Cowboy Boot Art | Leddy Boot Green Screen Print Style | Betsy Crum

Cowtown's most famous boot, in chartreuse and grey, ink skips and all. Leddy Boot in Green — Green Wall Art by Betsy Crum This is the Leddy sign — the boot-shaped one outside M.L. Leddy's in the Fort Worth Stockyards that works as a landmark whether or not you're shopping for boots. Betsy painted it flat and graphic: a pale grey boot outlined in black, LEDDY stacked straight down the shaft in fat block capitals with a red shadow behind every letter, turquoise stitch-flourishes curling out either side the way real Leddy stitching does, and HAND MADE BOOTS running across the vamp and toe in hand-lettered caps that bend to follow the leather. The whole thing sits on a field of chartreuse — a green with some acid in it, the kind that makes grey look deliberate instead of drab. And she left the ink honest. Look close and the black breaks and skips across the letters the way an old screen print does, so the sign reads less like a reproduction and more like something run off in a shop. The name on it is older than the sign. M.L. Leddy bought the saddle and boot shop he'd been working in, in Brady, Texas, in 1922. The Stockyards store opened in 1941 and hasn't moved since — there are still only two Leddy's in the world, that one and downtown San Angelo. A century of custom boots, and the thing most people can draw from memory is the sign. Where It'll Work in Your House The chartreuse does the work here. It's green wall art that gets along with wood, leather, and every shade of white paint anybody ever regretted — an entryway, a bar, a kitchen, an office that could use one loud object. It's vertical and compact, so it fits the narrow wall most art can't: between two windows, beside a doorframe, over a bar cart. It also travels in a group — hang it with the rest of the cowboy boot art and you've got a wall, or slot it into a gallery wall as the piece that keeps everything else honest. Questions Is this a real sign? It is. The boot hangs at M.L. Leddy's in the Fort Worth Stockyards, and it's been a landmark long enough that people say "past the Leddy boot" without thinking about it. What's going on with the texture? That's the screen-print look. Betsy let the ink break and skip instead of smoothing it out, which is the difference between a picture of a sign and a print that behaves like one. How green is the green? Chartreuse, and unapologetic — somewhere between olive and acid yellow. It reads warm in daylight and goes deeper under a lamp, and it's the reason the grey boot looks like a choice instead of an accident. How is it different from the other Leddy prints? Same sign, different temperature. The Warhol grid runs it nine times in nine colors; the minimalist version strips it back to line. This one is the loud-quiet middle — one boot, one big color, every skip in the ink left where it landed. Who made it? Betsy Crum, who has been drawing Fort Worth long enough to have opinions about its signage. Original family artwork, printed to order — the rest of her catalog is here. Most of Fort Worth's landmarks are buildings. This one is a boot, and it does the job better. Hang it with Caya's Justin boot for a two-bootmaker wall, work through the rest of our Fort Worth art, or send it to somebody who moved away and still gives directions by that sign — it files neatly under Texas gifts.