Weiskopf’s paintings elevate domestic life to something more exotic. Regional fruits and local delicacies like tropical longan berries, cold-weather quinces, and Italian Ossi dei Morti cookies become objects of beauty, worthy of being celebrated on canvas. The artist’s delicate renderings of the smallest details result in a body of work that invites careful viewing and rewards those who take the time to stop and pay attention.
Over his nearly five-decade career as a visual artist, Dale Chihuly has become almost as well-known for being a successful and canny entrepreneur as for his colorful and intricately wrought glass creations.
David Halliday is a master of still photography. He is known for his captivating portraiture, his still-lifes of exquisite ripened fruit (some with sexual undertones), his ethereal landscapes and his anthropological renderings of ordinary objects. But within the serene stillness of his works lie movement and life.
In 1982, when David Bates painted the monumental Ed Walker Cleaning Fish, he still made his living teaching art history at Southern Methodist University, where he’d gotten both his undergraduate degree and his MFA. The “little red house” in which he and his wife, the painter Jan Lee Bates, lived at the time, had walls so small he jokes that one could have made a nice easel for the 84-by-72-inch portrait. “I never really counted on making a living doing this,” Bates says, adding that it was the teaching salary that freed him up to make pictures of subjects that spoke to him. “That’s why I could paint an old black guy cleaning fish with a bucket of fish guts at his feet. Because I never thought anybody was going to buy something like that.”
When I was 14 years old growing up in Maine I experienced a startling awareness of understanding.
The old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words turns tangible in the summer exhibitions at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, where poetry pops off the page and into three dimensions.
I first met Jacqueline Bishop down in Cuba, where we both found Havana reminiscent of her own hometown, New Orleans. A seasoned traveler and visual artist, Jacqueline takes her inspiration from the natural world and its wettest places, be it Bangladesh, the Amazon, or her own beloved Louisiana swamps.
Like artists who work with paint or marble, Lesley Dill and Ian Hamilton Finlay use words, signs and poetry to fashion intriguing art that explores the nature and meaning of language itself. Sharing little but a willingness to provoke, they are exhibiting challenging bodies of work fashioned from wildly varied material at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum.
No American artist captured the devastation of Hurricane Katrina more forcefully than Dallas’ own David Bates in his stunningly powerful 2008 exhibition “The Storm.”
“Cartoonists take the salient features of the seemingly mundane which normally escape our attention, and blow them up to larger than life proportions, forcing us to acknowledge their emotive qualities.”