Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
Well, there’s a lion… and a tree, and desert plants, and a stylized rose and a burning dove with a key on a rope and an arm and an eye and…. plenty to go around.
Yeah, right.
Deep Ellum Graffiti
Category Archives: Art
Free Rothko
I am very happy now that the Dallas Museum of Art has instituted free general admission to its public galleries. There is a qualitative difference when paying ten bucks to get into a museum as there is when it is gratis. It you shell out the bucks, you feel you have an obligation to get your money’s worth – to see and do and cram as much as possible into the experience. You are under pressure to enjoy yourself. With free admission you can wander in and out and have a relaxed and interested time.
When the museum first opened in downtown (moving from Fair Park) in 1983 I was working in the old (now long blown up to make room for the First Baptist Church’s Parking Garage) Cotton Exchange building, only a couple blocks from the museum. What I loved to do was to carve out an hour or so, maybe over lunch, maybe before I went home, and simply go to the museum and look at one single work of art. I’d plan it out ahead of time, choose a painting or sculpture, and then go stare at the crazy thing, and nothing else, for an hour. It was an amazing way to get to know a work – a lot different than a casual stroll through a gallery.
That’s not something you can do with a ten buck admission price.
So we were down there and I was interested in looking at the Rothko piece, Orange, Red and Red. I really enjoyed the play Red at the Wyly in February and wanted to see one of his paintings in the flesh, so to speak. During the play, the actors playing Rothko and his assistant actually splashed paint, the undercolor, covering a huge canvas. The people producing the play worked hard on getting the details right and partnered with the DMA – which made me thirst to lay my eyes on the real deal.
The problem was, I didn’t know where the Rothko was. It might have been up on the third level with the American paintings, but I didn’t see it there – it was too modern and abstract for that gallery anyway.
Later, we walked into a modern gallery off the Ross Avenue side of the museum and I thought for sure it would be in there – it fit in. But I couldn’t spot the thing so I walked up to a guard.
“Excuse me,” I asked, “Do you know where the Rothko is?”
“The Ronco?” he said.
“No, the Rothko… It’s a painting by Mark Rothko, they did a play… it’s an important… He was a painter in New York in like the fifties and sixties.”
The guard looked at me with a blank, confused look. “Maybe it’s in the American section.”
“I looked there and didn’t see it, but maybe I missed it.”
“Oh, and these paintings down here, in this gallery, they are all by female artists.”
He gave me a big, proud smile… he had found something he knew that I didn’t. I thanked him for his help and as I turned I looked over his shoulder and there, right there, behind and past him and out the entrance to the gallery, hanging on the wall of the big main spine corridor, was the Rothko. I couldn’t miss it.
So I took some time and stood there, not an hour… but at least a few minutes and looked at it. I could imagine the artist throwing down those rectangular fields of color and then staring at the work as it progressed… just like the guy in the play did.
It was pretty cool. And it was free.
Mark Rothko, Orange, Red and Red, Dallas Museum of Art
Harmonic Vivarium and Raleigh Technium
Art by Judith Lea Perkins – Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
Judith Lea Perkins by alexandra olivia, on Flickr
A Well Muscled Aztec Warrior
I remember, once upon a time, a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, having a conversation with a cow-orker about art. We were in a bullpen-style office, during a break, and talking about buying artworks, where to find affordable paintings, if affordable, original art was worth the cost for poor workin’ stiffs like us or if we were better off with prints or reproductions… that sort of thing.
All of a sudden, a voice broke in. It was from another worker, one that we never thought would be interested in the subject. He was a good guy, bright enough, but not from the city. You can take the boy out of the backwoods, but you can’t take the backwoods out of the boy. His voice was slightly garbled from the giant chaw of tobacco he had stuck in his lower lip.
He said, “Oh, I just bought an original painting, myself.”
We were a little stunned at this admission. After a few seconds, I regained my composure and asked, “Oh, what did you buy?”
He said, “A painting of a well muscled Aztec warrior on black velvet.”
Not that I have anything against black velvet paintings, but at that time I didn’t really consider them art.
In the intervening decades between who I was then and who I am now… I have changed my mind.
Graffiti in Deep Ellum. This warrior is nothing if not well-muscled… plus he is carrying off his prize of war.
Cathedonia
Along the walls near the Deep Ellum Green Line DART station are some odd, wonderful, and striking portraits, all marked Cathedonia.
These are the work of a local artist, Cathey Miller. She does a lot of varied work, including professional scene painting and such.
From her online bio:
Since 2001, the subject of my personal artwork has been the mythical planet of Cathedonia, a place I invented and populated with only my closest friends . My amateur studies in particle physics convinced me that I existed simultaneously in a parallel universe, flying around in a spaceship, drinking big gulps, and saving the earth from monsters.
My paintings are portrait based explorations into a symbol rich outer space environment. These images are painterly, colorful, and communicate Cathedonian ideals of truth, beauty, girl power, and heroism in the face of gigantic eagle headed flying intergalactic lobsters.
Bait and Chomp
In Dallas, Deep Ellum is known for many things and, high among these, is the public art. One man’s mural is another’s graffiti – but in Deep Ellum, colorful art rules the brick.
Yeah, right.
It has been that way for a long time. I remember going down there almost two decades ago and watching a group paint some monument-like panels erected under the highway. Each artist had a different stele to paint – all different sizes and shapes. I watched them work with jealous desire – wanting to paint something worthwhile but aware that I lacked the talent.
There was a tunnel where Good Latimer Expressway coursed below some railroad tracks which had been painted in a long string of bizarre panels. It raised quite a bit of concern when the tunnel was torn out and the street raised to ground level along where the DART station now sits.
The capstone of the old tunnel is used as a backrest for one of the Traveling Man sculptures.
Now there are as many murals as ever down there. Everything from strangeness to music and back.
Last weekend I took advantage of some surprisingly good weather to go on a long bike ride and one stretch took me through Deep Ellum. I had a compact camera in a little bag on my handlebars, so I stopped and took some shots of some of the murals. These are across from the Deep Ellum Dart station – oddly enough not far from where the old Good Latimer tunnel used to be.
So today, here are a couple works by Amber Campagna, “Bait” and “Chomp.”
“Bait” by Amber Campagna. The paint is falling off the wall – which makes it especially interesting in an odd way.
A little way farther down the wall is “Chomp”, also by Amber Campagna
Mysterious Hieroglyphics
In a hallway in the New Orleans Museum of Art I saw a pile of wooden crates. Obviously a new exhibit on its way in – the plywood was stenciled with a set of transportation-related symbols.
OK, there’s the “this end up” symbol – the “do not let this get wet” symbol – a “Fragile” symbol – but what’s up with the stencil of the guy? Does it mean, “May contain Winston Churchill”? Does it mean, “Dangerous Bags Under Eyes”? “Please notify the butler”? “The old man may be constipated”?
OK, I’m not stupid, I can figure out that the stencil probably means that the crate contains art. Still, who picked that symbol? Why is it important that everybody knows it contains art? Who is that guy anyway?
The museum has some great art – but I sort of enjoyed the hieroglyphics on the packing crates as much as anything.
If I had to guess, I’d think that the crates had at least part of an exhibit called “Lifelike” in them.
Red Jellyfish
Part of the preview (A Glimpse) into the Aurora project in the Arts District, Dallas, Texas. We saw these on the way to see The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity at the Wyly Theater.
”The gods of the earth and sea
Sought through nature to find this tree.
But their search was all in vain:
There grows one in the human brain.”William Blake – The Human Abstract
Mojo Cat
Mister Mojo Risin’……..
Well, I just got into town about an hour ago
Took a look around, see which way the wind blow
Where the little girls in their Hollywood bungalowsAre you a lucky little lady in The City of Light
Or just another lost angel…City of Night—-LA Woman, Doors, Wilson Smith
I sat for a long time in the Opening Bell coffee house in Southside, writing on my laptop. Next to me was a sculpture – an assemblage of various metal parts attached to an ancient wheeled golf bag carrier. A conical brass cymbal topped it off and intertwined with the junk were multicolored neon tubes, glowing and flickering invitingly.
It had a great warning sign, hand-lettered and attached to the artwork.
Mojo Cat
This is ART!
On the back of the warning sign was the title of the piece, MOJO CAT, a sketch of the work, and a link to Sasso Art To Go.
I see your hair is burnin’
Hills are filled with fire
If they say I never loved you
You know they are a liar
Drivin’ down your freeways
Midnight alleys roam
Cops in cars, the topless bars
Never saw a woman
So alone, so alone
So alone, so aloneMotel money murder madness
Let’s change the mood from glad to sadnessMister mojo risin’, mister mojo risin’
—-LA Woman, Doors, Wilson Smith
The Eyes of the Cat
Detail from Eyes of the Cat, by Moebius and Alejandro Jodorowsky
My last years of college and the first few out in the real world I was a bit of a fan of the magazine Heavy Metal (and of the original French version Métal Hurlant). As anyone of that time and space would, I especially enjoyed the work of the artist/illustrator Jean Giraud – better known as Moebius.
I was sad to see he passed away this year, at 73. I thought of him recently as I stumbled across some of his work on a favorite art blog, But Does it Float.
Recently, that blog had a post on a work I was not familiar with. It was a collaboration of Moebius with Alejandro Jodorowsky – among many, many, other things, a director of amazingly disturbing and odd films.
It’s called Les Yeux du Chat (The Eyes of the Cat) – and was their first comic together (I believe it’s from 1978). It’s a simple collection of wordless drawings, telling a horrific story about a man, his falcon, and an unfortunate cat.
Pretty disturbing, not for all tastes (not too good for a cat-lover, for example) – but it’s the sort of thing that you will like if you like that sort of thing.
It’s what I would do if I had the talent. Sorry.
The book is terribly expensive and very short – but through the magic of this interweb thing, you can see it here.
Detail from Eyes of the Cat, by Moebius and Alejandro Jodorowsky
Bill Chance 