The Long Ride Home by Cheryl Freeman

The Long Ride Home
Cheryl Freeman
Acrylic on gallery-wrapped canvas
40"h x 30"w x 1.5"d
2025

The Long Ride Home is a tribute to endurance, memory, and quiet power of returning to one's roots. This piece embodies the spirit of a cowgirl shaped by open land and long horizons - a woman whose strength is not loud but lasting. She carries the weight of her past with grace, and every mile behind her adds meaning to the ones ahead.

Rendered in a palette of sun-warmed earth tones and faded denim blues, the painting resonates with a sense of weathered beauty and quiet resilience. The composition is enriched with subtle patterning - a nod to woven textiles, tooled leather, and layered stories that live in heirloom fabrics. Accents of copper and gold metallics bring warmth and flicker like Texas light at golden hour, hinting at beauty that endures even in worn places.  Through texture, color, and gesture, this work honors the legacy of the West - not as something fixed in time, but as something alive in every woman who rides forward with grit, heart, and an unwavering sense of where she comes from.

Get to Know the Austin Artist:
My work embodies a style I call Radiant Expressionism, which is a fusion of vivid color, layered brushwork, and luminous metallics that express emotion through form and light. Drawing from the bold energy of the Southwest landscape and the symbolic resilience of my subjects – agaves, longhorns, wild horses – my paintings offer a contemporary take on natural beauty, grounded in strength, patience, and quiet power. I paint to honor the quiet strength and wild beauty of the land. Bold color is my language, and nature is my muse. In my pieces, I seek to capture the tension between grounded stillness and bursts of vivid energy. Whether I’m painting a longhorn, a wild horse, or a solitary succulent, my aim is always the same: to express presence, power, and grace. My hope is that the viewer can feel what I feel in the moment of creation – a deep connection to place, to story, and to something timeless.