David Bates
Katrina Portrait V (Man with Do-Rag), 2006-07
Watercolor and charcoal on paper
41 x 26 inches
49 x 31 inches framed
49 x 31 inches framed
PRESS New York Times by Roberta Smith, Dec. 15, 2006 Section E, Page 47 of the National edition with the headline: 'Art in Review; David Bates' But the artist's aggressive...
PRESS
New York Times by Roberta Smith, Dec. 15, 2006
Section E, Page 47 of the National edition with the headline: "Art in Review; David Bates"
But the artist's aggressive intentions are perhaps clearest in his individual and group portraits of angry residents of the Gulf Coast who got the short end of the stick when Hurricane Katrina passed through. Taken from television, these images bring the self-contained glower that hovers behind his work out into the open and give it the immediate force of human emotions and events. These works suggest that even in times of crisis, paintings can be as powerful as photographs.
Intelligent Collector, 2023
"David Bates’ Take on Hurricane Katrina Still Resonates Nearly Two Decades Later"
This painting is from "his acclaimed body of work, The Katrina Paintings, which he created in response to the devastating storm that hit New Orleans and its surrounding regions in 2005.
Dense, graphic and eerily quiet, the painting captures in one scene an entire grief-stricken city, if not a whole nation. You can smell the salty sky and seawater. The house, like everyone who took in these images in person and through the media, is in shock; it encapsulates all of the humanity that built it, loved it, lived in it and lost it.
The Christian Science Monitor, August 2009
"Whose art is Katrina art?"
When television, newspapers, and Internet images showed New Orleans drowning, David Bates, like most people watching, felt he was witnessing an event of horrible national importance. In his Dallas home were two television sets – one for recording one channel, the other to watch in real time."
Mr. Bates felt he "wanted all the information" on what was happening. But as the week wore on and the event grew in magnitude, that news tracking turned into a yearning he could not shake. "I just felt I needed to do something," he says.
So he painted.
Bates, an artist whose work is collected in major institutions, including New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, has long had an affinity for New Orleans. His television viewing exposed him to faces that now live as still lifes in more than 50 paintings and drawings he created over the course of two years. Bates says he used, as a reference, Guernica, the Picasso painting from 1937 of faces stricken by a bombing raid in the Spanish Civil War.
"The faces that told those stories [on television] were like the faces Picasso painted, so filled with hopelessness, fear, and so much anger," Bates says.
Houston says that although Bates was not in New Orleans at the time, he possessed the facility to document the suffering in a way that resonated. "He somehow channeled the range of emotions," says Houston, who displays his work at the Ogden. "You see everything from stoic denial to despair to everything in between. He really brings out this human suffering and intensity."
New York Times by Roberta Smith, Dec. 15, 2006
Section E, Page 47 of the National edition with the headline: "Art in Review; David Bates"
But the artist's aggressive intentions are perhaps clearest in his individual and group portraits of angry residents of the Gulf Coast who got the short end of the stick when Hurricane Katrina passed through. Taken from television, these images bring the self-contained glower that hovers behind his work out into the open and give it the immediate force of human emotions and events. These works suggest that even in times of crisis, paintings can be as powerful as photographs.
Intelligent Collector, 2023
"David Bates’ Take on Hurricane Katrina Still Resonates Nearly Two Decades Later"
This painting is from "his acclaimed body of work, The Katrina Paintings, which he created in response to the devastating storm that hit New Orleans and its surrounding regions in 2005.
Dense, graphic and eerily quiet, the painting captures in one scene an entire grief-stricken city, if not a whole nation. You can smell the salty sky and seawater. The house, like everyone who took in these images in person and through the media, is in shock; it encapsulates all of the humanity that built it, loved it, lived in it and lost it.
The Christian Science Monitor, August 2009
"Whose art is Katrina art?"
When television, newspapers, and Internet images showed New Orleans drowning, David Bates, like most people watching, felt he was witnessing an event of horrible national importance. In his Dallas home were two television sets – one for recording one channel, the other to watch in real time."
Mr. Bates felt he "wanted all the information" on what was happening. But as the week wore on and the event grew in magnitude, that news tracking turned into a yearning he could not shake. "I just felt I needed to do something," he says.
So he painted.
Bates, an artist whose work is collected in major institutions, including New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, has long had an affinity for New Orleans. His television viewing exposed him to faces that now live as still lifes in more than 50 paintings and drawings he created over the course of two years. Bates says he used, as a reference, Guernica, the Picasso painting from 1937 of faces stricken by a bombing raid in the Spanish Civil War.
"The faces that told those stories [on television] were like the faces Picasso painted, so filled with hopelessness, fear, and so much anger," Bates says.
Houston says that although Bates was not in New Orleans at the time, he possessed the facility to document the suffering in a way that resonated. "He somehow channeled the range of emotions," says Houston, who displays his work at the Ogden. "You see everything from stoic denial to despair to everything in between. He really brings out this human suffering and intensity."