A different kind of ranch, a different kind of cowboy artist

The sky at Chico Basin Ranch seems impossibly vast, befitting the rolling landscape it covers like a pale blue bowl: 87,000 grass-cloaked acres, studded with five spring-fed lakes and, depending on the season, up to 2,500 cattle. The ranch, situated in an empty place on the map more than 30 miles southeast of Colorado Springs, is a cowboy's paradise. That means it is also paradise for any cowboy artist worth his paint. Which is where the two Dukes come in, a pair of princes in their respective realms and visionaries to boot. Duke Phillips is the rancher. Duke Beardsley is the artist. Together, in a fusion of commerce and conservation that could only happen in the open West, the two do what is possible to summon art from the natural world. The two men are mavericks of a sort. They operate within a tradition, yet stand apart from it. Phillips, 53, was raised in the cattle business yet has jettisoned all hidebound notions of ranching: He is a land steward and educator as well as a working cowboy. Beardsley, 39, while a spiritual heir to classic Western artists Charles M. Russell and Frederic Remington, uses his time on the ranch to create eye-popping paintings influenced by modernists Andy Warhol and Franz Kline...DenverPost