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.
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.”
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.
The Vieux Carre’s figurative freak flag dropped to half-staff last week when news circulated that one of the district’s last remaining embodiments of local color had faded to black. George Dureau, one of the city’s most nationally recognized artist and a major player in the local arts scene from the 1970s through the ’90s, was dead at 83, having succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease.
Over at Arthur Roger Gallery, the red pastel figure drawings and glass sculptures of New Mexico-based James Drake’s “Can We Know the Sound of Forgiveness” and the multidimensional poured paintings of Holton Rower ‘s “Viscous Resin Extruding From the Trunk” evoke styles of the past.
“Dreams from the bristles of the artist’s brush… I probe be yond the confines of the finite to create an infinity…Living dreams.” Arshile Gorky’s words, in 1942, at the start of his late, most eloquent, phase. The quote occurred to me during my initial visit to Edward Whiteman’s new exhibition of abstract pictographs (recently at Arthur Roger); it returned during my second.
View Lin Emery’s work in motion from her exhibition Lin Emery: In Motion at the New Orleans Museum of Art
David Bates is without question Dallas’ most venerated artist and, at 61, definitely worthy of a serious museum reappraisal. Artists often have mixed feelings about such things, since so many significant retrospectives have the aura of museum funerals rather than progress reports. So, it was with a bit of trepidation that David Bates, whose work has found its way into important collections from New York to Hawaii, said OK to a two-museum retrospective of his career at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas.
February 9 – May 11, 2014: In a career spanning more than forty years, Bates has combined exquisite technique with a deep understanding of American modernist traditions, resulting in a body of work that is at once sophisticated, soulful, and accessible. From his lush early paintings of the Arkansas nature conservancy Grassy Lake and the Texas Gulf Coast; to his reliefs, sculptures, and assemblages created in a variety of materials; to his most recent paintings depicting survivors of Hurricane Katrina, self-portraits, and a return to still life, this exhibition provides an in-depth look at the work of a unique and significant American artist. This exhibition includes approximately 45 paintings on view in Fort Worth, and 45 sculptures and 20 related paintings and drawings on view in Dallas.
February 9 – May 11, 2014: In a career spanning more than 40 years, Bates has combined exquisite technique with a deep understanding of American modernist traditions, resulting in a body of work that is at once sophisticated, soulful, and accessible. From his lush early paintings of the Arkansas nature conservancy Grassy Lake and the Texas Gulf Coast, to his reliefs, sculptures, and assemblages created in a variety of materials, to his most recent paintings depicting survivors of Hurricane Katrina, selfportraits and a return to still life, this exhibition provides an in-depth look at the work of a unique and significant American artist. This exhibition includes approximately 45 paintings on view in Fort Worth, and 45 sculptures and 20 related paintings and drawings on view in Dallas.