Hunting Prize 2015 Finalists

Robert Boyd

Hey, buckaroos, it's Hunting Prize time again, and they have uploaded photos of all the finalists to Facebook. In the past, Hunting has had controversy because of its prohibition of any art that anyone might possibly find offensive. A lesser controversy, but one that bubbles up most years, is that it seems to discriminate against abstract painting (although that complaint surely was silenced by last year's winner, Winston Lee Mascarenhas). But lending credence to this theory is that with this year's finalists, abstract paintings are vastly outnumbered by figurative paintings. That said, we don't know what the general pool of entrants was. Maybe this ratio of figurative to abstract among the finalists reflects what they received from artists entering the contest. Without more knowledge of the first round entrants and of the criteria by which they were judged, I am reluctant to say that the Hunting judges have a bias against abstract painting per se.

Below are a few pictures that caught my eye. Many of these works are by artists I already admire a lot, but the pieces that intrigue me most are the ones by people I've never heard of or are, at best, only slightly familiar with. I love coming across work like that, which is why I like open-call events like the Hunting Prize and the Big Show.


Alice Leora Briggs, Puesto, 2014, sgraffito drawing with acrylic ink and gesso on panel diptych: each panel 18 x 24 inches

Dean Liscum reviewed Alice Leora Briggs' work back in 2012.


Fernando Ramirez, Clouds

I haven't seen that many Fernando Ramirez pieces, but I have liked all the ones I have seen. They have a fearful edge that reminds me a bit of artists as diverse as Vince Locke and Brian Chippendale. But will the Hunting judges go for art that looks like it could serve as the cover of a death metal album? I doubt it, but who knows?



Gina Gwen Palacios, Abel's Lot, 2014, Oil on pane,l 37" x 36"

I was completely unfamiliar with Gina Gwen Palacios, but I liked the way the bleak landscape Abel's Lot collapses in the middle. It suggests sudden violence in a small town, like in a novel by Jim Thompson or Cormac McCarthy.



Harvey Johnson, Didn't It Rain

I'm glad I saw this Harvey Johnson image because it reminds me I need to take a road trip to Beaumont to see Harvey Johnson: A Triple Middle Passage at AMSET. His work is always great. (Why do we have to go to Beaumont to see solo museum exhibits by so many Houston artists?)


 Heather Bause, Honeycomb

I was surprised to learn that this drippy painterly abstraction is by Heather Bause, whose previous work has been pretty hard-edge in my experience.But looking at her recent work on her website shows that this is a direction she's moved into, and I have to say I like it a lot.


Jimmy Houston, Trailblazer

Every now and then I will see a piece by Jimmy Houston in a group show or during Art Crawl. But his work is generally not the kind of work you see in local galleries--illustrational, cartoony, "low brow," etc. But I like his work quite a bit and this particular Disney-crossed-with-steampunk image tickled me. Sure it's illustrational--and I like good illustrations.


Laura Lark, Arena

This is an unusual Laura Lark piece. If done using her typical stipple technique, it must have been rather tedious to create--it's so dark and dense.  I can't tell if it's a collage or if she just drew the male hand projecting from the woman's chest, but that combined with the darkness of the image and the bad surveillance photo quality give Arena a slightly sinister feeling.


Lindy Chambers, Party Animals

I loved Lindy Chambers' use of bold flat colors with clean outlines in Party Animals--it's like a cross between Patrick Caulfield and Hergé. She recently had a show at d.m. allison, which I liked but which also seemed a little heavy on the surreal/pop elements. By eschewing that stuff, this painting is much stronger. It's my favorite of all the finalists for the Hunting.


Matt Messinger, Sperm Whale

I have a silk-screen of three sperm whales by Matt Messinger printed on ledger paper from Dean's Easy Credit (which Messinger presumably acquired from Jim Pirtle). In my print, the whales are the usual black variety, but in this painting he goes for a singular white whale, perhaps a descendent from Moby Dick himself.


Mira Hnatyshyn, Mortal Immortal

I'm not sure what it is about these two monks (?) and their fans that appeals to me. It seems quite a bit different than the work I saw in Mira Hnatyshyn's studio in San Antonio a few years back.  Her work generally reminds me a bit of Larry Rivers--but not this elegant piece.


Seth Alverson, Useless Foot

This is the kind of grotesque work we've come to expect from Seth Alverson. But I also wonder if it's an homage to the foot paintings of his friend (and previous Hunting Prize winner) Lane Hagood. Whatever its inspiration, it's one damn ugly thing. I can't turn away. I love it. (I should disclose that I own a painting by Alverson.)


Terry Crump, Savannah Bridge

A few years ago, I saw a painting by Terry Crump at the Big Show at Lawndale that I really liked. With his splashy, non-local pastel colors, his work feels like the lite-beer version of Matisse. I guess that at best sounds like I'm damning it with faint praise, but I like Savannah Bridge a lot. It's pretty, and while sometimes I love ugly (as mentioned above), pretty's OK with me, too. "Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

There's much more. Check out Hunting's Facebook page to see them all.

Heather Bause Tests Your IQ

by Robert Boyd

Don't worry. Heather Bause's IQ test is pretty easy. In fact, it's not even her test. It's the Stanford-Binet test, an IQ test designed for children with the intent of slotting slow or retarded children into special education (it was also used for Army inductees). The test was created in 1916 and has remained in use to the present day. According to Bause, HISD uses a version of the test, but they keep it secret so that upper-middle-class parents won't send their kids to some kind of Stanford-Binet cram school to gain an advantage on the test. You can buy the modern version of the test online. The test has been an important part of society for many decades. It has had to be updated to reflect cultural changes and to be more sensitive (initially, a person with an IQ less than 20 was called an "idiot"; from 20 to 49, an "imbecile"; and from 50 to 69, a "moron").

Cultural bias has remained a sticking point, as has the definition of intelligence and the notion that intelligence can be measured on a one-dimensional scale. The sheer determinism of the test, putting children in advanced, medium and special ed tracks when they are in first or second grade, has been controversial. Even Binet didn't think it was the best way to judge children's intelligence. But he thought the test was necessary because universal education meant the need to evaluate millions of children every year, which meant that a one-size-fits-all evaluation was required, if not ideal.


Heather Bause, Doublemint Twins, latex on canvas, 36 x 48 inch diptych, 2011

Bause has taken illustrations form the test (presumably an old edition, because they seem quite dated) and blown them up. Her colors are very flat and poster-like. Some, like Doublemint Twins, feature an illustration where the associated question on the test is not particularly obvious. Others seem to be illustrations for the question: "What's wrong with this picture?"


Heather Bause, Windy Trees, latex on canvas, 36 x 36 inches, 2011

In Windy Trees, Bause has colored part of the canvas and left part white. The original illustrations were black and white line drawings. The uncolored part illustrates what the test taker is supposed to notice. Can you see what's wrong with this picture?


Heather Bause, Troubled Bike, latex on canvas, 23 x 36 inches, 2011

Likewise with Troubled Bike, the problem with the picture is in the uncolored part.

Looking at these, I assume that Bause has strong feelings about Stanford-Binet. But the work doesn't give you much clue what those feelings are. In a sense, by turning these ultra-generic illustrations into hand-made, one-of-a-kind paintings, she is valorizing them. It seems like a typical pop art strategy, one usually drenched with irony. But this isn't Campbell's Soup--Stanford-Binet is a major piece of 20th-century social engineering. It hardly seems possible that an artist or any thinking person could be indifferent to it.

If her meaning is political, then one wonders why she made paintings of them in the first place. These images are perversely attractive. They have a poster-like directness. So why not just make posters? Why are they paintings in the first place?

These are the questions that went through my head as I looked at this show, questions I don't really have an answer for. So maybe I'm not passing Heather Bause's IQ test after all.

Heather Bause's The Stanford-Binet: The Modern Authority on Identifying Intellectually Deficient Children is on view at the Darke Gallery through March 10.

Bause does bathrooms

by Dean Liscum

Generally, I don't post pictures that I take in public restrooms...at least not on this blog. For Heather Bause's show Wall Paper: As Art / if you sprinkle when you tinkle in the Art League's Main Gallery restroom, I'll make an exception.

The history of wallpaper is almost as old as paper itself. However, it didn't get industrial, and thus affordable for the masses, i.e., popular, until the advent of the printing press. In 1481 Louis XI hired Jean Bourdichon to paint 50 rolls of paper that he could use to decorate the walls as he moved from castle to castle.

...on the bathroom stall door

Heather Bause's art as wall paper derives its pedigree from Bourdichon and not the printing press. With Linda Darke of Darke | gallery playing the role of Louis XI, Bause spent three weeks going up and down a ladder and drawing\hand-painting thousands of images of a single Damask pattern.

close-up from the Main Gallery bathroom

The installation also references other artistic endeavors involving walls and paper and restrooms as noted by the Art League's description of the show on their website.

This innovative installation references the 1920's tradition adopted by many art museums of displaying hand drawn wallpaper in public restrooms as a way of creating a nontraditional creative environment, as well as the iconic series of custom-made wallpaper art installations known as Room Art created by noted artists such as Andy Warhol, John Baldessari and Sol Lewitt.

wall and vanity
(picture courtesy of Jennifer Ash
of the Art League Houston)

But what engages me is not the references. It's the repetition: image after image after image. Here a precisely limned leaf. There a florid, curving stem, blurry and paint-smeared. Here a tightly tempered tip. There a wobbly curve, oblique, the center not holding, the bristles gone berserk. The comparisons can be mesmerizing,

...too mesmerizing as a polite cough attempts to get my attention so that I'll notice that the owner of the cough is waiting to use the restroom

...and not enough as that person frowns when I say, "don't mind me. I've got plenty to look at here." 

The Big Show 2011, part 1--Retina Burn

Lawndale's The Big Show is always difficult to write about. It is, inevitably, a visual cacophony. There are 121 artworks in the show by 73 artists. It is impossible for a show like this to coalesce into unified whole. (That's always one of the complaints about the Whitney Biennial.)  The Big Show is always diffuse--the only thing one can say from year to year is that its diffusion takes a particular form (even if that form is complete randomness). This year, it's not random. The show is spinning on an axis and throwing off bits that are far from the axis, but the axis itself is pretty identifiable. The Big Show 2011 pays a lot of attention to large, colorful painting. So how could this happen given the diversity of work submitted? There is a selection of art to choose from (self-selected by the participating artists) and then a curatorial selection from this group. The curator can pick a certain direction, but she is limited by what pieces have been submitted. Given some of the shows curator Larissa Harris has curated at Queens, I don't see a predilection for paintings or bright colors, although she does seem to like "big." So one has to conclude that this year, Houston's paint-slingers submitted a lot of work.


John Earles, Everything We Know Traced in Lines of Lipstick and Fiber Optics, acrylic on canvas, 2011

John Earles has two large colorful paintings in the show, including the 12-feet-wide Everything We Know Traced in Lines of Lipstick and Fiber Optics. That work has a bit of a James Rosenquist vibe to it.


John Earles, I Laughed Until My Head Fell Off, acrylic on canvas, 2011

And in general, the work is shiny and plastic. I don't mean that in a bad way. The hard-edge style of painting, the fragmented incomprehensible objects, the flat planes of color; these qualities signify signify "modern" now just as much as they did when James Rosenquist pioneered this approach. Perhaps at some point in the future, this look will start to seem old-fashioned or nostalgic. For me, it hasn't gotten there yet.


Julon Pinkston, Kermi, acrylic on canvas panel, 2010

Lone Star College Kingwood instructor Julon Pinkston employs a similar approach. The difference is that his objects are a little more recognizable (they are trashed pieces of plastic) and he leaves parts of his canvases white. The white ground visually pushes both the objects and the flat-colored shapes forward. There is a real punch to these compositions.


Julon Pinkston, Circle Game, acrylic on canvas panel, 2010

Not every large painting has a bunch of bright colors. Heather Bause's My Little Pony (Red) has only three colors, but has as much if not more visual intensity as the previous four paintings.


Heather Bause, My Little Pony (Red), acrylic on canvas, 2011

This image comes from the Stanford Binet intelligence test for children. It was a test originally developed shortly after the turn of the last century, but still in use (after many revisions) today. Variations of the test have been used to determine whether incoming soldiers were officer material. Blowing up this image from an earlier version of the test reminds one of the cultural and class biases it contained. Other images, with their middle-class domestic scenes, seem even more biased. That said, a test like this has to measure intelligence within the context of the dominant culture because those taking the test will exist within that culture to some degree or another. Blowing up this card turns it into a striking, poster-like image. It's generic quality belies its somewhat scary bureaucratic social engineering origins.


Brian Keith Gardner, The Unicorn, mixed media on canvas, 2011

Brian Keith Gardner's The Unicorn takes a more-or-less abstract pattern of colors, then overlays it with black-and-white drawing. The drawing is a comic strip detailing the last bout of a masked wrestler called The Unicorn. The panels of the comic strip are roughly square, and they have little intrusions/extrusions that make them look a bit like jigsaw puzzle pieces. Some of the panels are painted over in white, but even with the blank panels, the story is clear. The Unicorn ends his career fighting a wrestler who is unusually violent--he literally beheads the Unicorn in the ring, to the mindless cheers of the audience.


Brian Keith Gardner, The Unicorn detail, mixed media on canvas, 2011

There are various avenues for crossing comics with contemporary art. In this case Gardner has created an actual comic strip and put it into a painting. But the comic he has created is deliberately crude and stupid. He's neither aiming for the soulless slickness of modern super-hero comics nor for the sophisticated expression of a Chris Ware or Lynda Barry. From within the world of comics, this seems closest to Johnny Ryan, who gleefully employs a kind of adolescent expression. Within the art world, a comparison could be made to Paper Rad.


Hogan Kimbrell, Athlete, oil on canvas, 2011

Amusingly, Hogan Kimbrell's realistic (if somewhat idealized) wrestlers were displayed right next to Gardner's ultraviolent wrestling fantasy. It seems exactly the opposite of Gardner's painting in all other respects, except that a comics connection can be made here--the outlined figures and flat, poster-like colors resemble comics (at least comics before Photoshop was invented). But mostly it seems like a poster--putting the figures against a white ground does that. One can imagine bold typography added--"London Olympics 2012."


Tanya Vaughn, Hurrah!, mixed media, acrylic, stain, pint pen, 2011

U.H. art student Tanya Vaughn's painting is basically a political cartoon. It has an easy irony that simplifies a lot of real world things (as political cartoons tend to do).Vaughn is portraying the celebratory mood following the assassination of Bin Laden as hopelessly naive, as exemplified by the statement "Terrorism is Over Now" and the children celebrating. The fact that the children are depicted in an illustrational style that recalls childrens books from the 1950s reinforces the naivete.

Not all the large, colorful canvases come out of a pop or cartoon esthetic. Ya La 'Ford draws inspiration from African fabric designs in her red and gold abstraction La Genesi Del.


Ya La 'Ford, La Genesi Del, mixed media on weathered canvas


Ya La 'Ford, La Genesi Del (detail), mixed media on weathered canvas

According to the artist, there is another painting on the back of this one, but Lawndale didn't have a way to hang it to show both sides. I suppose it could have been hung from the ceiling. In any case, this side is quite handsome--I like the maze-like pattern and the way the gold floats on top of the red.


David P. Gray, The Question, oil on canvas, 2011

Likewise, David P. Gray presents us with bursts of color in his two paintings, but in a realistic, highly rendered style that really stands out in this show. Not that there isn't some pop influence. The setting of the restaurant (some kind of nostalgia themed place where old-fashioned menus and a scooter on a plinth are meant to signal "the '50s") speak to Pop, and those water glasses and creamer containers in the foreground remind me a little of Wayne Thiebaud. If you look at the artwork he has on his website, it is very different. He does watercolors of Mexican subjects, very much infused with Catholicism, that derive from the period in his childhood when his parents moved the family down to Lake Chapala.

But here, he is depicting an all-American scene--guys hanging out, talking in a fake-nostalgia restaurant. What I like is that their conversation is intense--it slices through the weird, unserious setting. I'm pretty sure that the people depicted here are artists. The one of the left looks like Earl Staley (sans eyepatch) and I think the one next to him is H.J. Bott. One could imagine that they are discussing art. It's interesting to imagine that art would be the subject there in what seems like an uncongenial, artless chain restaurant. Of course, I could be misinterpreting it all-together. Still, I like it--this is a complex composition, and Gray really pulls it off. But also the subject--conversation among friends--is rare and wonderful.


David P. Gray, Harvey Takes Decaf, oil on canvas, 2011

Harvey Takes Decaf has most of the merits of The Question, but it feels more like a snapshot than the former painting, which has (to my eyes) deeper implications about what these are discussing and their relationships to one another.

Some of the works in the show were colorful, large and/or paintings, but not all three. Nonetheless, their presence contributed to the overall look of the show. For example, psychedelic collage artist Patrick Turk had a large work in the show, next to two smaller works. But the smaller works almost blew the larger off the wall.


Patrick Turk, The Scraptacularium Presents Experiments in Mysticism #8, collage on panel, 2011

What keeps this from being merely a well-executed piece of psychedelic art is double figure on the right--a 1930s beauty with a bob hairstyle, gripping in panic the arm of an unseen person. I would guess it was the cover of a pulp magazine, the the source of her terror was something concrete. In Turk's hands, the terror is the sublime or the infinite as evoked by psychedelic drugs.


Bill Fester, Farming in a Different Galaxy, fractal on aluminum, 2011

A fellow contemplator of the psychedelic sublime--this time on a galactic scale--is Bill Fester. As far as I can tell, Fester produces his fractal designs on a computer using a piece of software called UltraFractal. He then somehow prints the images on aluminum. The result is an intensely colored, geometrically complex image.

The thing is, this is just a sampling of the large, colorful painted works in the show. Alexine O. Stevens created a brilliantly colored landscape influenced, perhaps, by Chinese painting.


Alexine O. Stevens, Rain, acrylic, oil and pastel, 2010

Fred Allen is the third of the Rosenquist brigade with these two paintings:


Fred Allen, Smokin', Billboard enamel on recycled billboard vinyl, 2010

Gonzo247 has a huge shaped graffiti piece in the entryway, Introducing Mr. Pickle. Mark Benham's paintings are the definition of retina burn. And there's more. But if you want to see them, you'll have to go to Lawndale (or at the very least, check out Lawndale's Flickr photostream.)

But even if the overwhelming impression is colorful! big! painting!, there is a bunch of work that swims in very different directions. I'll discuss some of those pieces--which include my favorite pieces from the exhibit--in the next installment of this review.