PENDLETON — Rowdy Barry is well known in the sport of rodeo as a bullfighter.

He spent the better part of 33 years putting himself between angry bulls and bull riders, and has dozens of broken bones and scars to prove it.

Barry, 54, also is a respected cowboy artist, and the Pendleton Round-Up Board of Directors commissioned him to create the official poster for the 2021 Round-Up that will take place Sept. 15-18.

“It’s a pretty cool honor to be part of that history,” Barry said. “Hopefully I can build up my name. Most know me as Rowdy Barry the bullfighter, not Rowdy Barry the artist.”

Barry’s design puts a twist on Wallace Smith’s iconic 1925 saddle bronc rider that is synonymous with the Pendleton Round-Up.

“I looked at a lot of old posters and researched what I was going to do,” Barry said. “I wasn’t going to do the Let ‘er Buck horse, but the more I looked at it, I wanted to do it with the black background.”

Barry did a rough sketch of his design, complete with Native American designs in all four corners and a tuft of grass beneath the horse, and presented it to the board for approval.

“The other part that spoke Pendleton to me, and what people across the country associate with it, is that it is held on grass, so I added that,” said Barry, whose signature also is in green, by the grass, so that it doesn’t overtake the artwork.

Once Barry was done with the artwork, he and the board realized it was missing something.

“I knew how iconic the chutes are,” Barry said. “I had to have the right chutes. There are chutes, and then there is a walkway. You want to get the right chutes, and the right colors.”

Barry chose chutes 9-11, which are yellow, green and red. They add just the right pop of color on the black background behind the horse.

The casual onlooker likely won’t notice the subtle changes Barry made to the bronc rider and the horse.

“There is an Irish influence,” Barry said. “The rider doesn’t have dark hair, but more of a reddish brown. Also, the bottom of the horse’s feet are light in the original. You aren’t going to have light coming from under the horse, so I made them black.”

Barry finished the poster in April, and after final touches were added and approved a graphic artist added the logo and date with the Round-Up’s specific font and size.

“That font is part of Pendleton Woolen Mills, the Pendleton Round-Up and Pendleton Whisky,” Round-Up General Manager Erika Patton said. “It has to be exact.”

The signed limited edition posters 1-10 are being framed, and six have already been pre-sold. Posters 11-50 hit the store Friday, June 18. They sold for $100 each, and were gone before the end of the day.

The official poster, unsigned, sells in the store and online for $20, and has been flying out the door. They are headed to places across the country, including New York, Tennessee and Texas.

Only 600 posters were ordered, and through June 21, 186 had been sold.

“We didn’t want a bunch of posters left over by the end of the year,” Patton said. “We will order more if we are out before Round-Up. This is the first time it has sold that quickly.”

Creating a work of artBarry always has had a creative side.

“I was a daydreamer,” said Barry, who grew up in Touchet, Washington. “In class, instead of taking notes, I was drawing bulls or fighter jets. If someone wanted me to draw something, I did. My art teacher saw that I had passion, but I only wanted to draw what I wanted to draw. In college, I would ask the professors if I could draw what I wanted. I never thought it would be a career, or that I would do it for money.”

Barry entered a few competitions and won a few ribbons, but he didn’t want to be a full-time artist.

“I didn’t want to lose my passion for it,” he said.

Barry also sculpts. He likes the challenge of the third dimension of sculpture, but each piece is extremely time consuming.

Fun fact, Barry actually was asked to do the poster for the 2020 Pendleton Round-Up, but the COVID-19 pandemic derailed the event.

“When that happened, I did the regular artist procrastination thing,” Barry said. “I had enough commission stuff to do, so we extended the deadline.”

When Barry finally got back to the Round-Up piece, he did sketches of what he wanted to do.

From there, he did an outline of the piece, then spent hours with an array of pastels to create the image. The shading on the cowboy’s shirt used several different shades of blue, while the shading on the horse used a wide array of browns.

“When I work a piece, I start in the upper left corner and work diagonally to the bottom right,” he said. “That way there are no hand drags or runs. The entire original piece is done in pastels.”

When Barry added the chutes, he had to devise a makeshift hand rest so he wouldn’t disturb the work that was already done.The Pendleton Round-Up poster is one of many Barry has done in his career. He’s also created them for the Farm-City Pro Rodeo, Walla Walla Fair and Frontier Days and the Sisters Rodeo, to name a few. He also has done artwork for rodeo programs and does commission pieces.

Wallace Smith did the first official Round-Up poster in 1925. Before that, various businesses created any posters. The first posters the Round-Up commissioner were in 1989 and 1990 and done by Boots Reynolds.

“They were kind of a busy cartoonish poster with a million different things going,” Patton said. “It was a comedic type of perspective.”

There were no posters from 1991 to 2001, then Buck Taylor stepped in and created posters through 2012.

The posters disappeared again from 2013-15. From 2016-19 different artists created pieces, but none have resonated like Barry’s.

“You just don’t know each year how popular it will be,” Patton said. “He is popular, and he knows a lot of people.”