Well Hello Lubbock!
Here I am back. I grew up just north of here in Amarillo, in the fifties. I came to Lubbock in 1965 to study Architecture, but ended up with a degree in painting and ceramics as part of Texas Tech’s very first BFA class, in 1970.
Growing up in Amarillo and here on the high plains, I remember the full circle of sky and the sun baking that bermuda grass that itched and stained my jeans. I remember the wind always with you or against you whistling through the weather stripping around the door. I remember it raining frogs. Yes, it did! I remember the hail, and the take cover sirens for tornadoes. I remember that damn hard, flat, Caprock pushing up against the rain so hard it chased down our streets curb to curb. We found homed toads and rubbed their almond bellies till they winked tears of blood. We collected cadres of cicada ghosts, their translucent shells split open up the back from the constant drone of their desire.
We had bikes with fat tires before it was cool. I remember the “duck and cover” A-bomb drills at Lamar Elementary school. Gasoline was $.19 a gallon (full serve)! I remember wives and mothers who wouldn’t smoke in the presence of their husbands. I remember Sunday morning Bible School and “Onward Christian Soldiers”. I remember the things we learned cruising Stanley’s Drive In. The loop around Polk Street was our mantra.
I came to Lubbock in 1965 to work on a college degree. Lubbock was a different place then. It was a dry county, which had nothing to do with the weather. There was no alcohol at all, unless you drove to the “strip” out on the Tahoka Highway. With a fake ID you could get drive through service for your cold beer. All the women students at Texas Tech, (yes! I said ALL) had to live in the dormitories and the dorms had strict hours. Every young lady had to be back in the dorm by 9:00 on weekdays, 12:00 on Fridays and 1:00 AM on Sundays. The front doors were closed tight and all the phones in their rooms were switched off between 9:00 and 10:30 for study hours. There was a brief window between 10:30 and 11:00 where we guys franticly dialed in, to try to get a date. At 11:00 PM sharp, the dorm phones were turned off for the night!! When you did get a date, you’d better behave when you brought her back to the dorm. You couldn’t touch each other in the dormitory lobby! If you did the dorm wing monitors would give your girl an O.D.A. (an obvious display of affection). The O.D.A. grounded her to the dorm for the next weekend. The late 60’s in Lubbock and at Tech were not the freewheeling scene that was going on in California the rest of the country with sex, drugs, and rock and roll. In Lubbock there was very discreet sex and some rock and roll.
I don’t know why but I always knew that I wanted to be an artist. I did paint china with my grandmother, Sis, before I can remember. Since I got an MFA from the University of Utah in 1972, I’ve lived the life of an itinerant professor making and teaching art from Florida to Montana, New York to California, through Oklahoma, and back here to Texas. I’ve been blessed with lots of gifts out there. I’ve been lucky. The hardest part has been learning to recognize and accept those gifts as they’ve come.
The environmental and cultural paradoxes physically manifested by the high plains of the Texas Panhandle have informed my work, although I recognize other more worldly influences also. There is this full boundless blue dome of sky completing a circular horizon pressed against that golden brown flatland. There are spectacular canyons carved into the earth like negative molds of mountains on their backs. I learned that form in West Texas is the palpable void. It is a void pregnant with the presence of changing winds and the siren song of the cicadas. In the art world, “formally” as we say, my work uses the cultural paradox between the physical, material world and the other, harder to define world, where we find beauty, quality, and meaning.
I have lived in San Antonio since 1988. I have a studio where I live and make my work in downtown San Antonio. I am a professor of Art/sculpture at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
The work in this show was made during the last 60 years. I picked it out to reference Lubbock and to work with the space here at the Underwood Center.
My work, over the years, reflects a need to invent and evolve. As an artist, I like to move through things and onto others and then come back through those original things again, in a new way. I was a ceramic sculptor for about ten years. In about 1980, I made the transition to using a number of media making sculpture, installations, and performances. My work has almost always been figurative in one-way or another. Readings over the years have run the gamut from the literal autobiographical to more universal ruminations on themes from the world of ideas.
I have always worked with my hands and my head, really in a sort of antique way. I usually don’t know where I am going or exactly what I am going to make until I establish some sort of dialog between my process or materials and my ideas or subject matter. I can’t really say that one comes before the other. In fact, when things are working best, I am really transported somewhere else doing something that I could never have imagined or planned.
During my career as an artist, I have made lots of different things out of different materials with different processes. I have made ceramic furniture, tools and life-sized figures. I have worked through ceramics and mixed media to installations, performance, and objects made from all kinds of stuff. There have been bears made of shoes and boots, deer made of roadmaps, automobiles from dictionary pages, houses from Bible pages and charcoal briquettes. There have been suits and dresses sewn from $1 bills, masks in bronze, hands in neon, ladders made into buildings, and cast iron feet.
I’ve been lucky. I’ve shown my work at some great places. I’ve met some amazing people, some of who are my good friends. I’ve had some terrific students, forty-two years of them. Many of them have gone on to be important artists and almost all of them are friends, too.
The friends, that is really the best part.
Thank you to Louise Hopkins Underwood, Linda Cullum, Maize Alford, Karen Wiley, Elec Winner, Hills Snyder, and all the staff and supporters of the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center.