On a sunny Cloudcroft afternoon, I found Bob Shepherd, a.k.a. “Shep”, in his backyard studio, surrounded by canvases in every stage of becoming.
A few glow with the vivid green of underpainting, a signature step in the centuries-old method he’s spent two decades chasing.
On the easel: a tropical flower, sectioned into three subtly different color schemes, patterned and bold, a departure from the classical portraits that made his name. “Everybody who’s seen it so far has gone crazy over it,” he tells me, grinning.
Shep is 79, a former Wrangler jeans sales executive with the easy cadence of someone who has told a story or two in his time. Ask him a simple question, and you get a full life in return, complete with punchlines, digressions, and a cast of characters. It’s how he ended up here, painting five-hundred-year-old techniques in a mountain village forty-some years after he first laid eyes on it.
A Late Start, and a Wake-Up Call
“I started drawing when I was nine,” Shep says. “I drew my grandfather. Nobody believed me. So then I drew everybody else in the family.”
Technical drawings won him citywide school contests as a teenager, but the artist’s path gave way to a business degree at Texas Tech, then seven years at JCPenney, three in real estate, and finally three decades with Wrangler, where he rose to oversee the company’s largest national accounts. “Didn’t do anything in the way of art, ever,” he says of those years.
Then, in 1997, newly fifty, he had a health scare he wasn’t expected to survive. “I was supposed to have died,” he says, “but I didn’t.”
Not long after, he came home from work to find a community college catalog open on the kitchen table. “There’s a catalog for Lone Star College — then it was called Montgomery Community College — and it was opened and highlighted in bright yellow for beginning oil painting. Thirteen hours credit.”
He signed up, and it set off a chain reaction. His instructor pulled him aside early on. “Shep, you got real potential as a portrait artist, as a figure artist. I think you need to go to Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston,” he said.
He got in, took life drawing alongside students half his age, and kept going.
A canceled Caribbean cruise and a rerouted vacation on a whim to Santa Fe put him in front of the teacher who would change everything: Geoffrey Lawrence, who taught him the Venetian tradition. “His class just changed my life,” Shep says. “I’d already been exposed to traditional oil painting, but I never knew where it came from.”
Painting Like It’s 1492
The Venetian painting method traces back to Titian, Michelangelo, and Da Vinci.
“Da Vinci will tell you that Titian was going to hell because he used too much red,” Shep says. “But Titian was famous because he really developed transparent red oxide. It’s a marvelous color — the greatest color as a foundational color for skin tones.”
The process unfolds in five stages, the same ones Shep now walks his own students through in a single week. Students stay at his Airbnb and work on site in the studio.
Day one is the full compositional drawing. Day two is grisaille. ”You’re painting a value study, simply,” worked entirely in burnt umber, coal black, and white.
Day three is what he calls the dead color stage, warm against cool with no true color yet: “it’s almost a clown look,” he says, “but that’s kind of what they thought dead people looked like back in Italy.” Day four brings in the yellows and local color, built from the same pigments the old masters used: burnt umber from Umbria, burnt sienna from Siena, ochres, iron oxides. “All these are elements and crap you can find in the world,” he says.
Day five: glazing. In Shep’s words, “the start of the rest of your life.” Thin layers, “about ninety-five percent liquid” to “just a drop of paint,” built up again and again, with no real end point. “You can put it, you can hang it up above your mantelpiece, and at some point in time you’ll see something you don’t like, bring it down, start painting on it.”
He’s tested that philosophy on two full master studies, recreations of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.
“A master study is not a copying,” he says. “It’s where you become it.” The real Mona Lisa, he notes, carries an estimated seventy-three layers of paint; his own approaches that depth in places. And because the blues available in 1492 were poor, ”smalt,” he explains, “neither one’s a good blue; that’s the reason the sky looks like hell.” He believes his version comes closer to how the painting actually looked the year da Vinci died: “as close to what it looked like in 1516.”
Coming Home to Cloudcroft
Shep’s connection to the mountain goes back to 1971, when his in-laws bought a lot in Timberon. It was sold to them, he laughs, by a late-night television commercial. “Her mom couldn’t go to sleep at night, and so she sat and watched the late movie in Lubbock. And every break was a thirty-second commercial for Timberon. They came and bought a lot.”
He and his wife Donna visited as newlyweds. “We dreamed about — you think we’d ever own a cabin up here?”
Decades of career and family pulled them elsewhere, until a colleague’s cross-country drive nudged them back. “One of my bosses bought a Corvette and drove Route 66 from Dallas to LA,” Shep says. “I thought, that’s damn cool.”
His own trip, in 2011, brought them back through the Sacramentos. And this time, they stayed. They bought their cabin in 2013, and by the first or second summer, Shep was already teaching.
Twelve summers running now, he’s kept his classes small. “I like to do it two to four,” he says, “and I have once done five.”
He sat out last summer while recovering from a recent heart procedure. “I’m feeling the best of my life right now,” he says, “at least the best for the last two years.”
Classes were set to resume in August.
He’s also a longtime member of the Cloudcroft Art Society and teaches adults at Camp Sunshine at the Sacramento Camp and Conference Center.
Shep can do, as well as teach. He took Best in the State of Texas in a Lone Star Art Guild competition judged from 617 entries and placed second in the same show. A piece from his newer, color-layered series, built up in intense passes of red, green, orange, and blue before the Venetian glazing begins, was recently the featured painting in Austin Fine Art Gallery’s ColorPop show, hung “in space number one.”
Shep’s stories and laughter fill his studio with the sheer joy of a man who found his calling.
”We just have a blast,” he says. “We love the place. We love Cloudcroft. We love everybody in it.”
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