What do a forty-foot iguana, 1920s cowgirls, dancing frogs, Roy Rogers, and the world's largest cowboy boots have in common? All have served as inspiration and subject for the art of Bob "Daddy-O" Wade, one of the great Texas artists of the latter half of the twentieth century. The iguana, frogs, and boots speak to his tendency to work in monumental forms, taking otherwise trivial aspects of his Southwestern heritage and projecting them on a magnificent scale in steel frames, concrete, and urethane foam. The vintage cowgirls series of hand-tinted photo emulsion canvases show something softer in Wade, a nostalgia and a desire to reconnect with and revive the Western past. And, well, Roy Rogers was in actual fact Wade's second cousin, and he attributes his early meetings with Rogers as firing in his mind the myth of the American cowboy. Each of these has made him into one of the ablest artists in capturing Texas identity in art-by turns brash, playful, crude, crafty, and always larger than life. (source from American West Magazine)