Category Archives: Art

Somebody Else’s Dream

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Life is too short to be living somebody else’s dream.”
― Hugh Hefner

Playboy Dallas Design District Dallas, Texas

Playboy Dallas
Design District
Dallas, Texas

Over the last year or so, the Dallas Design District has become one of my favorite destinations – especially for riding my bicycle.

Right off Riverfront, in the heart of the district, appeared a huge steel replica of the Playboy Bunny logo, alongside a black-painted muscle car on a tilted slab of concrete.

On group bike rides there was some snickering and snide snarky sermonizing about these incongruous objects. I, on the other hand, never really gave it much thought – except to get out my camera and take some snaps.

Today, I was surfing around this internet-thing, and stumbled across the story of the Playboy Marfa. The mystery was solved.

Marfa is this strangely cool West Texas town – half old-school West Texas ranchland, a throwback to the old wild west – and half postmodern hip art colony. A mix that doesn’t always agree – but somehow gets along to the betterment of both.

One thing that both groups don’t like at all is crass commercialism.

So when the Playboy Corporation rented some space and erected this faux-artistic giant steel advertisement the locals were appalled. They resented the use of their wilderness artistic tradition for advertisement. Everyone was up in arms, including the Texas Highway Overlords.

Playboy Marfa now moved to Big D Marfa, Texas

Playboy Marfa
now moved to Big D
Marfa, Texas

It didn’t take long for the site’s permit to get itself yanked – Playboy Marfa had to go. The locals were happy.

But, What is Art?

Luckily, there is Dallas. You see, Dallas doesn’t care about crass commercialism. The crasser, the better. As Dallas updates itself it is careful not to fully abandon its past – its history of tackiness, moneyed kitsch, and big everything. And I like it.

It is embodied in the phrase I’m starting to see – partially in response to the popular “Keep Austin Weird” campaign down I35 a few miles…
“Keep Dallas Pretentious”
…which is interesting on several levels – once you think about it and embrace it.

So Dallas gets a new sculpture – Playboy Marfa becomes Playboy Dallas (at least for as long as the exhibition lasts).

Good.

Design District, Dallas, Texas

Design District, Dallas, Texas

Design District Dallas, Texas

Design District
Dallas, Texas

Design District Dallas, Texas

Design District
Dallas, Texas

Jean-Michel Basquiat on the Wall of a Liquor Store

Posted on by Bill Chance

I was a really lousy artist as a kid. Too abstract expressionist; or I’d draw a big ram’s head, really messy. I’d never win painting contests. I remember losing to a guy who did a perfect Spiderman.
—-Jean-Michel Basquiat

This last weekend, I dragged myself out of bed… if not exactly very early, then rather earlier than later. I thought of what I needed to do with the rapidly slipping away day and I thought, “I need some miles and some photos.”

So I packed my camera into a handlebar bag and rode to the DART station – intending on taking the next train that pulled in, no matter which direction it was going. The Red Line came first, going south, so I headed downtown.

The day was warming quickly and I didn’t feel very good – so I wasn’t going to be able to get as many miles as I wanted. I rode to Klyde Warren Park and picked up something to eat from a Food Truck, read a book, and rested for a bit. Then I headed to Deep Ellum to see what I could see.

Sometimes, it’s important to be able to trust fate, to follow your nose and see where you end up.

As I crossed Ross I saw someone up on a ladder spray painting a mural on the back wall of a building. I’m a big fan of urban murals but have rarely been able to see one actually being made. The artist was working off a photoshopped photo of the site with the design, taped to the wall. I parked my bike and dug out my camera.

The mural was being painted by an artist from Denton, Eric Mancini. He said he was Velcro-ing some artworks to the building when the owner came out and told him he had been thinking about placing a mural there. Eric was glad to comply.

The mural was a stylized Technicolor portrait of Jean-Michel Basquiat. “You can tell by the hair,” Mancini said.

We chatted a bit about art, about Denton (“Denton has become what Austin thinks it is” – one of my favorite sayings), this and that. “I’ll finish this later today and then do one of my tree paintings on the rest of the wall,” he said. He needed to get painting and I needed to get some more miles so I packed up and rode off – he climbed back up his ladder.

Now, this weekend I’ll go back and take some photos of the finished work. More photos, more miles.

Eric Mancini painting a mural of Jean-Michel Basquiat Downtown Dallas, Texas

Eric Mancini painting a mural of Jean-Michel Basquiat
Downtown Dallas, Texas

Eric Mancini painting a mural of Jean-Michel Basquiat Downtown Dallas, Texas

Eric Mancini painting a mural of Jean-Michel Basquiat
Downtown Dallas, Texas

Design for an Eric Mancini mural of Jean-Michel Basquiat Downtown Dallas, Texas

Design for an Eric Mancini mural of Jean-Michel Basquiat
Downtown Dallas, Texas

Eric Mancini painting a mural of Jean-Michel Basquiat Downtown Dallas, Texas

Eric Mancini painting a mural of Jean-Michel Basquiat
Downtown Dallas, Texas

That I Might Touch That Cheek

Posted on by Bill Chance

“See how she leans her cheek upon her hand.
O, that I were a glove upon that hand
That I might touch that cheek!”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

Dallas Museum of Art

Dallas Museum of Art

“So she thoroughly taught him that one cannot take pleasure without giving pleasure, and that every gesture, every caress, every touch, every glance, every last bit of the body has its secret, which brings happiness to the person who knows how to wake it. She taught him that after a celebration of love the lovers should not part without admiring each other, without being conquered or having conquered, so that neither is bleak or glutted or has the bad feeling of being used or misused.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

Dallas Museum of Art

Dallas Museum of Art

“Touch. It is touch that is the deadliest enemy of chastity, loyalty, monogamy, gentility with its codes and conventions and restraints. By touch we are betrayed and betray others … an accidental brushing of shoulders or touching of hands … hands laid on shoulders in a gesture of comfort that lies like a thief, that takes, not gives, that wants, not offers, that awakes, not pacifies. When one flesh is waiting, there is electricity in the merest contact.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

Dallas Museum of Art

Dallas Museum of Art

Give Him A Mask And He’ll Tell You the Truth

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he’ll tell you the truth”
― Oscar Wilde

Mouth Mask Probably Depicting the Head of a Rooster Indonesia: Southeast Moluccas, Leti, Luhuleli 19th Century Wood, Boar Tusks, Clam Shell, Mother-of-Pearl, buffalo horn, resinous material, and pigment Dallas Museum of Art

Mouth Mask Probably Depicting the Head of a Rooster
Indonesia: Southeast Moluccas, Leti, Luhuleli
19th Century
Wood, Boar Tusks, Clam Shell, Mother-of-Pearl, buffalo horn, resinous material, and pigment
Dallas Museum of Art

Label Text:
Among the rarest of sculptures from the Southeast Moluccas are small masklike objects depicting the head of an animal. The dancer held the masklike object in his mouth by the tab extending from the back of the head. This type of object is thus sometimes referred to as a mouth mask. Only four mouth masks have survived, three of which are in European museum collections and represent pigs. This Dallas mask depicts a bird, probably a rooster. The sculptor imaginatively used boar tusks to create the white feathers that rise above the head and encircle the bird’s face.

Pig mouth masks are associated with a distinctive fertility ritual called porka, which encourages increase and abundance among human beings, animals, and vegetation. The bird mask shown here was used in a war dance that was performed by men and portrayed headhunting.

Very Poor and Very Beautiful

Posted on by Bill Chance

“I believe…that to be very poor and very beautiful is most probably a moral failure more than an artistic success.”
—-Raymond Chandler

Sculptured Composition 1953 Charles T. Williams Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

Sculptured Composition
1953
Charles T. Williams
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

The Midnight Miner In the Secret Seams

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Here, are the stiffening hills, here, the rich cargo
Congealed in the dark arteries,
Old veins
That hold Glamorgan’s blood.
The midnight miner in the secret seams,
Limb, life, and bread.

– Rhondda Valley”
― Mervyn Peake, Collected Poems

Lignite Mining Mural Fair Park Dallas, Texas

Lignite Mining
Mural
Fair Park
Dallas, Texas

One of my favorite things in Dallas are the little-known Art Deco Murals along the Esplanade in Fair Park. Half-restored, few people see them, although millions visit during the state fair. They are hidden by the porticoes along the row of buildings – you have to get up underneath to see them.

And you should.

Of Obedience, Faith, Adhesiveness

Posted on by Bill Chance

OF obedience, faith, adhesiveness;
As I stand aloof and look, there is to me something profoundly affecting in large masses of men, following the lead of those who do not believe in men.
—-Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 79 Thought

Adhesiveness (detail) David Hockney Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

Adhesiveness (detail)
David Hockney
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

Label Text:

David Hockney
British, born 1937

Adhesiveness, 1960
Oil on board
Museum purchase
When David Hockney painted Adhesiveness, he was concerned with creating works that reflected the lessons of modernist abstraction but also contained recognizable imagery. To this end, he began writing on his paintings, utilizing words, letters, and numerals as signposts to their content. This period of Hockney’s work is situated between the Expressionism of Francis Bacon and the emergence of Pop art, which Hockney would help pioneer in Europe and later in the United States.

Adhesiveness is an homage to the American poet Walt Whitman, who used the prenological term first to describe love among men and later to describe an ideal in which not only the States would be bonded, but the world at large could be unified. In the early 1960s Hockney began to allude to his homosexuality in his work, and the symbols he has included in Adhesiveness are clues to this aspect of his life. Whitman, too, was homosexual, and here Hockney borrows from the poet a childlike numeric code for initials, identifying one figure as himself (4.8 = D.H.) and the other as Whitman (23.23) – W.W.). Hockney created a number of compositions at this time that depict personal relationships (real or imaginary), a theme he has explored throughout his career and is now strongly associated with his art.

Forget What You Want To Remember

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that.
You forget some things, dont you?
Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Tom Wesselmann Mouth # 11, 1967 Dallas Museum of Art

Tom Wesselmann
Mouth # 11, 1967
Dallas Museum of Art

I have always loved this piece of modern art in the DMA. I remember it from when I first moved here thirty four years ago. I worked downtown and would walk over to the museum at lunch and look at this (and other, of course) work of art to help make the day bearable.

Those were the olden days, ancient history, when you could take a lunch and get a needed break – unlike today where lunch is something you gobble at your desk while answering emails.

There was this cool little gift shop across the street from my office – in the old building that has since been converted into the Joule hotel. They had a postcard of this painting. I bought it, no reason, I simply wanted to own the image so I could look at it whenever I wanted. The young redhaired shopgirl asked me as she slid the card into a thin paper bag, “Do you know where this is?”

“Of course,” I said. “I go over at lunch and stare at it.”

I have no idea what she thought of that. She didn’t say anything.

Fade Surprisingly Quickly

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

Mural, Fair Park Dallas, Texas

Mural, Fair Park
Dallas, Texas

I have always loved the Art Deco Murals along the Esplanade in Fair Park. I think they are among the many unappreciated public artworks in the city. The ones along the southern side have been beautifully restored.

However, the murals on the North Side – exposed to the southern sun – are very faded and in need of loving care (and very hard to photograph). I hope they get some, they are just as gorgeous as the others.

Mural, Fair Park Dallas, Texas

Mural, Fair Park
Dallas, Texas

Bird’s Building Its Own Nest

Posted on by Bill Chance

“There is some of the same fitness in a man’s building his own house that there is in a bird’s building its own nest. Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged? But alas! we do like cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built, and cheer no traveller with their chattering and unmusical notes. Shall we forever resign the pleasure of construction to the carpenter?”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Joan Miro Spanish, 1893-1983 Oiseau (Bird) 1968-81 Bronze Cullen Sculpture Garden, Houston, Texas

Joan Miro
Spanish, 1893-1983
Oiseau (Bird)
1968-81
Bronze
Cullen Sculpture Garden, Houston, Texas

One of the nice things about travelling to different places and looking at the art is finding the same sculpture in two settings.

What is even better is finding very similar sculptures by the same artist – compare and contrast. Two Miro birds, one in Houston, Oiseau, and one in Dallas, Moonbird.

(click to enlarge) Moonbird, Nasher Sculpture Center

(click to enlarge)
Moonbird, Nasher Sculpture Center