Back in October, a retrospective exhibition of my ceramic works called Out of the Floodwaters was featured in the Shore Gallery on the campus of Abilene Christian University. Some may be surprised to discover that I have been involved with clay over most of my lifetime.

I took a ceramics course for the first time in 1977 and fell in love with the medium. By the time I graduated I had an equal number of ceramic and painting courses and struggled to decide which of these disciplines I wanted to study in graduate school. I chose painting, thinking that would be the end of ceramics! Some years later when I was hired as a professor by ACU, I returned to making a few works in clay as a sideline–the university had all the necessary equipment and I needed no assistance to produce, glaze, and fire the works on my own. Then in 1992, our department lost its ceramics teacher during a reduction in faculty and I was asked to take over full responsibility for the ceramics curriculum alongside my duties teaching painting. I taught all of our ceramics courses between then and 2005. My good friend Kenny Jones was hired that year as a new faculty member, and since he had his own expertise in the area, he and I began to alternate semesters of teaching ceramics. Almost a decade later we began to hire adjuncts to teach these courses; still, I continued to teach a summer course in ceramics at least every other year. With the exception of a few scattered years, I made ceramic work pretty consistently through the years, always when I was teaching, though less so when not.

My ceramic work has never been featured on this website because the focus of the site was intended to be painting and a bit of drawing. That changes today–or at least for this blog post!

How this exhibition came about is a wonderful story, though that story is steeped in loss. This picture is a hint; so too the title of the exhibition, Out of the Floodwaters.

You can read the story in the Exhibition Statement

and see a selection of the works included in the exhibition in Floodwaters Survey

Just last month I worked with 12 talented artists in a two-day Palimpsest Workshop I taught at The Bonny Studio in Richardson, TX. Bonny Leibowitz, artist, owner, and operator of The Bonny Studio, invited me some time back to come do a workshop and my schedule finally opened up for the weekend of Jan 24-25.

The students arrived on Saturday morning with bags full of maps, floor plans, magazine pages, old photos and more to collage onto panels. We worked to find or create connections among the diverse materials, applied them to the panels and then painted another image or images atop the collage–in essence placing our text above other texts to establish a palimpsest. On Sunday afternoon participants got to share their works with each other and the results were impressive in quality and variety.

A whole series of pictures from the workshop have been posted at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/theencausticcenter/sets/72157648132490563/

Thought I would share one recent painting that was inspired by an ink drawing originating in Nanjing, China.

Waterfall Landscape Improvisation, acrylic on canvas, 54″ x 32″ ©

I came across the ink drawing in the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford, England) in 2010. I sat down nearby the work and made a rough sketch in pen, thinking that one day I might do something with it. When, this past spring, I started a painting based on that sketch, much of the concrete imagery that the sketch used to evoke in my memory was gone.  A bit curious as I prepared this post, I searched for an image of the work on the museum’s website and found that much had been lost in translation–and in the upheavals the painting went through as a resolution was sought. Nevertheless, what was missing would only have been hinted at via improvisation anyway; thus the painting retains the spirit of its inspiration while capturing the vision I had for its reemergence.

I received notification about a week ago that I am one of 109 finalists for the Hunting Art Prize. Darwin and the Beagle, a 36″ x 48″ acrylic painting on paper, was the work that placed me among the finalists.

The Hunting Art Prize is a prestigious annual competition open to established, emerging, and amateur artists throughout Texas. Hunting PLC, an international oil services company, sponsors the Hunting Art Prize, the “most generous annual award in North America for painting and drawing.” The 2012 winner of the $50,000 Hunting Art Prize will be announced at a gala held on April 28 in Houston.

Submissions to this year’s competition were assessed by a three-juror panel: Eric Crosby, Curatorial Assistant of Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota; Julien Robson, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia; and Claire Schneider, Independent Curator based in Scottsdale, Arizona and former Senior Curator of the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art.

This past spring I received a Cullen Grant in support of efforts to create a new body of paintings. The goal for this new series was work that evoked musical forms.

A little over a decade ago I collaborated with a pianist, Gustavo Toloso, in a public recital where I created works of art in response to his performance of Ginastera’s Twelve American Preludes. As each of the preludes was incredibly brief, I ended up treating my on-stage role as performance art–although 12 mixed media works were made and exhibited at the conclusion of the performance.

With this experience as a backdrop, I decided to return to music-inspired works, this time confining the visual character of my paintings to the language of maps. Having worked directly from piano compositions before, I changed the tactic. This time I would focus on musical forms: the organizational structures of types of music (e.g. the sonata form). The three paintings which appear with this post are the results of this inquiry. Each indicates the musical form in its title.

Two paintings completed earlier in 2011 have been added to the Artwork page.

Etude, 2011, acrylic on paper, 13,5″ x 48″ ©

Pastoral Sonata Fragment, 2011, acrylic on paper, 10.25″ x 36″ ©

Fugue, 2011, acrylic on paper, 10.25″ x 36″ ©

In May of 2010 Hilton Worldwide purchased Magellan’s Circumnavigation for its new corporate offices in McLean, Virginia. The new headquarters were opened to coincide with the rebranding of Hilton as the international hospitality company it had become, Hilton Worldwide. The selection of Magellan’s Circumnavigation was intended to reflect the corporation’s international scope and mission. The work was placed with Hilton Worldwide by Sheryl Fiegel of Art Specialists LC.

I recently completed a work (see below) inspired by Charles Darwin’s historic voyage on the HMS Beagle. History buffs are likely to recall that 2009 marked the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, a book whose conclusions are drawn directly from the observations made on this journey, which makes the subject of this painting timely. Besides that, recent events in the news bear striking resemblance to experiences Darwin, Fitzroy and crew had on their voyage. Chile’s earthquake this past spring, parallels one that happened during the 1837 voyage which caused much amazement and wonder because there was no loss of life from the quake or the tidal wave it spawned.

On a more personal note, it was my reading of Alan Moorehead’s Darwin and the Beagle that reignited an interest in mapmaking and eventually led to this series on journeys. My knowledge of this journey was more intimate; hence, this voyage occupied a privileged position in the series and demanded a different level of conviction. Its narrative features had to be stronger and more evocative. And like Darwin’s experiences, the painting had to come perilously close to sensory and conceptual overload.

Darwin and the Beagle, 2010, acrylic on paper, 36″ x 48″ ©

This work will be exhibited later this summer at Richard J. Demato Fine Arts Gallery in Sag Harbor, NY.