Editor’s note: In 2006, The Dallas Morning News’ former style magazine, FD, traveled to the countryside west of Fort Worth, a few miles outside Weatherford. The News was on location with Dallas photographer Laura Wilson (yes, mother to Hollywood’s Owen, Luke and Andrew), who was shooting a fashion cover story for us at the ranch of her friends, Western artist Buckeye “Buck” Blake and his wife, artist Tona Blake. Several of Wilson’s photographs that day of Colleyville-raised model Ali Michael (above, who had won The News’ Fashion!Dallas/Kim Dawson Model Search contest the year prior at age 15) are now included in the Fort Worth exhibition “Laura Wilson: The Heartland”. The young Ali was a horsewoman in her own right, and Wilson captured that connection with the animals in her evocative photographs. We’re bringing back that original story, “West of Eden,” and photographs to coincide with the exhibition.

The first thing you notice here is the sky: vast and deep, like an ocean turned upside down.

Underneath, the prairie stretches out for miles. Open fields of grass turned yellow and brittle from the sun edge up against squares of irrigated green, creating a patchwork quilt across the land.

This is the countryside west of Fort Worth, a few miles outside Weatherford. In town, you can still get a Dairy Queen soft-serve cone down the road from the Cadillac dealership. On trade days, there’s the outdoor flea market off the square where locals come to buy and sell guinea hens, vegetables, tools and the other trappings of rural comfort and necessity.

What occupies most people’s time here, though, is horses.

“Weatherford is sort of the cutting horse capital of the universe,” says Buckeye “Buck” Blake, a Western artist who, in his late 50s, still looks the part of the tall, rugged cowboy in boots and blue jeans.

It was horses that brought Buck and his wife, Tona, a photographer who also designs artisan jewelry and clothing, to Texas from Idaho. The couple have long raised cutting horses and regularly traveled to Fort Worth to compete. Last year, they decided to settle in the area for good.

What started as the couple’s “mini horse ranch” on 13 acres has since become something far more interesting. Sure, there’s Buck’s quirky art studio at the bottom of the slope, an “old guard shack” the couple had moved here from “some golf course near the Brazos.” But what really got folks talking was the barn.

Specifically, how it shelters not only the couple’s cutting horses, but also the couple.

“When you’re painting pictures of people riding horseback, you need to know your subject matter,” says Buck. And clearly he does. The son of artists and great-grandson of a foundation quarter horse breeder, he grew up in the West, and is one of the few living artists to have had a retrospective at the Whitney Gallery of Western Art inside the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyo.

Buck compares their three-room home to an efficiency apartment inside a galvanized tin barn. “I like that we’re able to keep the horses close by us here. Actually, a little too darn close – they shake those iron stalls enough at four in the morning to wake you up and let you know they’re hungry.”

And that’s OK. “We wanted a home that wasn’t a regular house,” explains Tona. “We’ve lived in regular houses our whole lives, and we were ready for something really different.”

The Blakes have always needed freedom. Wide-open spaces not just for their beloved horses, but for themselves, as well – to do want they want, be whom they want and create their own version of Eden, left of center.

It’s Friday afternoon and Tona is closing the sliding screen on the carved-wood front door. She’s worried that their four dogs will get loose and into trouble – especially Jasper, her yellow Lab. Jasper likes to cool off in the shallow pond nearby, then tromp back through the house with muddy paws.

Through the door, the sound of a horse’s whinny is amplified by the tin roof and walls of the barn – or home.

“My place is like something out of Pippi Longstocking,” says Tona, “the horse, the monkey, the train park … I could relate to Pippi growing up. Like her, I never wanted to go to school, I just wanted to be with my animals.”

Not much has changed. Tona is a gatherer – of creatures, of objects – much like her parents who raised her in the heart of Western Pennsylvania mining country.

“Most of my antiques used to belong to my mother – she had a major collection. All these rugs are from her,” says Tona, pointing to layers of carpets, from Persian to Navajo, covering the cement floor. “I just piled them all atop one another.”

And that is the essence of what makes Tona and Buck’s space so unique, so bohemian. Every square foot is a sensory explosion of colors, layers and textures.

In one corner, an 1813 Swedish cabinet bumps up against an exotic carved wood door from India. A Moroccan fixture lights the bedroom and bath area; the European chandelier in the living room once belonged to a princess from the von Thurn und Taxis family, befriended by her mother. Suspended stained-glass windows filter light onto Mexican folk art and a cowhide sofa. Even the doorknobs are all vintage finds.

“I grew up in a 40-room house stuffed with antiques,” says Tona, though she’s quick to point out that her childhood was not as opulent as it might sound. “I never had a sense of being overly privileged, or that I was better than anyone else. My parents didn’t belong to the country club; they drove an old car with a coat hanger for an aerial.

“My mother loved antiques and art, and my father was a doctor who loved the dollar store. … When he died, they filled four pickup trucks with items he had bought, like jumper cables and screwdrivers. A lot of it was still in the little $1 packaging.”

Tona was anything but frugal about living her own life. Strong-willed and rebellious, she ended up in a Massachusetts girls’ boarding school, but spent most of her time hanging out with friends at Harvard Square. She was part of the Beat generation – jazz and Jack Kerouac – and when the Beatniks went on to become hippies, she was right there, too.

She began helping a photographer boyfriend and discovered her own talent for taking pictures. The two traveled the country shooting portraits to earn a living, eventually landing in the mountains outside Carson City, Nev. That’s where she met Buck, who showed up at their cabin door one day while hunting rabbits. “I told my boyfriend, don’t let that guy in, he’s a killer … ” says Tona, “and I don’t know how, but a couple of years later I started dating him. We’ve been together for 29 years now, which is a miracle with an artist.”

Buck recalls that Tona served him homemade beer, and that “the dating situation up there was like musical chairs, you changed up partners every so often, so eventually we came around.”

Tona and Buck married and moved to Augusta, Mont., where they had a son, Teal, now 27 and a successful artist and rancher in his own right. It was at the Augusta rodeo that the Blakes first met Laura Wilson and Richard Avedon, there to work on the epic portrait project “In the American West.” (See “On location with Laura Wilson,” page 15.)

Tona was deep in her own project at the time, collaborating with a friend and local writer on the story of champion bucking-horse rider Fannie Sperry Steele. “Everyone told us she had died,” says Tona, “but we finally tracked her down to a convalescent home in Helena.”

It turned out that Steele, 94, had kept a lifetime’s worth of notes and memorabilia underneath her bed in three trunks. Tona and her friend eventually obtained the material and developed a movie proposal around it. The story has since passed through the hands of everyone from Jane Fonda to execs at HBO and Showtime.

“It’s a great love story about an independent woman in the West. It needs to be told,” says Tona, reaching to pick up a nearby photo of Steele. But she acknowledges it’s a tough business. “The first three meetings, everyone is excited, and then the regimes change or something happens, and your project’s dead.”

She places the photo back and moves to an old tramp-art frame. This one holds a yellowed portrait of Tona and Buck taken in Nevada in the ’70s. Tona looks almost Native American with her long dark hair in braids. Buck is wearing his usual cowboy hat and still clutching the drink he was holding when the photographer approached them.

“Here’s Buck and I when we were hippies,” she says, pausing to study it before breaking into a small laugh. “I guess in some ways we still are.”

The first thing Buck and Tona did when they bought the land in Weatherford was to clear it and to set up that guard shack turned studio on the lower end of the slope.

Buck built a wraparound porch. When it’s not too hot, he likes to sit out there to get the light and paint. On this day, it’s plenty hot. Easel and canvas remain inside, old school jazz plays on the stereo. Buck always paints to jazz.

In addition to oils and watercolors, Buck also works in bronze. His next project is a lid for the crypt of legendary outlaw Billy the Kid, in Fort Sumner, N.M.

“Some people respond to my work out of nostalgia I suppose,” says Buck. Other clients, high-rise New Yorkers, have told him his art helps center them.

“When you’re in a completely artificial environment, and your days are fast and laser-like, there’s nothing really rhythmic or rolling or easy about it … then you take an image of something like the pictures I do, cattle grazing in the field or whatever, and it creates a kind of balance. It’s medicine – visual medicine.”

The house that Buck and Tona built is a kind of medicine for them, as well. Tona worked with builder Arlie Ashley from Mineral Wells to incorporate the materials into their radically combined home and barn.

“We created this place from scratch, cleared the land, put in the road and built the house from what we had collected,” says Tona. “We must have moved the dirt around here a thousand times to get it right, but it was worth it. We were able to put all the things we love into this home.”

The result is a shelter unlike any other. “Texas territorial,” says Buck, or better yet, “bebop cowboy.

“Building this home was a lot like creating a piece of art: You’re not sure exactly how it’s going to turn out. In a way, this place may never be done because it keeps evolving as we go along. And that’s how it should be.”

On location with photographer Laura Wilson

Our Weatherford shoot was hardly the first time Dallasite Laura Wilson has headed west with a camera. In 1978, when the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth commissioned Richard Avedon to create the portraits that became the milestone exhibition, “In the American West,” it was Wilson who served as his chief assistant and the six-year project’s documentarian. Her book about the experience, Avedon at Work: In the American West, was published in 2003. Already on the bookshelf were three other Wilson photo essays set in the West: Watt Matthews of Lambshead, the elegiac story of one of Texas’ last great cattlemen; The Hutterites of Montana, a collection of somber but beautiful portraits of the distinctive religious community; and the small-town-Texas Grit and Glory: Six-Man Football, with foreword by Troy Aikman.

It was while working with Avedon at a Montana rodeo that Wilson first met Tona Blake, the only person in the crowd who recognized the famous New Yorker. “I walked right up to him and asked him what he was doing here,” Tona says of Avedon. The entire crew ended up at the Blakes’ home for dinner. Tona and Laura have remained friends since.

“Laura’s very special,” Tona says. “She’s not impressed by money or someone’s name, that’s not what it’s about for her.” (Good thing, given that the Wilson family also includes a trio of celebrity sons – Andrew, Luke and Owen.)

In the end, Wilson’s images achieve what she once noted of Avedon’s work: “As much as all these photographs may appear to be moments that just occurred, they are finally, in varying degrees, studied works of the imagination.”

Tracy Achor Hayes