Thursday, October 1, 2026
Jeff Cocanour is going through something, and he’s taking the entirety of the Western art world through it with him.
The Granbury-raised artist’s ongoing and constantly evolving series, “Western Conversion,” is a multi-media experiment, including his new passion of clay, exploring cowboy culture, community and change.
The culmination of this work will be displayed Sept. 6 during Fort Worth’s biannual Gallery Night.
‘CONVERSION’
Cocanour was raised in Granbury and carved out a life in Fort Worth. A painter who has dabbled in just about every style one could name, Cocanour now is striving to give new perspective to the West he knows, from both an artistic and ideological standpoint. His point of attack — “traditional” Western art.
While other styles of American art have changed and adapted throughout their histories, Cocanour believes Western art has been stuck in its ways much too long.
“(Cowboys) were out in the field, being cowboys and capturing information,” Cocanour said. “They’d come back, and they're in their studio alone, trying to paint their best, but they don't paint a lot, and so it's a little hokey and a little cheesy. Western art has held on to this accidentally, and no one's at fault. It just became familiar and safe.”
Cocanour said he looks to breathe new life into the stiff cowboy art style, inviting a perspective that doesn't seek to overlook the troubles of the silver-lined concept of the Wild West, like previous Western art styles have. Instead, he seeks to immerse the viewer into an idealistic Western world where maybe those troubles never happened, and therefore simply don’t matter.
For Cocanour, Western art and cowboy culture have held to a safety that feels incongruent with the authentic “Western” way of life.
“Does this motif of the Wild West still hold this wellspring of adventure? We honor it like it's still this amazing thing, and we all know, quietly, it wasn't an amazing thing,” Cocanour said. “Yet we're all a part of it regardless. It’s just become a Saturday morning cartoon motif, and it might be, but is it worth asking if it still embodies this wild, progressive frontier?”
To answer this question, Cocanour believes it’s time someone pushes the bounds and intentions of Western art, so its patrons can push the bounds and intentions of western ideals.
“We're only where the West begins here in Fort Worth. You can't really escape that, whether you relate or don't, whether you're like, ‘Yeah, I grew up on a ranch with animals’ or you're scared to ride the horse,” Cocanour said. “It doesn't really matter if you lived it or not, these things occurred. We're right smack in the middle of it, and it's still playing out. It's just more dynamic today, but there's still things we haven't explored.”
His answer to the unexplored? Trailblazing a style of art he’s dubbed “Cowboy Cubism,” and building it across several years and mediums through a series called “Western Conversion” or “Conversion,” (he hasn’t quite decided).
“I called it Western Conversion, so it would be accepted by those who are (Western) while I could explore and express the things that aren't (Western),” Cocanour said.
The idea is not only to breathe new life into Western art, but to bring other art styles and their associated implications to its audiences through commonality and familiarity, he said. On similar footing, audiences are then invited to explore what Cocanour could be hinting at — or not — and it’s that mass appeal Cocanour is trying to establish through “Conversion.”
“We are of the West, if we like it or not. Being a white male, I've learned quickly you are responsible for things you haven't done — and that matters. And although it's a stretch to say something so direct, it’s this huge anomalous thing to compare to this art I'm making, but I like exploring what people didn't do in answer to what they have.”
Full of bold lines and bolder colors, Cocanour’s Cowboy Cubism echoes the same intents of the artistically disruptive masters such as Picasso and Matisse who came before him. They too, were experiencing the same need for conversion, both in their respective cultures and the art that reflected them.
“(Cocanour) started drawing them (his characters), and sometimes I'd look and be like, ‘there's hats and boots and boobs and butts, and I can't tell what's a girl and what's not,’ but that's what he’s going for,” said Kim Oaks, owner of Savor Ceramics in Fort Worth, and Cocanour’s Western Conversion collaborator. “(The characters) make it seem almost stupid that we even have to focus on these things.”
“These (characters) reference an idea that’s less directly political and more ‘Let's just embrace the concept of being farther down the road.’ It's farther than the current battle. It's as if equality was so real, that it was no longer the focus of today,” Cocanour said.
During the interview, Cocanour came back to Conversion’s motifs of transformation, growth and movement. The theme of the body of work itself is seeing how the notion of the West can and is shifting, and how this shift is reflected in cowboy culture’s portrayal in media and art. His Cowboy Cubism characters are almost always caught dancing, and even the mediums he used show the idea of evolution and motion.
The professional painter even broke his own mold with Western Conversion, converting from paintings to ceramics over the course of the series, driving his Cowboy Cubism characters off the canvas and leaving them etched in clay.
COLLABORATION NOT A DECISION … A SILENT OFFERING.”
Cocanour and Oaks met at a dinner party hosted during the summer of 2024 through mutual friends.
Oaks said she was a professional ceramicist who was opening a pottery studio in Fort Worth’s cultural district, and as Cocanour also was an artist — the two quickly became close friends.
During the mere handful of months that have since elapsed, the two have combined their talents, artistic processes and worldviews to create something uniquely their own — something the world of Western art has yet to see.
Oaks is a traditionally trained ceramicist with more than 30 years of experience. She’s trained with masters in China and worked in studios across the states. Cocanour, on the other hand, is a novice to the medium, unsculpted and transformative, and it shows in the way he creates.
“He’s like a tornado of clay,” Oaks said while laughing.
It’s this exact dichotomy that allowed for the birth of the ceramic portion of “Western Conversion.”
It all began in February 2025, when Oaks’ new pottery studio, Savor Ceramics, first opened to the public. Oaks invited Cocanour, who had never previously worked in clay, to attend one of the very first beginner wheel courses to be offered in her new studio.
According to Oaks, Cocanour began as all emerging ceramicists do — by creating heavy, clunky, hand-sized pots. An era that did not last long for Cocanour.
Oaks watched her star pupil, a veteran painter but a novice potter, surpass the rest of his peers, imposing his own style in greater quantities with each piece. She watched him carve his first piece, and on a whim, she threw one of her class demonstration pots over to him, just to see what would happen.
“I just kind of stuck it (the pot) into his ‘tornado,’ and all of a sudden it just comes out, gorgeous and covered in all of his carvings, and I'm like, ‘Oh. We have a thing,’” Oaks said.
After that first realization, Oaks and Cocanour have been collaborating and converting every step of the way. Each piece of “Conversion” bears both artists' influence.
“Can you see how this cowboy has his boot sticking off the back behind him? That (boot) originally broke off, and he was like, ‘I'm just gonna stick it back on.’ And all the traditional like, learning of pottery in me said, ‘Yeah, you can’t do that.’ And he's like, ‘Nah, it's gonna be good.’ And so, he does it, and I realized, ‘Oh my god. Now it's like they're dancing and moving,’” Oaks said. “Everything I think, ‘No, that's not the traditional way,’ he's like, ‘Yeah, I don't know the traditional way ... let's do it my way.’”
It just may be Oaks’ traditionality and expertise in every aspect of pottery, in tandem with Cocanour’s Western-bending style and boundary-breaking disregard for the way things should be, that makes this body of work so enticing.
If Cocanour can dream it, Oaks has the know-how to see it through.
“It really honors the collaboration that I think is inherent to pottery ... when you can collaborate, it just changes the whole dynamic — it changes the art,” she said.
Cocanour agreed.
“It’s really cool, this ebb and flow we have. It's like playing ping pong.” Cocanour said on their partnership.
THE MEDIUM
To Cocanour, both the clay as a medium, and his status as a ceramic novice, echo his message — growth and change are often challenging, but the key is to meet them where you are. If you wait until everything is perfect, neither will ever happen.
“It's (clay) always falling apart. You're like, fighting gravity and clay and moisture and dryness, and you’re just like, ‘will this even meld?’ Cocanour said. “I just decided that, if I was trying to learn a craft to its apex, I would never be ready. I don't do clay; traditionally, I paint. But, because of the place she's built, and the embodied culture of relaxation and mothering — it's like you explore things you'd never try. And it grew. These characters leapt off the canvas onto the carvings on these ceramics.”
“We've established I don't know what I'm doing, but I am learning on my own track. And they (his pieces) went from vessels, to vessels with like these wings and appendages and 2D characters. The newer ones? Who knows. We're still building those,” Cocanour said.
Cocanour’s emergence into ceramics made “Conversion” both personal and tangible to him, adding another layer of ethos to the work’s message.
“He's just — he reminds me of the 1950s and 1960s artists like Paul Soldner and all the, like, original people who shaped clay as an art, rather than just traditional, functional pottery,” Oaks said. “When I throw the little pots into his ‘tornado,’ that's what it’s like. He feels like one of those, ‘I don't care what the rules are. I'm making this what I want to’ artists.”
During his time at Savor, Cocanour said he realized he wasn't the only one to experience the transformative power of throwing pottery. The more he engaged with his peers, the more he realized the clay was shaping them as much as they were shaping it.
“It’s almost cheesy or cliché to say, but because the nature of the clay coming from the earth and it being so grounding, the people find themselves vulnerable, not knowing how to do something, but willing to try it in front of an audience of strangers,” Cocanour said. “It’s nerve-racking, and they're showing sides of themselves that we hide from society, and yet you are forced to deal with it — even within yourself.”
According to Cocanour, not only does ceramics ground its participants, but it also binds them to one another through shared knowledge and exploration.
“I watch them (Savor’s patrons) all get to know each other, and they're like inside conversations, bonding, chilling out and talking,” Cocanour said. “Or here, sharing like the recipes and the chemistry for the glazes and clay. There's so much science to learn that — even if you spend time with masters in China — there's always more to explore.”
Cocanour and Oaks repeatedly returned to the idea that clay was more than an art form or a hobby; it’s a lifestyle. One built around community, curiosity and self-discovery.
“I love going home with it all on me. She was talking about how we practically eat and breathe clay, and there's some truth to that,” Cocanour said.
“Yeah ... I have gloves,” Oaks said with a laugh.
GALLERY NIGHT
Cocanour’s “Western Conversion’ will be on display Sept. 6 as a united body of work during Fort Worth’s city-wide Gallery Night.
Cocanour and Oaks will transform Savor into gallery space for the evening, welcoming anyone and everyone to enter and be among the first to witness Western art’s and Cocanour’s own personal conversion.
This will be the first time Cocanour’s “Cowboy Cubism” paintings and ceramics will be shown together, a collaboration he believes will add to the viewing experience of “Western Conversion.”
“I think it, very technically, adds a three-dimensional shape in front of a backdrop, and they're very much intertwined. So, I think it, I think it really expands the work, or you could say it elevates both,” Cocanour said.
And, according to Cocanour, the conversion is on-going.
“I'm not finished. There's so many, and we're not done creating. We'll work until it's time to show them, and then I'll truck in all my paintings and hang them in here,” Cocanour said. “There's gonna be some interesting interaction between the mediums that even we ourselves haven't experienced yet because (the mediums) haven't lived together … and although they are kind of the same work, they may very well be stronger together.”
Fort Worth Gallery Night is from noon to 9 p.m. and is free for the public to attend. The event will feature open galleries and museums, shopping, food trucks, concerts and more.
Savor Ceramics is located at 2062 Montgomery St., right at the Gallery Night shuttle’s first stop.
“Whatever it is I'm bringing to my previous work, I'm trying to explore in another medium, which also makes the paintings more relevant,” Cocanour said. “So, I don't know what the commentary will be or how they'll be received. I just hope people think they're as fun as I do.”
