Rural Renaissance man
Hamilton artist’s works range from
leather to paint, bronze to jewelry

Hamilton artist Bill Chappell works on an oil painting in his studio gallery on the town square.

Photography by Jessica Horton

By D’Leesa Keys
Texan News Service

Will Rogers, the cowboy humorist famous for his folksy sayings, might have described Bill Chappell as a man who never met a medium he didn’t like.

Chappell, a Western artist with a studio and gallery off the town square in Hamilton, draws, paints, makes jewelry, produces vivid bronze busts and sculptures and carves images in leather.

The dominant work in the Bill Chappell Art Gallery and Museum is a life-size leather carving of Rogers leaning against a fence and looking at visitors with a warm smile. The work is mounted on a sheet of three-quarter-inch plywood and rests against the studio’s left wall.

Chappell carved the likeness at his home in Seymour in 1951. The piece initially was displayed at the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma before coming to Hamilton.

“I drew Rogers’ face off of a photograph I had of him and had my son pose for the body,” Chappell explained.

He said his motivation for creating the unusual work was to do something different and to prove a point. “There was a man from Amarillo who wrote that is wasn’t possible to carve a face onto leather because it was too thin, so I did this carving of Will Rogers just to prove him wrong and give him a bad time,” Chappell said.

The Will Rogers carving makes its home with several of Chappell’s bronze sculptures, paintings and prints depicting cowboys, Indians and scenes from Western life. The gallery also is filled with Western artifacts such as Indian blankets, rifles, pistols, saddles, steer horns and a mounted buffalo head.

Each piece is a testament to the life and experiences of the 88-year-old artist who grew up among cowboys.

Chappell was born in 1919 in Van Zandt County in northeast Texas. When Chappell was 3 years old, his father moved the family to Colorado so he could work on the railroad, only to return to Texas a year later. The Chappells settled in Collingsworth County, northeast of Childress. Chappell also attended elementary school in Dallam County near the Texas-New Mexico border.

“Being a cowboy back then wasn’t much different than today, minus the vehicles; they were used occasionally but most everything was done with wagons and teams,” Chappell said. “Now everything is done with four-wheel-drive vehicles.

“When I first got married in 1939 I was working for $30 a month,” he added. “Now cowboys make that much money in an hour.”

When Chappell wasn’t riding the range, he was working with rock or clay creating images that captured what he knew the most about -- ranching.

“During the Great Depression it was all about survival. If you didn’t have the skills you couldn’t make it,” Chappell said. “Ranch work was all I knew, so as an 11- or 12-year-old kid I used to make sculptures of cow and steer heads and later got into tooling leather.”

Fay Chappell, the artist’s wife of 67 years, said her husband is a born artist.

“His mother said it would always be a part of him and he’s been working in different medis such as metalwork, casting bronze, leather and has even made some nice jewelry,” she said. “He also never had a single art lesson.”

When World War II began, Chappell enlisted in the U.S. Navy. After basic training, he was stationed in Alameda, Calif., and assigned to occupational therapy.

“There were so many sailors who were waiting to be discharged or waiting to be shipped out that the Navy couldn’t process them, so they came up with ways to keep them busy,” Chappell said. “Some were taught how to make jewelry, others like me were taught leather working. With my background, the Navy put me in charge of the class itself and I did that until the end of the war.”

After the war, Chappell returned to Texas with his wife and two children, settling in Seymour, where in 1951 he opened a saddle shop. There he created the Will Rogers carving and a saddle awarded to the first-ever World Champion Rodeo Cowgirl.

“The saddle was won by a girl named Jackie Worthington from Jacksboro,” Fay Chappell said. “She later sold it to a man from Canada who gave it to his niece who was a barrel racer.

“The barrel racer later put it up for sale in a magazine where our nephew saw it and wanted to buy it,” Fay continued. “He was unable to afford it, but he told his uncle, Bill Chappell Jr., about it and they both bought it and gave it to my husband as a birthday present.”

After selling the saddle shop, Chappell bought a ranch in Colorado and decided to become an artist. In the early 1960s an art gallery in Taos, N.M., bought some of his art for what Chappell described as “a bunch of money.”

“It turned out to be a good deal,” he said. Word of his talent began to spread.

In 1969, a representative of the Leanin’ Tree Greeting Card Company saw several of Chappell’s paintings and wanted to make Christmas cards from them.

“They bought the full rights to nine paintings for Christmas cards and one for birthday cards,” Fay Chappell said. Several of the cards are featured at the Leanin’ Tree Museum in Boulder, Colo.

“The Leanin’ Tree Company is first-class without a doubt,” Bill Chappell added. “The museum is a place where a lot of artists would like to be.”

In 1988 the director of the South Texas Children’s Home in Beeville took a liking to one of Chappell’s drawings called “Just Wishin,’” a black-and-white sketch that featured a young boy on a stick horse looking off in the distance at some cowboys on horseback in the distance. Chappell reworked the drawing in color, and gave it to the children’s home to use as a Christmas card. He’s done a different Christmas card for the home every year since.

Chappell’s work has also been featured in museums from Glen Rose, Texas, to Pueblo, Colo., to Winnemucca, Nev. It also has appeared in books such as Bronzes of the American West and Personalities of America and in magazines such as Western Horseman and Craftsman Magazine. Chappell also was commissioned to produce the “Hardin-Simmons Cowboy” painting and sculpture for Hardin-Simmons University.

One of his favorite paintings, “All in a Day’s Work,” which tells the story of a cowboy’s day from sunrise until sunset, was featured at an art show at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas in 1986.

As demand and recognition for Chappell’s art grew, both Bill and Fay Chappell say the things that defined their success were the places they had been and the friends they had made. While some artists struggle to merely survive, Fay Chappell says her husband has never been a “starving artist.”

“We’ve gotten what we’ve needed and had a lot of fun,” she said.

During a career that has spanned more than half a century, Chappell said he stays fresh by experimenting and change.

“When I get tired of working on one medium I’ll move onto the next one,” he says. “I got started in art slow because of my age and the Depression, and though I wish I knew what I know now 50 years ago, I’m still pretty satisfied.”

The Texan News Service is a project of Tarleton State University’s journalism program. Story editors were Jessica Horton, Coby Kestner, Cassie Kimbrough and Beth Murphy. Contact us at texannews@tarleton.edu

Bill Chappell with one of his bronzes and some of the oil paintings on display in his gallery.

Chappell collects many Western artifacts, here on display in his studio-gallery, to bring authenticity to his work.

Chappell's wife, Fay, said the couple has met many interesting people through his art.