This one is historical and it's personal. A lot of the history is in the nam probably every mining camp and cow town in the West had a Palace Sal a at one time or another. Dodge City, Tombstone, you name it. They were everywbere, and you pretty much know what they looked like, because there's a replica in every John Wayne Western. There was a long paneled bar. Probably made out of oak or mahogany, and maybe imported from St. Louis or someplace farther east as a mark of class. There was a brass foot rail and probably some spittoons. And behind the bar there was a painting of a nude woman. I always loved those paintings. A lot of them were by A.D.M. Cooper, who was one of the Taos artists, and the story is he would pay his bar bills with those paintings.
The saloon owners were always willing to go for that deal because the paintings brought in customers.
The personal part is, in the old days, I hung around at the Palace in Santa Fe. It was a local legend, and all the Santa Fe characters were there at one time or another.
You'd be sitting with Earl Biss on one side and R.C. Gorman on the other, and the mayor two stools down.
The artists were always broke, and they'd let us run a tab until we sold a piece and paid them. Sometimes they'd ask me to do some watercolors for the walls as payment, and I always did. The whole place was decorated with my art back in the old days. Some of us used to work as extras in the Westerns they made out at Eaves Movie Ranch south of town, and a lot of times we'd come in straight from the set, still wearing our costumes. The scene in this sculpture is based on something I saw a lot of late at night at the Palace. Two cowboys in their outfits are in a 'face off' over this one cowgirl. They're hoping to get lucky but she knows it's last call, and she's holding aces.
—GIB SINGLETON