Tag Archives: Art

Their Great Horns Also Seemed To Attract Electricity

Posted on by Bill Chance

“When the longhorns could be gathered up and driven, it was theorized that the heat from the herd’s mass attracted lightning. (Such was the radiant heat from a large herd that a cowboy’s face would be blistered on whichever side of the herd he’d ridden by the day’s end.) Their great horns also seemed to attract electricity, so that lightning and ground-electricity would bounce around from horn to horn throughout the herd – a phantasmagoric burning blue circuitry. The cracking of the cowboy’s whips and the twitching of the cattle’s tails also emitted sparkling “snakes of fire.”
― Rick Bass, The New Wolves: The Return of the Mexican Wolf to the American Southwest

Richardson, Texas

 

I Could Dance With You Till the Cows Come Home

Posted on by Bill Chance

“I could dance with you till the cows come home. Better still, I’ll dance with the cows and you come home.”
― Groucho Marx, Duck Soup

Italy, Texas

There is something odd about seeing a movie at nine o’clock in the morning. Especially when it ends and you walk out into the sun… and realize that most of the day is still to come.

I’m glad that everyone has been good about not saying or posting spoilers for Avengers Endgame – though the movie played out pretty much exactly as I thought it would.

Certain Combinations Of Wheels

Posted on by Bill Chance

“The glance of women resembles certain combinations of wheels, which are tranquil in appearance yet formidable. You pass close to them every day, peaceably and with impunity, and without a suspicion of anything. A moment arrives when you forget that the thing is there. You go and come, dream, speak, laugh. All at once you feel yourself clutched; all is over. The wheels hold you fast, the glance has ensnared you. It has caught you, no matter where or how, by some portion of your thought which is fluttering loose, by some distraction which had attacked you. You are lost. The whole of you passes into it. A chain of mysterious forces takes possession of you. You struggle in vain; no more human succor is possible. You go on falling from gearing to gearing, from agony to agony, from torture to torture, you, your mind, your fortune, your future, your soul; and, according to whether you are in the power of a wicked creature, or of a noble heart, you will not escape from this terrifying machine otherwise than disfigured with shame, or transfigured by passion.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

2527 King, Dallas, Texas

Live Out Loud

Posted on by Bill Chance

“If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.”
― Émile Zola

 

Mural, Dan Colcer, Bowls and Tacos, Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas

Dan Colcer – Fine Art

A Brooding Peace

Posted on by Bill Chance
“In his face there came to be a brooding peace that is seen most often in the faces of the very sorrowful or the very wise. But still he wandered through the streets of the town, always silent and alone.”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Ellis County Courthouse, Waxahatche, Texas

Patches Of Godlight

Posted on by Bill Chance
“Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy. These pure and spontaneous pleasures are ‘patches of Godlight’ in the woods of our experience.”
― C.S. Lewis

Fabrication Yard, Dallas, Texas

It’s not a gentle woodland breeze wafting the smells of nature – it’s the sour bite of drying spray paint. Not the rustle of a leaved canopy – it’s the pulsing of a rap song from a nearby video shoot. Not a copse of ancient forest – but an abandoned set of corrugated steel shacks covered with crude graffiti.

But still the sun splashes. The same sun.

Your Opponent Is You

Posted on by Bill Chance
“I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing-for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell and again and you and your opponent so evenly matched it’s impossible to see your opponent is you …”
― Joyce Carol Oates, On Boxing

Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas

I Didn’t Want To Be A Novelist

Posted on by Bill Chance

I knew that I wanted to be an artist and it started out as a solution to making work at the beginning. I was a literature student, but I knew very well that I didn’t want to be a novelist.

—-Mai-Thu Perret

from Sightings, by Mai-Thu Perret, 2016, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas

You’re Not In Tejas By Accident

Posted on by Bill Chance
“And here …” Now the orange became Tejas: “In the middle of this mess, Tejas, Spanish to the core, God’s bastion, just as in Europe.” He patted the orange, reveling in its security, and said: “God arranges these things according to His grand design. Believe me, Trinidad, Tejas is not where it is by accident. And you’re not in Tejas by accident. Your destiny is to rear Spanish sons who will build there cities much finer than New Orleans.”
― James A. Michener, Texas

Four Corner’s Brewing, Dallas, Texas

I Don’t Understand How It Subtracts

Posted on by Bill Chance

“I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. Then he says “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is … I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.”
― Richard P. Feynman

Mural by Sour Grapes Crew (detail) Oak Cliff, Dallas, Texas (taken from Dallas Streetcar window)