The Return of Billy the Kid reimagines New Mexico’s legendary outlaw through a weather-beaten palette of turquoise, ochre, rust and desert earth tones. Based on Billy’s iconic circa-1880 tintype, this contemporary digital painting brings an Old West legend back to life.

I have been fascinated by Billy the Kid since I was a boy. There was always something particularly compelling about Billy—a young outlaw whose brief life somehow became inseparable from the history and mythology of New Mexico.

For The Return of Billy the Kid, I started with the famous tintype believed to have been made in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, around 1879–1880, when Billy was only about twenty years old. The tiny original photograph—roughly three by two inches—is generally regarded as the only authenticated surviving portrait of him. More than a century later, I wanted to pull Billy out of that faded nineteenth-century photograph and bring him back into a very different visual world.

Turquoise, mustard, rust, buckskin and deep brown replace the monochromatic tones of the original, while the surrounding wall dissolves into scratches, drips, scrawls and petroglyph-inspired markings. A faded Thunderbird appears almost like an artifact from another time.

In The Return of Billy the Kid, history and folklore collide with contemporary Southwestern abstraction. Billy hasn't simply been colorized—he has returned, surrounded by the colors, textures and visual language of the landscape that made him a legend.

• Available on: Watercolor paper, wood panel, metal panel, or gallery-wrapped canvas
• Maximum size: 50 × 40 inches

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