I began working with artist Ron Lesser several years ago on a series of books featuring his paperback cover and gallery artwork.
Since then, my co-editor Bill Cunningham and I have published two volumes in what we call THE ART OF RON LESSER series.
THE ART OF RON LESSER, VOL. 1: DEADLY DAMES AND SEXY SIRENS focuses on paperback and movie-poster artwork Ron created in the 1960s and 1970s.
THE ART OF RON LESSER, VOL. 2: DANGEROUS DAMES AND COVER DOLLS features original paintings of sexy women he has created in recent decades for galleries.
Both books are available in deluxe hardcover and paperback editions via Amazon, BudsArtBooks.com, the MensPulpMags.com bookstore, or my eBay listings.
We’re now working with Ron on Volumes 3 and 4, set for release in the summer of 2026.
Volume 3 will showcase Ron’s Western artwork.
That includes Western paperback covers he did in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, Western movie poster and ad art, and Western paintings sold by galleries.
Volume 4 will focus on the action/adventure and thriller paperback art he did during those decades.
Ron’s movie posters for Western films like Clint Eastwood’s HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER (1973) and PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID (1973), starring James Coburn and Kris Kristofferson, are iconic and widely known.
Another Clint Eastwood movie poster with Lesser art is PAINT YOUR WAGON, in which he co-starred with Lee Marvin and Jean Seberg. That film is adapted from the Broadway musical that was a huge hit in 1951. It’s worth watching just to be amazed at hearing Eastwood and Marvin sing.
Less well known are the masterful pencil drawings Ron created for TV ads promoting Western movies.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, Ron and other top illustration artists created many black-and-white drawings for ads that appeared in TV Guide and newspaper TV-listing pages. Some were for ads promoting new TV series. Others were ads promoting films that were getting their first airings on network television.
Below are some examples of Ron’s drawings for such ads. They are not simple “sketches.” They are finely crafted, finished pieces of art done with pencil on Masonite board covered with a thin layer of white gesso.
One was done for an ad promoting the debut of the NBC miniseries THE SACKETTS, which first aired on May 15, 1979.
That classic miniseries starred Sam Elliott, Tom Selleck, Glenn Ford and Ben Johnson. It’s based on Louis L’Amour’s SACKETTS series of novels.
The other is for the movie THE REVENGERS, originally released in 1972. It starred William Holden, Ernest Borgnine and Susan Hayward.
We’ll be showing more examples of Ron’s Western poster and ad artwork in the Movies and TV section of THE ART OF RON LESSER, VOL. 3, along with more than 200 of his Western paperback covers and photos of his original cover paintings.
If there’s room, we may include the more recent artwork he did for the TV series BIG SKY, which originally aired on ABC from 2020 to 2023.
It’s a modern Western set in Montana, based on the novel THE HIGHWAY, one of the books in the Cassie Dewell series written by C. J. Box.
It features a pair of private detectives played by Katheryn Winnick and Kylie Bunbury.
Ron Lesser was commissioned to provide six drawings of horses to be hung on the walls of the houses used in the series.
Ron didn’t know which house on the show they were intended for.
When he emailed me photos of his horse drawings, he included two photos he found on the internet that show them hanging on the walls of a set.
I was a fan of the BIG SKY series, but I couldn’t recall where those drawings appeared.
So, I decided to rewatch the show and discovered that all six of Ron’s drawings were hung on the walls of the house where Kylie Bunbury’s character Cassie Dewell lives with her father and son.
You can see the six drawings Ron did for the show and the photos of them on the BIG SKY set below.
Ron did many paintings of horses during his career as an illustration artist. Naturally, horses are shown on a lot of the covers he painted for Western novels in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s.
In the ‘90s, as the paperback cover market shrank, he did Civil War paintings for galleries and prints that included many scenes with horses. He also did a series of paintings of polo players on horses you can see on his website.
But despite how great his BIG SKY horse drawings are, and despite the fact that he has done doing a lot of other artwork depicting horses, Ron does not consider himself a horse art specialist.
“Some people think horses are a specialty of mine because I’ve painted so many horses,” Ron told me. “But I’m not really. I’m not a specialist. I’m an illustrator. In 1959, I became a student of Frank Reilly [the legendary teacher at the Art Students League in New York City]. We were taught how to draw and how to paint anything. I don’t have a specialty in the sense that some artists do. The same is true of a number of other illustrators who started out on the ‘50s and ‘60s. Artists like James Bama, Frank McCarthy, and Mort Künstler—they could paint anything.”
When I asked Ron what was important in drawing or painting a horse, he said: “The anatomy of the horse. Horses have short hair. When you draw them, it has to look like there are muscles and bone structure underneath the hair.”
As his drawings for BIG SKY series demonstrate, after more than six decades as a professional illustration artist, Ron hasn’t lost his touch.
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