The American Quarter Horse Journal, April 30, 2008 -- Renowned equine artist Orren Marion Mixer died April 29. He was 87.

Mixer was born in Oklahoma City in 1920 to Florence Motter and Orren Marion Mixer Sr. After attending public schools, he graduated from Central High School and through the efforts of his high school art teacher, Grace Chadwick, he obtained a scholarship to attend the Kansas City Art Institute from 1938-40.

Mixer worked in graphic arts in New York, Oklahoma City and Fort Worth, Texas, before moving to San Diego to work in an aircraft manufacturing plant. He returned to Fort Worth in 1943 and joined the U.S. Navy. Stationed in Chicago, he was a visual aids graphic artist.

In his personal time, Mixer painted Western scenes, and his first sales came through a Chicago sporting goods store. Discharged from the service in 1946, he brought his wife, Evelyn Leonard, whom he’d married in 1941, back to Oklahoma, where he built a house and studio near Arcadia/Edmond.

Mixer became a well-known local Western artist during the 1950s and 1960s. Livestock, particularly horses, became his specialty, and his work graced the covers of Western Horseman, Quarter Horse Journal, Cattleman, and Oklahoma Today. In 1968, the American Quarter Horse Association commissioned Mixer to paint "the ideal American Quarter Horse," and six other breed associations followed suit. He depicted the ideal Pinto, Paint, Palomino, Appaloosa, Buckskin and Pony of the Americas.

Briefly retired during the 1980s, Mixer resumed his artistic productions in the mid-1990s, still working from a studio near Arcadia.

Mixer was inducted in the American Quarter Horse Hall of Fame in 1993.