Joe Johnson is a man out of time. The 81-year-old cattleman, cowboy and self-taught folk artist recounts tales of his youth with a Southern drawl that is endlessly curved, held between past and present. A descendant of Fort Myers founder Manuel A. Gonzalez, Joe preserves in words and drawings a bygone era when cattle roamed the region’s beaches and grasslands freely. Cowboys have long been known to sing songs and write poems, but Joe takes the recollections a step further, capturing the land, its history, its people and the native flora and fauna upon it through illustrated remembrances. His crude pencil marks on makeshift paper dash out lively scenes of cracker cattle, ponies and wild hogs. Sweeping charcoal landscapes and penciled figures, sketched on panels of parchment, particle board or paper, are taped together within a frame to form visual lore.
A window to Southwest Florida’s forgotten past swings open as Joe speaks and sketches, welcoming in rays of pastoral light that shine on an ever-expanding audience. Once reserved for friends and family, the cowboy artist’s work has found a broader audience in recent years through exhibitions and speaking engagements at local galleries, igniting a renewed interest in our region’s heritage.
“See that one over there; I chased the devil in it,” he says, taking me from one square panel to the next. In the first, a cowboy takes off on horseback, dog in tow, beneath the squelch of a setting summer sun. Broad pencil strokes announce the approaching darkness. The following panels bring Joe’s memory to life: A herd of cattle bunch near an errant creek 20 miles outside of camp. The young cowboy (a self-depiction) dismounts in a field of stars. “Those paint horses would slow their breathing, matching the rhythm of the cattle,” Joe says, gesturing to a vibrating swirl of cream-colored hide and horns. He points to a smoldering fire near the frame’s edge—whoever tried to steal the herd left behind their remnants.
That night, as Joe remembers it, he sat beside the dulling blaze, nudging a charred piece of hardwood loose with his boot. The smell and feel of the ember recalled his mother, an artist who whittled makeshift charcoal pencils. “My mother was a storyteller and a cowgirl,” he says. “She drew pictures of this life, same as me.”
A self-taught artist, Joe began by swapping portraits with fellow cowboys, carving wooden figurines alongside Seminole children and mimicking his mother’s delicate sketches—each act leaving a stylistic imprint that flourished as the decades progressed. “These are real people,” he says of the portraits. “Cowboys, ranch hands and Seminoles—orphans, too. A lot of orphans became cowboys. It takes a certain kind of person.” Over the years, his art has evolved from a series of cattle and cowboy portraits to sprawling, story-driven landscapes.
Each morning, he checks in on the herd that roams his land, pours a cup of coffee, then sets pencil to paper. Works begin as a snapshot of a burning memory, his weathered hands quickly scratch and scrape out small graphite strokes, giving way to waving tufts of sawgrass, palmetto fronds and bending palms. They labor heavily over the curved, ink-penned jaw of a mule, the crooked horns of wild cattle. He doesn’t reference photographs, but feels his way through each memory—where each man stood, which beasts grazed and which strayed from the herd. Scrawled at the periphery of drawings are phrases and names: “No fence laws” harkens to the era’s free-roaming bovines; creek and cowboy camp names anchor the works with a sense of place and history. A single drawing may take months to complete, as Joe returns again and again to a life lived and a Florida remembered.
His drawings reflect a cowboy’s inclination toward plain handiwork over elaborate constructions of light and depth, lending an approachable sense of familiarity and warmth. The agrarian subject matter, flattened compositions and implicit rejection of artistic formality fall in line with American primitivism—a subset of folk art typically associated with untrained artists who thrived in the 18th and 19th centuries. Yet Joe’s intuitive sense of scale and the robust narrative quality of his work eschew any stereotypes surrounding primitivism’s lack of sophistication. Not that Joe puts much stock in any such labels. He prefers the moniker “storyteller.”
When Joe formally retired from ranching at the age of 79 (the cows that roam his land these days are owned by an investor), art filled the hole ranching left behind. His work circulated through a tight group of loved ones until last year, when LaBelle’s Arts of the Inland gallery invited him to exhibit some works. Joe agreed, but only if he could come and share his stories, too. The program ignited a renewed interest in Florida’s cattle history and the lives of those who tended it. Now, Joe is a regular presence at the gallery, sharing his work and stories.
In January, Sanibel Island’s J.N. “Ding” Darling National Wildlife Refuge showed some of Joe’s works, which caught the eye of famed Everglades photographer Clyde Butcher. “He does black and whites just like me—all landscapes—and he wears a cowboy hat, too,” Joe says, each word measured with a cowboy’s pride. “He wants to spend some time this summer out on the ranch, looking at the same things I look at. The same things I’ve been following all my life.”