Painter

Doing Dallas

The Library on Parry Avenue with books, collectibles, ceramics, and silver on display.

The Library on Parry Avenue with books, collectibles, ceramics, and silver on display.

I’m the guy that moved into the loft directly across the street from Fair Park in Dallas the day the State Fair of Texas commenced. For the next three weeks, it was mayhem down here. Not to worry, I was a prisoner of the loft anyway, getting everything from the TPRB office and the Inwood Manor condo that had been in storage in Houston for past six months sorted and stowed. It was all the more important that everything be just so, since the loft is my home AND my livelihood. That it is so beautiful is due to the talent and hard work of interior designer and dear friend, Alice Cottrell, and her trusted jack of all trades and all-around miracle worker, Steven Hauser.
The loft is “done” and I’ve been working to launch my new endeavor – selling artist and architect designed objects; original art and editions; vintage ceramics; collectibles; rare art, photography, and fashion books; fashion and design collaborations; and commissioned objects by Texas artists to interior designers and directly to clients. I’ve gone to every event [“He’d go to the opening of a drain!”], talked to everyone, and have had enough delicious meetings/meals with fantastic people to need bigger pants. With a job providing thoughtfully chosen accessories for Alice’s latest Museum Tower project under my belt, some press coming out in January [fingers crossed] and a collaboration with the Donghia showroom in Dallas [see my next post], things are coming along. This gig is certainly not a “sure thing,” but people and the universe keep stepping in just when I wonder if it “will ever happen.” It has happened. It is happening.

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Early Yesterday

Jack Early's Man Boobs, 2014

Jack Early’s Man Boobs, 2014


I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to see and then learn more about artist Jack Early and his work, part of Bill Arning’s terrific “A Better Yesterday” at CAMH. Early grew up gay and creative in the south of the 1970s just as I did. The tightly cropped hypermasculine 1970s dude chest of “Man Boobs” (2014) – and the other 2 paintings in the show – all live on a background of toy soldier wallpaper – the kind typical in the boys’ bedrooms of my childhood. I felt the tension in the picture even before I heard Early say in his recorded “Jack Early’s Life Story in Just Under 20 Minutes” (2014), also in the show, “I was a gay eight-year-old in 1970. I would have chosen flowers or a circus theme, but it wasn’t lost on me that choosing soldiers would lend some air of masculinity.” He abandoned himself to pass in a world that told him it was dangerous to be him. I abandoned myself to stay safe. We all did.

Jack Early’s work is exactly what I was missing in The Speed Art Museum’s “Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art.” [see my earlier blog post, Due South.]

I could tell you more about Jack Early’s life and career, but he does it best in:
Jack Early’s Life Story in Just Under 20 Minutes!

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Due South

Jeffrey Gibson's I Put a Spell On You, 2015

Jeffrey Gibson’s I Put a Spell On You, 2015

I visited friends in Lexington, Kentucky this past week. We took a drive to Louisville to see, among other things, the fairly newly completed addition to the Speed Art Museum and the main exhibit there, “Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art.” It is billed as “the first contemporary art exhibition to question and explore in-depth the complex and contested space of the American South.” The works addressed “southern themes” – race, poverty, disparity, violence, disaster and decay among others. But it felt like stuff was missing. Big Southern stuff. At least to this gay, creative, white, mid-life Southerner. Themes like anti-intellectualism. The fascism of sports in southern culture. Souless, generic development with specious claims to “local.” Limiting/damaging ideas of masculinity and femininity. Lack of encouragement or even tolerance for true excentricity/individuality. Social conservatism. And hypocrisy. I loved Catherine Opie’s pictures of lesbian couples, but they didn’t say a lot about the sometimes fraught, often dangerous LGBTQ Southern experience.
I’m not sure if the show was good or bad, or successful or not. I was just looking for some of me in the show and it just wasn’t really there. Maybe something to look at creating myself?

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A New Mood at Rice

Rice University's new Moody Center for the Arts

Rice University’s new Moody Center for the Arts

I was thrilled to meet Rice University Moody Center for the Arts’ Executive Director, Alison Weaver, and tour the facility a little over a week ago. Alison explained that The Moody’s mission is to foster connections across disciplines and to connect art with science, performance, community and more. And to go “beyond the hedges” to connect Rice University itself with Houston through the arts. [Another example of a mash-up or collaborative approach – seems to be part of the zeitgist these days.] The striking building was designed by Los Angeles-based architect Michael Maltzan and includes areas for “making,” exhibitions, learning and performance. With the work of Olafur Eliasson, Thomas Struth, teamLab and Mona Hatoum already having been featured, The Moody is well on its way to becoming one of Houston’s premiere arts institutions.

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Be A Connoisseur

Artist Leslie Wayne interviewed by HMACC Exhibitions Manager, Dominic Clay

Artist Leslie Wayne interviewed by HMACC Exhibitions Manager, Dominic Clay

This past Saturday I was thrilled to see my friend Leslie Wayne’s shared exhibition at the Houston Museum of African American Culture “Africa on my mind: The art of Malick Sidibe and Leslie Wayne.” Leslie and her sculptor husband, Don Porcaro, flew down from NYC for the opening and the next afternoon Leslie gave a gallery talk/interview. One of Dominic Clay’s questions to Leslie was along the lines of “What advice would you give to an artist who’s intent is to a have a global, cross-cultural approach to their art practice?” Leslie’s emphatic response was “Connoisseurship!” This from a NYC-based life-long working, successful artist. And I couldn’t agree more. For any kind of creative person – from painter to art director to copywriter – output IS connected to input. The more you absorb, the more you have to work with. Leslie admonished the audience to be informed, to look at everything we can. Be interested and engaged. Yes! Creativity does not exist in a vacuum. Or at least it’s more fun and more of this world if it doesn’t.

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