Way Out Western
Classic Western figures, taken a little way out there. Andrea Morgan’s Way Out Western opens November 6 at Cassens Fine Art.
Andrea Morgan. November 6 through November 21, 2026. Opening reception Friday, November 6, 5-7 p.m.
Andrea Morgan came to Montana at 19 to build trails in the Bob Marshall Wilderness. She was on a seven-person Forest Service crew, the only woman among them, and spent the whole summer in the backcountry doing the work. “And I never left,” she says.
Since then she has lived all over Montana, and she now makes her home in the Blackfoot Valley. The people she has worked alongside over the years keep turning up in her paintings. “I’ve had a lot of different jobs, and I’ve met a lot of characters,” Andrea says, “and they all show up in my work, I think.”
Way Out Western is 19 new paintings from Andrea. “I recognized that some of my ideas are a little way out there,” she says. “And so that’s when I put the two together. Way out west. We’re way out west. We’re way out Western.” The show begins with a question Andrea has been asking for years: what does it mean to be Western? Andrea didn’t have a tidy answer. “You know, I haven’t quite figured it out yet,” she says. “Have any of us?”
The West Right Now
The majority of today’s Western art looks to the past for subject and style ideas. Charlie Russell and Frederic Remington painted the open range as it was fading at the turn of the 20th century. Since then, much of the genre has stayed with cattle drives and the old frontier. Andrea paints the West as she lives in it.
“Some of the best cowboys I know wear baseball hats and sneakers,” Andrea says. She has spent decades working outdoors in Montana, and the Westerners she paints are the ones she has met along the way: fishermen, firefighters, and the people she calls “just hard, hardworking blue-collar people.”
‘Hot Shot Westerner’ is about one of those people. Hot shots are wildland firefighters, and to Andrea they belong in the same tradition as the cowboy. “A hot shot is basically the cowboy version of a firefighter,” she says. Most Western art would never put a firefighter in that role. For Andrea, the people doing the hard work in the West today are the Westerners.
‘Range Rider’ is another good example. In the Blackfoot Valley, a community organization hires a range rider to track predators on the grazing leases around Andrea’s home. “A range rider rides around, literally, and keeps his eyes on the range,” she says. The job title is old, but the work is happening right now.
Room to Make Messes
Back when she was on the trail crew at 19, Andrea sketched on the letters she wrote home to her parents. Later she kept sketch journals of hikes with her kids, right down to the bugs they found. “Always been a maker,” she says. “Always painting, always drawing, always knitting, just making things, baskets, whatever.”
Even so, she didn’t let herself call herself an artist until 2021. That year her youngest child left for college, and suddenly she had room in her house “to make messes and leave them,” plus time in her schedule. She signed up for Art2Life, a 12-week online course with the painter Nicholas Wilton that covers composition, value, color, texture, and how to play. “It just kind of unlocked everything,” she says. “It’s been simmering in me for a long time.”
The Side Eye
When Michelle asked Andrea how she can tell when a painting is finished, Andrea already had a name for her method. “I like to give them the side eye treatment,” she says. “I’ll walk past and, think: no, not quite there. No, not quite there. And then I play with it a little bit more, and then it finally comes together.” She almost always starts with a limited palette “because I feel like it helps me hone in a little bit.” On one of her recent paintings, she used just three colors. From there, she says, “I edit and discern and kind of focus in more.”
Andrea also makes maps from data and GPS coordinates, and she sometimes writes the latitude and longitude of places that matter to her into a painting. “I feel like all of that is really just for me, because it helps me make the work stronger,” she says. “Once I make a painting, it belongs to whoever’s looking at it, not me.”
Where the Details Come From
When Andrea’s kids were little, they had a friendly magpie. You’ll find it in ‘Range Rider’ and a few other paintings in the show. “Oh, my God, I loved my magpie,” she says. “They’re funny, and they’re mischievous, and they’re very smart.”
The idea for ‘He’d Really Rather Be Fishing’ came from Andrea’s other job. Every fall for the last 30 years, she has collected willow cuttings by the thousands and planted them along stream banks to rebuild trout habitat. Fishermen who see her at work often stop to ask what she’s doing. “And oftentimes they say, oh, my gosh, wow, thank you,” she says.
The flowers in ‘Marimekko RancHER III’ are a pattern from Marimekko, the Finnish design company Andrea’s mother loved. Her mother also taught her to look for the good in things. “I try to go through life with gratitude. My momma taught me that,” she says. “So I just try to appreciate all the good things, and poke fun of some things in a good way. Don’t be mean, but rather just enjoy the little things.”
The Element of Surprise
Andrea started ‘Bubblegum Buckaroo’ with a pink background, and her first plan was to paint over it. “And then I realized, no, it’s going to stay,” she says. She gave the cowboy a tweed jacket for a similar reason. “It’s funny because it’s fun, and it doesn’t fit, but it does.”
She does something special like this in most of the show. Andrea takes a figure that Western art has painted for more than a century and adds one thing that wouldn’t normally belong. For the cowboy in ‘He’d Really Rather Be Fishing,’ Andrea imagines what he’s thinking: “He’s sitting there in the dust, the hot, whatever. He’s thinking to himself: ‘I’m sick of looking at cows.’” When asked why the ranchwoman in ‘Marimekko RancHER III’ wears a Finnish floral, she says, “Right, because she’s a fashionista.”
‘Way Out Westerner,’ ‘Blue Rebozo’ and ‘Stars II’ are each 11 x 14 inches, and Andrea painted all three at once. “I did them all at the same time, and that’s why I kind of thought they would work,” she says.
Cassens Fine Art has shown Western and wildlife art since 1993. Michelle Cassens, owner and curator, sees Way Out Western as part of where the gallery is heading next. “I’m really looking forward to playing with this theme and this idea of art in my gallery in the next year, as we push into contemporary a little bit more and less traditional,” she says. “It’s a really beautiful body of work.” Andrea still doesn’t have an exact answer to what it means to be Western, and Michelle is happy to leave it open. “Maybe that’s exactly what our collectors get to decide when they come to see the show,” Michelle says.
Way Out Western opens Friday, November 6, at Cassens Fine Art, 215 West Main Street in Hamilton. The opening reception runs from 5-7 p.m., and the exhibition will be on display through November 21.
Way out Western
in print
Andrea sat down with Audrey Eagerton of Western Art Collector to talk about her years of working the land and how that work carries into her paintings. If you’d like to learn more about the stories and meanings behind the pieces before you see them in person, start here.