Blessings of Shade

This is one of my paintings where everything comes together at just the right time, as naturally and pleasantly as a hawk surfing the wind. I didn’t struggle with it. This is probably because the palm tree subject was no longer new. I had treated it several times. Like most of my best work, it was set in motion by a sudden viewing of an actual event, usually a very commonplace event. The one you see here was one of our campus maintenance men doing his work. 

I had already been here long enough to absorb the Biblical association of the palm tree. The Judaic allusions were already part of my way of looking at them. I had seen them in a hurricane, their trunks bent parallel to the street for hours and, when the storm abated, they shook themselves upright. I have stood under them just to see the sky coming through their leaves and bumping against their golden boughs like pieces of deep blue lapis lazuli so prized in ancient Egypt, and heard the whispering music of their dancing leaves, the sound of a distant sea. read more

Easter Devotion in the Zocalo: Mexico

Piety moves me deeply. It always has, though it doesn’t come easy for me in personal practice. Perhaps that is why I have done several versions of this Easter scene that we actually saw during a vacation in Mexico City. By this time, Mexico and Mexican artists had long been a major influence in my work. As an undergraduate, I had spent over half the summer studying mural painting in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. That summer of 1956 was a year of drought and a drastic flu epidemic that emptied the local coffin shop, killing many children. One night, there was a procession that filled the main street. Hundreds of people were marching and chanting. They carried a glass encased statue of the Virgin towards the cathedral. Solo voices were answered by a chant from the crowd. It sounded Native American, not European, and it was hypnotic in its repetition. The large crowd with their candles, their singing, and the statue borne on high on the arms of the people was bobbing like a little ship in a turbulent sea. It was mesmerizing. There were onlookers who made scoffing remarks, some of them shouting out of windows. They looked down with contempt at these unsophisticated people. Piety does not come easily to our technological age. But piety is the common denominator of all civilized religion regardless of personal conviction. It is the special dimension of the religious impulse. In this modern age, the silent music of the soul is often despised, although I think less so now than before. The worst dictators of the last century hated religion, and, in truth, so do the fanatics who hate in the name of religion. What is it that they hate most of all? Perhaps it is this dimension of piety, of people kneeling enrapt in silent devotion before a crucifix or standing in chant before a Torah scroll, the unquestioning love of a divine goodness. The dictators want this for themselves. In order to get it, they become more cruel but they are competing against something that only God can command.

Flower Vendor

Flower Vendor is one of the early works from after I graduated from the University of Texas at Austin and moved to San Antonio. This painting was always a favorite of my mother’s (of blessed memory). It was painted soon after I had performed an errand for her to get certain flowers.  I was in a terrible hurry for what urgent task I cannot now remember, but the workman kept telling me in earnest tones how to care for the flowers. I’m gratified that I showed no impatience with the man. As I crossed the street, I realized that this poor gardener was one of the true artists that the great teacher, Robert Henri, wrote about: the one who does what he does for the joy of the doing, “like a man walking over a hill singing.”  The gardener was not educated in the school sense of that word. He was not the owner, and he made no extra profits from his sale or whether his plants lived or died. He just loved them because he knew them and because he raised them. He wanted them to have a nice home. I was deeply moved as I am always by the loving task, tenderly performed, millions upon millions of times by the unknown and the unnoticed. It reminds me of the rabbinic legend of the thirty-six righteous upon whose works all existence depends. No one knows who they are. No one can lay claim to their title. I am always uplifted when I think I might have met one of them.

Goat Boy

At an intersection where four roads meet and often used by melon vendors, there I saw a young boy herding his goats. He was as he appears here; smiling his toothy smile and standing barefoot in the sun. I studied him, his animals, the colors that sunlight makes on skin and hair. His eyes and mine met, and so did the eyes of his goats.  read more

Goat Hauling

The goat hauler is making a turn, a change of direction. For a moment (that in this instance will never change as long as the painting remains), the truck driver and his trailer full of goats are moving in different directions at right angles.  This is no news story event but visually, it is a magnificent painterly event. Perspectively, it is very rich and the scene in its entirety allows me an opportunity to do some of my favorite things; to play with combining different qualities of space and to do it with favorite subjects: pick-up trucks and cowboy-hatted drivers, and, of course goats, those curiously temperamental biblical animals with the body of a deer but the grace of a walking duck. Against the big outdoor space of a hot South Texas day, there are the confining spaces of the cab of the pick-up containing its driver, and the box-like network of steel crowding together multi-colored goats. read more

Gulf Station

A scene no longer with us in these days of self-serve, the Gulf Station was the first to disappear. I tried to catch something of what it felt like being in the car and people rushing out to you, leaning over, hopping all around your car, opening the hood, putting gas in the tank, air in the tires, and smiling at you through the windshield as they wiped it, their hands making waving gestures as the chamois cloths wiped the glass clean. Where else could you get that much service, that many servants coming to you at one time in a few minutes? It didn’t matter what kind of car you drove, an old used one, a jalopy, a high end, literally Cadillac, Buick, or Lincoln. I never thought it would all disappear someday. Looking back on it now, I see it as a kind of metaphor of America. It gave equal service for all; every carriage carried a king or a queen. In time, many of these so-called “filling station boys” would equal or excel the drivers they so happily served. Those chamois filled hands and motor oiled fingers put them through college, and if not that, provided for their families. They, too, were car owners and drivers, who themselves pulled into filling stations and were served like kings and the ladies like queens. All across the country, it was this way; the innate, unspoken democracy that sparked between a car driver and the filling station. Is it another “only in America” story? I never thought about it this way until now, after it has disappeared. I don’t think a self-serve station comes near it. It’s all self and no serve. Getting gas doesn’t just cost more now. It has become a lot lonelier too.

Melon Vendor

By the roadsides in the morning or in the heat of the day, the melon vendors’ produce seems to suck in the sunlight and generate enormous amounts of coloristic energy. They are like oases in the desert, small places of shade and coolness, quiet and restful, and offering refreshing fruit. The concentration of yellow greens in the sun and blue green as the stacked melons retreat into the deep shade of a covered truck or tent are here contrasted against the gold tint of yet another melon, the cantaloupe. Blues and yellows against golds generate currents of radiant color energies. A single slash of red, exposing the flesh of the watermelon, almost the first stroke of color I put down, proved the most decisive. It remained unchanged throughout the painting process.  read more