In 2000, Graham Flatt was named the best new artist at a prominent Western art auction in Montana. The following year, he was the featured painter at the Calgary Exhibition and Stampede, one of the most significant annual gatherings of Western artists in North America. You could have forgiven him for thinking he’d made it to the top of his field, but it turns out Flatt thought no such thing.

“I remembered that when I was 25, I thought I was very good, that I had ‘made it’,” Flatt said over the phone from his home and studio in Millet, Alberta. “Now at 40, if I can get to where I feel like I’ve made it by the time I’m 50, I’d be very happy.”

As a matter of fact, the watercolour artist, who travels to Jasper on July 27 as part of the Artists on Rails program, speaks about the period following his Stampede achievement in less than glowing terms.

“As an artist it’s important that you don’t ever think that you’re where you want to be,” he said. “That was a very difficult period of time, because it was like being shot out of a cannon. For such a long time you’re paying dues, working hard and then one day everything changed. For me, it was a matter of having to start setting the bar higher, all it’s done, in the end, is make me work harder to go forward.”

In the immediate aftermath of his feature run in Calgary, that wasn’t necessarily his first reaction, Flatt admitted. 

“It’s a source of powerful reinforcement, but when you start believing your own press, as I did for a while, the fall from grace can be substantial. You hit your chin on every rung you climbed up.”

That metaphorical ladder is one that Flatt has been climbing, in one way or another, his entire life.

“I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t an artist, and I think that’s true of many people, but you just end up doing other things to make a living. When I was growing up, if there was a blank surface, there’d be something on it... I guess I was a bit of a problem child in that respect.”

Although Flatt considered attending art and design college as a young man, he soon thought better of it.

“I don’t handle structure well,” he said. “I think that what happens at universities and colleges is that they homogenize you... it has nothing to do with art and the process of creation, it has everything to do with academia and conforming to the professor’s myopic view of art.”

Instead of art school, Flatt became a paramedic, and pursued his art whenever and wherever he could.

“It was sort of a process of osmosis as you encounter other artists and other styles. You find things that work... and discard the stuff that doesn’t,” he said, adding that his informal art education continues to this day, even though he’s often playing the role of teacher.

“I continue to forge ahead... I read voraciously, I teach constantly.”

Jasperites will have a chance to learn from Flatt next month. In addition to the demonstrations he will do on the VIA train and in the Sawridge Inn and Conference Centre, Flatt has two multi-day workshops scheduled for the Palisades Centre. The first runs from July 31 to August 4 and the second from the 7 to 11 of August.

For someone so averse to the idea of being taught art, Flatt loves to teach, although he approaches his classes with care.

“When I was a medic I’d have students with me all the time, and I found that I was teaching them the trade, and not the techniques. Anyone can find a vein or run a chest tube, but what you have to learn is empathy, reaction time, parts of the trade,” he said. “It’s the same in art. I could impress my classes with some slick technique, but that has nothing to do with the trade, the design, the process of creating art.”

Although his own work is all Western-themed, Flatt doesn’t limit his workshops to explorations of that genre.

“My job is to give information and facilitate the development of an artistic vision,” he explained. “I paint predominantly Western, but that’s what I teach. It’s all student driven.”

As for his own journey towards Western art, Flatt took the advice of a friend and turned down a path that has proven immensely rewarding.

“I was doing a lot of painting of people on roads and so on, and a friend suggested that I try to do Western. Initially I blew him off, but when I did try it, the work seemed to strike a nerve with people. It was also a lot of fun, exploring the landscape and abstracting it more and more.”

The capacity to abstract elements of the landscape to what Flatt describes as “almost nothingness” is evident throughout the examples of his watercolour work he displays on his website, and it remains one of the most attractive things about painting in the Western style, he said.

“It’s that, and also the figures provide a narrative. You become that person, you have that person’s story driving you along.”

While many might conflate Western art with depictions of the rodeo, Flatt’s work is largely centred on lone figures on horseback set against dramatic (and substantially abstracted) landscapes.

“There’s a certain romance, nostalgia and sense of self that’s built in to the paintings,” he said. “I’m very reclusive, I don’t have a burgeoning social life, I’m fiercely independent... most of my paintings feature a single figure, so there’s a lot you can read into that.”

To participate in one of Flatt’s watercolour workshops, call Don McLean at 780-467- 1868 to register, or you can check him out at the Sawridge next Friday evening.