Well Howdy! Here I am back, never thought I would be. I grew up here in the fifties. I left in 1965. Some things are different here and some are the same. You’ll probably think that about me too. I remember the sky and the sun baking that bermuda grass that itched and stained my jeans. I remember the wind always with or against you whistling through the weather stripping around the door. I remember it raining frogs, and the hail, and the take cover sirens for tornadoes. I remember that damn hard caprock, flat, 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 saw the first TV in Amarillo from a perch on my father’s shoulder through a crowd at our auto dealership. I remember the first Pizza Hut, the first mall, and the first freeway as it thundered past my grandparent’s home. We called them expressways then. There was big time wrestling, yellow meated watermelon, and lots of hair. The boys had ducktails and the girls had bubbles. There were two Amarillos back then, black and white. My friend Boomer bought our beer on the west side. We had tail fins on our cars. We watched John Kennedy’s death endlessly on the television. Elvis and Buddy got pushed aside by the Beatles on eight track tapes. Viet Nam was up next.
I left in 1965 to work on an Art degree. I don’t know why but I always knew that I wanted to be an artist. I never was sure what they did. I got a couple of clues from Life magazine.
And to tell you the truth, I guess it’s still changing for me. I did paint china with my grandmother, Sis, before I can remember. Since I left 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.
I now live in San Antonio. I have a studio where I make my work in an old warehouse in downtown San Antonio. I run a modest exhibition space there too, for the art of our time, called Rrose Amarillo. I named it to reference growing up with you and after some other folks you may have heard of. Marcel Duchamp and Emily Morgan. I am also a professor of sculpture and chair of the graduate committee at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
The environmental and cultural paradoxes of growing up here have informed this work, although I recognize other more worldly influences too. Your full boundless sky with circular horizon presses against that hard flat caprock earth. Your 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’s a void pregnant with the presence of changing winds and the story sung by the siren cicadas. In the art world, “formally” as we say, my work uses the cultural paradox between the material world and where we find meaning.
The work in this show was made during the last 12 years. I picked it out to reference Amarillo and to work with the museums spaces here. There’s a tumbling neighborhood of Bible houses called “Block”. Probably, real houses of faith and facades over the truth. I like to think of the car “Ford” as a verb. It’s fording the deluge of knowledge and communication through the dictionary’s alphabetical grid of words. “Buck” and “Doe” could be angels from the bank, flying or falling through their wealth without heart nor face.
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Tiny cast iron baby’s feet could be taking their first steps towards the future in a world defined by conscious action in Victory and Defeat. In The Wheel of Desire, the hands may be twirling through the glow of desire, longing, and loss.
I’ve used these sculptures in other exhibitions and combinations before. In 1995 some of them were in an exhibition at Linda Pace’s place here in San Antonio. She started this place here, ArtPace, as an international artists in residency program. I was chosen to put up a piece I called “Soaring, the Rules of Engagement.” While the show was up my friends, Ed and Linda Blackburn from Fort Worth visited. Ed, also known as Eddie Leon, the “art sleuth”, is an Amarillo boy also. He knows what its like to live here and to be from Amarillo. I knew him by reputation long before we got a chance to meet. He’s an amazing artist and a superb friend. So anyway, Ed wrote me this letter, and its just too right not to share. Coming Around the Bend talks about that installation and this work too. Thanks Ed.