he told him to draw what he had seen. Don Emilio knew that the boy was good with pencil and colors.
Years passed and the boy fascinated by cowboys, cattle, shooting and the unforgettable pose John The Duke Wayne became a graphic designer, settled in Cabrils and one day, overwhelmed, he began to draw horses, cowboys and cowgirls and horizons far away to relax.
An unexpected yoga with pencil and then finished with watercolor. He posted the drawings and paintings on Instagram and they became such a viral tornado that he began to receive applause from Americans related to the world of livestock farming. Comments, I like it.
Until one day things escalated and Vergés received a surprising call: “Today, I am Ethan Wayne, the son of…”. The foundation that bears the name of the most paradigmatic actor in the history of Westerns works on artistic projects.
“They commissioned me to draw some drawings for one of their product series. Then came an order from the hat brand that also needs no introduction, Stetson.” What, at first, was a distance contact, later became an absolute immersion in the world of livestock farming in the American Midwest.
“I visited ranches, met people, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming and I realized several things…” One is that the job has not changed much in a century: “They have many better scientific tools, they better control the rotations of the pastures so that they are more sustainable, but the tasks are the same and they are very hard work.”
Did you try it? “Yes, and it is very difficult, very hard, few people can endure a day for ten hours under that sun, at an altitude of 2,300 meters, in the case of Colorado. I learned to lasso, to mark the cows. To take them. You got up at two in the morning and ate a burrito without desire, but you needed energy…”
The other aspect that Vergés learned, and that he considers important, is that “many of the people I have met are very cultured, have culture, maybe they support Trump, but they have a very solid cultural base, far from the image that times we can have from Europe.”
Vergés does not want to die of success with his jeans and cowgirls. “There was a time when she posted one a day on Instagram…. Not anymore. That of life in the “far” West is a theme that has had great recent film versions such as the beautiful The Sisters Brothers by Jacques Audiard with Joaquin Phoenix, John C. Reilly, Riz Ahmed and Jake Gyllenhaal (also co-star of Brokeback Mountain) and The Power of the Dog, by Jane Campion, with Benedict Cumberbatch and Jesse Plemons, where the theme of homosexuality is also discussed.
Vergés's drawings are stylized, often in black and white, calm or wild, like horses that never seem static, which seem to move forward at a trot or with difficulty if the plain is frozen. And horses are not usually models that sit still. It is not easy to paint them.
In a recent interview, gallery owner Pilar Ordovás, a great friend of Lucian Freud, recalled that the artist (a great lover of horses) settled for a few days in some stables near his house. Some children approached him one day with his teacher and gave him a drawing manual. They didn't know who he was.
Grandpa Emilio never saw his grandson's current success and recognition. He died a few years ago. He didn't really need him. He knew he had talent and that's why he encouraged him. “He never saw these last ones, but the ones I made when I was little,” the designer concludes, “he kept them all for me.”
