GEORGE HALLMARK HAD BEEN GIVING SOME THOUGHT TO THE PAINTING HE WAS PLANNING FOR THE Settlers West 50th anniversary show, under the impression he had more than a month to finish it. When he found out he actually had only a couple of weeks, he had to punch things into overdrive and paint through the weekends. But he was surprisingly unruffled. At 72 years of age, with five decades of award-winning art on his résumé, Hallmark has learned to take everything in stride, from the pandemic (lots of painting and a podcast with Western Art Collector) to arthritis (“I just fall out of bed and crawl up the side”) to an accelerated due date on an oil that needs time to dry.
“I already had the subject matter picked out,” Hallmark says placidly, even jovially, from his studio in Meridian, Texas, in Bosque County, which, he points out, is home to a surprising number of Western artists. “It’s real pretty country here, and you get a lot of artists. James Boren and Melvin Warren, who both lived here, were super artists and
