For those of us who have never set foot on a working ranch, the image that comes to mind is of sweeping vistas, and pastoral scenes; the ranch hands and the cowboys are young, rugged and vital.

But Maeghan Watkinson, whose grandparents own a ranch near Lillooet, and whose dad has spent his life as a cowboy, knows better. Ranching is tough, it is messy and it is dirty. And everywhere you look ranchers and cowboys are getting older — many have entered their retirement years and are still working as hard as ever.

The fourth-year visual arts student spent the summer completing her Undergraduate Research Experience Award Program project, using her brushes and paints to capture images of working ranches on her canvas, and she did so without embellishment.

The project, “The Ranching Lifestyle: The Romanticized Ideal Associated to Ranchers and Cowboys,” broke her out of her comfort zone. As a portraitist, she had to broaden her scope, and she learned many lessons along the way.

“I was able to go places and visit people that I might not have otherwise, and I would never have had the funds to complete a project like this,” she said, referring to the $4,500 scholarship provided to UREAP recipients.

“It took me two months to complete the first painting. It was a real eye-opener. Just because I’m an artist, I had never done anything like this and I was working on a much larger scale.”

Her project, which was supervised by Visual Arts faculty member Alan Brandoli, took Watkinson to ranches in Williams Lake, Big Creek and McLeese Lake, and while her paintings steered away from the romantic ideals of ranching, they are still stunning.

“I wanted to show ranching as it truly is — to display the labour and the hard work — I wanted to pay homage to my grandparents and my ancestors, and I can do this by making the public aware of the very traditional and difficult career that it is.”