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
This go-round is the Tony Award winning play Red, by John Logan. It’s a two man play based on the artist Mark Rothko, set in Rothko’s studio in 1958, during the time he is working on a group of large murals for the new Four Seasons Restaurant in the Seagram Building in New York. Rothko and his fictional assistant, Ken, work and talk about art and life. The overarching conflict between the two is the very acceptance of the commission to decorate the walls of a restaurant frequented by the wealthiest people in the world. Rothko insists it is a subversive act, that he wants to paint, “something that will ruin the appetite of every son-of-a-bitch who ever eats in that room.” Ken counters that Rothko simply wants to feed his ego with the money and fame the prestigious commission offers.
At any rate, I was going alone, and went to catch the train downtown. Since I left from work, I felt underdressed – but that was fine; the crowd for “Pay What You Can” night was motley and wearing all sorts of styles at various levels.
I was interested in the staging of Red. King Lear is still running at the Wyly in the main stage above the lobby (the Wyly is revolutionary in its stacked structure – the lobby is at the bottom, the stage area above, with the support spaces higher up). For Red, they converted the rehearsal hall on the ninth floor into an artist’s studio.
While the patrons attending Lear were entering on the right side of the Lobby, we were divided into groups and sent up elevators to the ninth floor. The tickets had no seat assignments, so the crowd wandered around the edges of the studio, finding chairs lined against the wall on low risers. After I settled in, I noticed the actor playing Rothko silently sitting in a comfortable chair in the center of the room, staring and contemplating one of his in-progress color fields. Finally, the last patron came in looking around, looking lost – I noted his clothing was curiously dated… like something out of the fifties. Suddenly I realized that this was the actor playing the assistant, he spoke to Rothko, and the play began.
The play was simple – only two characters, one set, no intermission. Very intimate – you are there in the studio with the two characters. It was more intellectual than passionate – the only real moments of raw emotion was generated by Ken talking about the death of his parents… and that felt a bit forced. Still, it was enjoyable – the character of Rothko is a grand pompous bully – and a brilliant one. Ken was more of a blank canvass where Rothko would paint with his powerful personality and stubborn ideas, but Ken’s point of view somehow kept winning out in the end.
One highlight was a long, wordless passage where Rothko and Ken together slather the dark crimson undertone on a giant canvas, both working hard, slinging heavy brushfulls of paint in different sections of the wall-sized work, their breathing hard and passionate in the small space. To Rothko his paintings are living things… and he feels responsible for and concerned about their ultimate fate.
There is a lot of talk of the art of the time. It was fascinating how Rothko boasted of how he and the abstract expressionists dethroned Picasso and Matisse (“Nobody even thinks of painting cubism anymore, it’s dead”) and how Ken feels that Pop Art is now overthrowing Rothko.
Ken namedrops Warhol, Johns, Rauschenberg, and Lichtenstein – and Rothko asks, “Lichtenstein, who’s that?”
I was happy when, in my mind I thought, “Comic Books,” and then Ken says, “Comic Books.”
There is a lot of namedropping here, and it helps to know a thing or two about a thing or two – but not so much that it gets in the way of the entertainment.
After the play we rode the elevators back down to the lobby. It was full of patrons from King Lear, which was in intermission. They were all very nattily dressed, formal, seeing and being seen in that Dallas way while we cheapskates skittered away at the edges.
Outside, the glittering canyons of the city were shining at night while torn scraps of low cloud skimmed by overhead, illuminated by the lights below. It was beautiful and a bit of a shock – while the play was going on it was easy to think you were really in a dingy art studio and forget that you were really nine stories in the air in a huge aluminum cube-theater-machine.
Down Flora Street, between the hulking rows of the Arts District public edifices stood the Dallas Museum of Art. Inside, I knew, there was a Rothko painting. I’ve seen it before – but now I want to go back and stare at it for a while, watch it pulse, see it live, think about what the artist was thinking in that dark place where it was painted.
Mark Rothko, Orange, Red and Red, Dallas Museum of Art
Every year, in the spring, Dallas is host to the three day Deep Ellum Art Festival. We try to go every year. I like to refer to it as the Deep Ellum Festival of the Arts, Music, Food, and Bad Tattoos.
I wasn’t able to get down there on Friday or Saturday, but managed to carve out a couple hours around noon on Sunday. The sky started to spit on the ride down and the clouds off to the west were looking ominous, so I had to scurry through the throng a little faster than usual.
There were a lot of artists there – more than usual. I was a little disappointed, though. Usually the Deep Ellum Festival of the Arts, Music, Food, and Bad Tattoos has a healthy selection of oddball, interesting, and edgy art for sale – but it seems to have been taken over by the usual selection of folks that haunt springtime festivals all across the heartland. There is one sculptor that I look for and he was there with his usual flair (tomorrow’s entry) but otherwise, there wasn’t much to catch my eye for sale.
Now, as far as the folks walking around, that was another story. That was fun.
The festival stretches in a double line of canvas booths lining Main Street for about a mile. It is now growing down a handful of side streets too.
One nice thing about an arts festival is the chance to meet and talk to the artists themselves.
A wide variety of stuff is for sale.
There is a lot of food at the ends - Por Ejemplo - the King of Candy Apples
At each end of the main drag were large stages. This guy was drawing a band - though they had already finished.
Plenty of hipster doofuses to keep things lively.
This woman was waving a turkey leg out of her food trailer. When someone came up to buy one, she said, "Let me get you a fresh one hon, this is my demo model, I've been waving it out this window for hours."
A guy eating a turkey leg being stalked by a woman in a "Reality is a Prison" shirt.
Smaller musical stages were set up out on the end of the side streets.
An artist and his creation.
I really liked these little sculptures... but you'd have to by all of them to get the same effect.
I have been playing around with my camera. I want to try a technique – actually a set of techniques – to paint with light. These are not finished attempts, just preliminary studies to see what the possibilities are.
When I was a little kid I used to read Popular Science and Popular Mechanics like they were the word from God. There was an article where you would set a camera down in the dark, open the shutter, and swing a light over the top of it, making a pattern. It’s a lot easier now, with a digital camera, because you can see what comes out right away – instead of having to develop the film. You can play around.
A couple of test shots with a small flashlight hanging from a ceiling fan.
Working on adding a little color
Next, I want to go outside at night and experiment with “painting” on objects. I actually tried that, but my neighborhood has too much ambient light – plus all the dogs go nuts. I need to think about this a bit more.
Bill Chance 