Tracy Stuckey - The Western Mythos: Nature vs Nurture?

I can’t discern if I agree or am offended by Stuckey, but perhaps that is his very point. I admit I am 100% courted by the Western mythos. Raised in North Texas, my very first memories are of weekends on my parent’s ranch. Wandering the broad unbroken land & sky as a toddler, the cows we assigned sympathetic names to like “Bert & Ernie”, tractor rides with Papa feeling safe up high from giant tarantulas below. These experiences are etched in me, sewn into my personality like an appendage. We packed our blue Dodge pickup with no AC and rode home to the burbs in time to attend school at one of North Texas’s most accomplished public school systems. Do I identify with a silly dream or am I the recipient of a legacy? Was my Dad, who initiated the ranch as a family endeavor, living out his fantasy all while imbuing those values in me? I might poke at Tracy Stuckey’s satirical perspective on Western culture. Today, living in Kansas City, the fearlessness found in the community no doubt held over from the days of western expansion. Once the jumping off point into nothingness, westward expansion exists as a uniquely American experience. For those who left their home countries or ventured beyond the Missouri to find something more, must possess a bold, fearless, and dumb quality to attempt such an endeavor. We are the very descendants of those bold thinkers. Is our obsession with Western mythos nature or nurture? Could not one man’s wagon trail be another’s man’s start up? Is Stuckey missing that the suburban actors in his paintings authored a new app or product that we enjoy, perhaps proprietors of the tech that allowed Stuckey to obtain the canvas and paint in which to create his paintings. Is the Western mythos a silly dream or a legacy in which we as artists pay homage to with every forward thinking piece of creation. To be truly “Western” demands us to explore the great unknown & make something out of nothing. Is not surrounding ourselves with its kitsch connecting us to a legacy of fearlessness and bold thinking?