Eugene Thurston (1896–1993) Hand-Signed Lithograph “Indian Pottery Maker”
Eugene Thurston arrived in El Paso in 1906, a ten-year-old boy in a border town where the frontier was still within living memory. He would spend nearly nine decades painting the country around him: the Franklin Mountains, the Organ Mountains, desert washes, adobe villages, the Pueblo and Mexican communities of the borderlands.
He was there at the end of the Old West and watched it change. The adobe gave way to asphalt, open desert to subdivisions, trading posts to highways. Thurston served in the Army in World War I, ran a greeting card business until the Depression, taught commercial art to hundreds of El Paso students, and helped build the city’s art community. Through it all he kept recording the land and its people as he found them, painting into his eighties before his death in 1993.
His work is a record of a place in transition. The mountains are still there, and the Pueblo pottery traditions he drew are still very much alive, but the West he knew as a young man survives largely in pictures like these.
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