Why Art:

 

When I was in college I read about an American woman who loved Russian novels so much, she learned and became fluent in Russian so she could enjoy these books in their original language. I was amazed and dumbfounded that anyone would go to that extreme. I thought, quite frankly, that there must be something obsessively wrong with her. Then I realized I had done the same thing.

 

When I was five or six years old I became absolutely fascinated by a colorful non-representational painting a friend of my mother’s had done. I looked at that painting over and over again and became somewhat obsessed by the way color could be used to express thought and emotion. I decided I wanted to learn that language, the language of color, to help me express myself in life. That’s why I became an artist.

 

Past Art:

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My first and primary art teacher was a woman named Myra Green, who lived in Jackson, Mississippi, where I was raised. She was largely a portrait painter and that influence led me to working with the figure. I greatly admired the work of Francis Bacon and the figurative work of Willem de Kooning. I worked with the figure for the first 30 or so years of my career.

 

I write that to say that in my career I have been dedicated and prolific, but that type of art was what I did then and it is not what I do anymore.

 

 

Being born again into color:

 

When I began to mature in my knowledge of Christianity I got baptized. I went into the water one person and came out another. It was wonderful to be reborn, but it posed a dilemma for me and my artistic choices. I wasn't sure what kind of art to make any more. Although it took me a year to decide how I would continue, when my ideas “hit,” everything made sense.

 

God reminded me why he had called me in the first place – to speak through the language of color. Color, like sound, taste and smell is a gift to Humanity from God. We take color for granted, thinking it is our birth-right, but it is not. Color helps humanity accomplish a lot of tasks, but it also gives us aesthetic satisfaction. Reminding people of this beauty through my work would educate the public, satisfy me and please God.

 

There is no artistic need other than seeking Beauty:

 

The most important aspect of my art work is choosing color combinations that are beautiful. Beauty is what artists have strived for throughout most of history. When the printing-press and camera were developed artists began to lose confidence in their artistic calling and replaced their aesthetics with art work based in social commentary and politics.

 

My generation of artists were raised to believe you had to make a statement about society to be relevant. That was a lie back then, but today that concept is totally irrelevant. With 24 hour television news, radio and Internet, there is no need for visual artists to inform the public on social and political concerns.

 

That leaves two serious avenues of artistic pursuit. One is to experiment with new media. Oil paint was at one time considered “new media.” The enjoyment of research, development and investigation has always been a creative test for artists. The other avenue is aesthetics -- the pursuit of beauty. I chose this.

 

The Reason for Weaving:

 

When I came out of the water I decided that painting and sculpture were too closely connected to my past life to continue doing for my personal artistic expression. There is nothing wrong with painting and sculpture. I taught both for 26 years in college and loved teaching them, but I was concerned that I would not continue to mature in Christ if I still used the same tools and methods as before.

 

I recalled how much I loved the weaving course I took as a freshman in undergraduate school at the Memphis Academy of Art in Tennessee. I loved it so much I thought about changing my major to it, but it was a very expensive major and I couldn’t see dragging a huge loom around with me as I traveled through life.  

 

So, after I was baptized, I made a small loom out of wood and began weaving with yarn. Of course I had forgotten everything I had learned in school, so the simplest and easiest way of weaving was what I did. I made weaving after weaving, after weaving, after weaving, after weaving, after weaving, after weaving, after weaving trying this and that along the way and being driven primarily by the desire to show how beautiful color combinations could be.

 

I wove for about three years without giving any consideration to showing the weavings to anyone, much less marketing them. It just became a part of my life, part of my weekly routine, part of what I expected myself to do.

 

Eventually I asked myself where this might lead, the answer that came immediately was to let God direct me when the time was right. So I didn’t worry about it even as the number of weavings began to pile up and storing them became a legitimate problem. Yet, I never once thought about stopping.

 

Showing my artwork:

 

Although I showed a couple of my weavings a few times in group exhibitions at Northwest Vista College where I used to work, I asked the faculty one day if I could have a one-person show. It surprised me that I made such a major request. It was like an outer-body experience --- what was I committing myself to? The exhibition space was huge and my work was small. It would require a minimum of 40 or more pieces of art, but I had them and I realized this was the moment. It was God telling me the time had come to start showing my work again.

 

The exhibition was a huge success in its presentation, but it also revealed to me how to use this opportunity to contact other people and venues. I used the Northwest Vista College show to advertise my work and before that show came down, I managed to secure two more one-person shows and two group shows.

 

Covid:

 

Shortly after that, the Covid Virus hit right in the middle of a show I was having in the Bandera County Library and seriously delayed ALL the other shows I had scheduled for the future with some being cancelled altogether. 

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I don't want to minimize the world-wide effects the virus had, but, for me, several very positive things came from it. First, my wife and I got Covid, and two weeks later -- got over Covid. Secondly, my wife and I started teaching remotely from our home. And, I was able to continue showing my weavings in several brick and mortar galleries as well as an abundance of "virtual shows" in galleries and cities which I never would have been able to do otherwise.

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Retiring as a Teacher:

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About 5 years after becoming a full-time Art Instructor my wife and I decided to buy a house in Ruidoso, New Mexico. We traveled there in the Summer time and lived peaceful, quiet lives in the cool pines of the mountains, loving every minute of this opportunity.

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In 2021, partially because of the confusion Covid had placed on the working conditions at school, we decided we wanted to make Ruidoso our permanent home, and not return to teaching. That was not a difficult decision. As much as I loved teaching, it was something I had dedicated the past 26 years of my life to, and it was time to have a different adventure.

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How Weaving Works and What I did With it:

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When people hear the term "Weaving" they have a pretty accurate view of what it is and how it works. They know the artist has a structure upon which to work, called a "loom." The loom has strings tied to it going up and down called the "Warp." The artist uses thread to "weave" through the warp, traditionally in an over one warp string, under the next warp string, over the next warp string, under the next warp string, etc. That's the basics. A weaver can do anything he or she likes, but the procedure I just described is the core of all weaving. 

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In the beginning my goal with weaving, aside from making aesthetically pleasing work, was to constantly experiment --- What happens if I do this? What happens if I do that? The only thing I didn't do was copy or imitate native American weaving.  I wanted to achieve a "modern look." something no one had ever seen before. I believe I accomplished that goal.

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The problem is that just because one has made highly creative and experimental work, doesn't mean it is good. Most of what I did during the first three years looked like I was trying too hard to be different. A lot of it was disjointed, confusing and lacked direction. The presentation was also poor. I was cutting-up wooden boards to make them look primitive and gluing the weavings onto the wood.

 

Nevertheless, I still liked them and I got a lot of positive responses. The most frequent negative response was that they were too small (14 inches tall by 9 inches wide). Gallery owners told me their clients didn't buy art that small and the profit margin was too low.

 

I saw their point, so I began working on the presentation and the size. The weavings retained the same look and size, but I increased the size of the frame around them to 24 inches tall by 12 inches wide. I stopped putting the weavings on crude wood and instead created a framed background that was much more sophisticated. Then at the bottom of the frame I created an entirely new work of art consisting of a collage of different shaped wood and objects I had found here and there. I matched the look of the collage with the weaving so that they had a visual connection. 

 

I loved doing that. It kept my creative needs at a very high level. It challenged my aesthetics and it added a great deal more fun to the aspect of making art. I worked like this for several years. When I had shows, this was the work I put on display. I stopped showing the older work altogether.

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As stated, I had been experimenting with all sorts of different materials, but the thread itself was mostly medium to thick yarn. When I tried crochet thread I was very pleased. It is much thinner than yarn and so the lines and shapes I was making in my weavings became much tighter and less clumsy. They had a controlled appearance that I relished.

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The clean look of crochet thread made such an impression on me that I decided to make weavings with just that material and tone down the experimentation. I stopped relying on combinations of shapes (crosses, diagonals, triangles, etc. that would become established randomly in the picture) and just wove from the far left of the warp to the far right and back again. This would create long rectangles of color(s) next to each other relying on the temperature of the color or it's value (the relative lightness or darkness of the color) to separate the two.

 

 

 

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