n American Indian and his horse drink from the same pool of water by a river in the Rocky Mountain West in The Indian in His Solitude, a 36- by 31.5-inch oil by painter Ron Lesser [artbyronlesser.com]. The piece evokes the remote frontier, though the artist doesn't remember exactly what inspired this particular canvas. "Maybe I liked the title and painted something to fit the Indian in his solitude," he says. Of course, when you have rendered as many paintings as Lesser, you're not likely to remember the details of every single one.

  Lesser was introduced to art at an early age-though not at the Met, Guggenheim or Whitney. "When I was a child, I loved to study the drawings from comic books," he says. "I wanted to be an illustrator for as long as I can remember. I had hundreds of comic books, which my parents threw out as soon as I moved out. Would be worth a lot of dollars today."

  He later studied at the Pratt Institute and then attended the Art Students League. Having grown up a Western film buff, Lesser naturally gravitated to Western subjects as a professional artist. He ranked among the top illustrators of Western paperback covers from 1976 into the early 1990s, when publishers increasingly turned to digital photography-or, as Lesser puts it, "Photoshop took over and put many fine artists out of business." He's perhaps best known for his iconic movie posters. "I loved making paintings for movies," he says. "Often I would photograph models and place the actor's head on the body for the painting. Other times I would paint the actor's portrait and add scenes."