Arts
Earl Staley’s “Landscape With Skull” is among works on view at the Glassell School of Art in a show curated by Pete Gershon in conjunction with the publication of his book “Collision.”
The piece: “Landscape with Skull”
The artist: Earl Staley Where: In “Contemporary Artists in Houston from the Collections of William J. Hill and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston” at the Glassell School of Art
To be or not to be an artist? That never was really a question for Earl Staley, who is still painting prolifically more than 50 years after he first came to Houston for a teaching job at Rice University.
The 12-foot-long “Landscape with Skull” was created in 1974 but looks like it could have been made yesterday by somebody with a south-of-the-border Goth sensibility. Staley calls it one of his “dirt paintings.” The grit mixed into the black paint, creating a rich texture, is vermiculite, a material recommended back then by Staley’s pal Harvey Bott, who also is still painting.
The glittery cow skull is the only figurative element in the all-black wasteland, under an ominous green sky with just a hint of a fiery orange horizon. Very few of Staley’s other paintings are so stark and minimal, and stylistically, they are all over the map, with references to cubism, surrealism and classical landscapes.
Skulls, however, are still one of his favorite icons, perhaps selfreflective imagery akin to Picasso’s bulls. They relate partly to his childhood years in the 1940s as a Boy Scout from Oak Park, Ill., who loved Native American lore, and later, the landscapes of West Texas and New Mexico.
Maybe Staley envisioned the skull on top of the ground, but I like to read it as buried, because, well, how ironic is it that this vision of subterranean mortality put him, for a time, on top of the world?
“Landscape with Skull” appeared in the 1975 Whitney Biennial, and Staley’s star kept rising for more than a decade after that. His work appeared in a landmark New York show, “Bad Painting,” in 1978. He won the Prix de Rome in 1981, giving him a four-year stint in Italy at the American Academy, where he breathed in the influences of classical art and mythology. He had several solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and showed his work at other museums and galleries across the U.S. By 1984, the year the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston made a pitch for the importance of regional talent with its landmark show “Fresh Paint,” Staley also was showing at the Venice Biennale.
But tastes changed, and collectors moved on. “Collision,” Pete Gershon’s forthcoming book about the burly, burgeoning years of the Houston art scene in the 1970s and ’80s, offers a quote from Staley’s diary that describes his painting style: “It is rough, plain, pretentious in its honesty… . My technique is to have none. Esthetics? Forget it — I give no thrills.”
One might argue that the glitter of “Landscape with Skulls” is kind of thrilling. And Gershon, who curated this show at the Glassell in conjunction with the book, has placed it smartly next to a more lyrically stark, almost monochromatic flat landscape of Texas by John Alexander, painted the same year. (The show is terrific, also including stellar works by Richard Stout, Dorothy Hood, Dick Wray, Luis Jimenez and other giants of the 1970s and 80s scene.)
In recent years, Staley has cut up old canvases to create collage paintings as a kind of “epic memory map,” and he has been exercising his brain in a different direction lately by painting small portraits of people in Houston’s art community.
“I’d love to be able to sell paintings, but it’s so hard,” he told Kay Sarver in a recent video. “People would rather buy a pair of shoes.”