In familiar territory, painters stretch
Some artists reinvent themselves often and obviously.
Others find a groove and embrace a signature aesthetic or vocabulary for years. In a culture that spins at lightning speed, it would be easy to call this steady approach boring: You mean he’s still doing that, after all this time?
But at this moment, the ability to sustain one’s attention span for more than five minutes — much less decades — seems a quality worth celebrating.
In the new year’s first round of gallery shows, a handful of mostly veteran Houston painters is demonstrating how engaging with familiar territory can yield fresh poetry, energy and discovery.
Floyd Newsum: ‘Black and White With Gray and Color’
Floyd Newsum is capping one of the biggest seasons of his 40-year career with this elegant show of recent works. The title seems as loaded with symbolism as his dynamic, primitive-spirited works on paper.
Newsum, who will soon retire from his day job of the past 40 years as an art professor at the University of Houston Downtown, has had much to celebrate lately.
The Smithsonian Institution’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture owns two of his works and included his Hurricane Katrina-themed painting “After the Storm CNN” in its opening show last fall. The Houston Museum of African-American Culture honored him with a 13-painting retrospective last fall, and one of his public sculptures, “Planter and Stems,” was refurbished for the Art Blocks at Main Street Square.
Newsum paints in several styles, including works busy with circular marks that imply a sea of humanity. The current show falls into his other realm, full of symbolic images that float, unmoored — a sea of pictograms conveying dreamlike narratives.
His signature ladder form appears often, a metaphor for hope that also pays tribute to his father, who was the first African-American firefighter in Memphis, Tenn. So do images of houses, with tiny people — collaged photographs — peering through windows. Images of birds, fish and water reflect his concern about an environment in peril.
The most recent series incorporates images of kites, objects that suggest a kind of fragile transcendence. A kite helps define the shape of a human head in “The Five-Handed Kite.”
But my favorite may be “Kite Visions in Flight,” the 2008 painting that set Newsum off on this airy journey. At its center, an abstract figure is discernable, and it’s not much of a stretch to see the kites flanking it as a pair of wings, ready to carry viewers with the figure above a turbulent, endangered world.
On view through Feb. 18; Nicole Longnecker Gallery, 2625 Colquitt, 713-591-4997, longneckergallery.com.
Geoff Hippenstiel: ‘Romance’
Some people call Geoff Hippenstiel a “painter’s painter.”
He’s the youngest of the bunch considered here, although the technical virtuosity with which he handles his materials has amazed critics, collectors and peers pretty much since the moment he earned his master’s degree at the University of Houston, in 2010.
His messy-looking abstract paintings are a riot of dabs, swipes, splotches and swirls of impasto, the paint layered with such complex topography it looks like it wants to be sculpture. And the blending of colors seems nearly miraculous.
Three of the big finished pieces draw from a shared palette of yellow, blue, red, white, black and metallic gold with intriguingly different effects. A blinding puddle of white holds “The Indian” together. “EZ-7” might, somewhere in there, contain an image of a human head. “Huffer” projects a different kind of ghostliness, more lyrical. Borden said it was inspired by the sample boards at Home Depot where customers test out spray-paint colors.
The metallic paints for which Hippenstiel is known get roughed up with flourishes of black spray paint in the golden “Francisco” and the silver “Raider Nation.” They’re not pretty, and yet they’re exquisite, with a payoff that increases the closer you get.
Through Feb. 25; Devin Borden Gallery, 2917 Main, 713-529-2700, devinborden.com
Richard Stout and Ken Mazzu: ‘Transient Views: The Places of Our Lives’
Richard Stout and Ken Mazzu share a big show with the late photographer Jim Culberson that captures the fleeting nature of “place” in Houston. The city’s ever-shifting architecture gives them an endless source of inspiration from different angles.
Stout, a still prolific titan of the city’s early modern-art scene who taught for more than 25 years at the University of Houston, has long found his inspiration close to home, in his Montrose neighborhood or the flat landscape of the Texas Gulf Coast. Windows, doors and alleyways become reflective, refracted or transparent portals in his acrylic paintings, creating abstracted, geometric frameworks that invite viewers to journey somewhere that might exist only in dreams.
With this show, he takes viewers along on morning walks or drives, past townhome construction and down leafy sidewalks but also to locales whose generic titles fire up the imagination another notch. With the exception of the superbright “Morning Is Breaking,” the colors are mostly moody, the tone quiet.
“The Way,” with its strict, horizontal composition and beautifully transparent brushstrokes, is a stunner.
Mazzu, at midcareer, has found his niche examining the raw beauty in Houston’s constant process of deconstruction. Although his rough landscapes feature piles of busted concrete, twisted metal, exposed rebar, torn sheetrock and fluffy insulation — and sometimes a hint of still-standing buildings nearby — Mazzu’s gentle palette evokes a sense of time that’s simultaneously elegiac and hopeful.
He renders these scenes in oil and in watercolor. They’re all strong, but the watercolors, with their soft clarity, seem more emotional.
Mazzu’s most recent subjects include the architecturally significant Glassell School of Art building, which is being replaced with a new landmark structure that opens next year. Eugene Aubry’s 1979 edifice was especially close to the artist’s heart since he has taught at the Glassell for 10 years. It yields the show’s largest painting, and the composition that most strongly suggests a topped monument.
The newest works also feature the rubble of the 3400 Montrose office tower that held a popular rooftop bar and the Chronicle’s former home at 801 Texas Ave., which is still being dismantled floor by floor.
Through Jan. 28; William Reaves/Sarah Foltz Fine Art, 2143 Westheimer, 713-521-7500, reavesart.com
Perry House: ‘The Pete Paintings and Musings’
Perry House arrived on the scene about the same time as Newsum, in the 1970s, and taught for 30 years at Houston Community College.
His new show at Zoya Tommy Gallery offers two large suites of small paintings — all being shown for the first time — that are installed as wall-consuming grids. This makes the show feel highly ordered but also intense in spite of their often deliberately flat colors (in acrylic on canvas). Overall, there’s a sense of urgent industry.
The 36 “Pete Paintings” date to 2006 and ’07 and include many variations on the theme of House’s alter ego, a bespectacled, cigarette-smoking balding character — shown only as a disembodied head — who first came to the artist as a teenager when he was drawing on the back of bowling-alley score cards, and became a constant presence in his paintings over the years. Pete, nostalgic now but still with a greedy everyman aura, looks like he could reside comfortably in the Surrealist galleries of the Menil Collection.
The “Musings,” which date from 2014 to the present, spotlight other elements of House’s past work — mundane domestic objects and geometric shapes. They’re more fragmented. Through it all, House is sorting out his lifetime of art-making, drawing attention to the imagery that has been most significant to him, but also giving himself, and us, a chance to question what it all means.
Through Feb. 11; Zoya Tommy Gallery, 4102 Fannin, 832-649-5814, zoyatommy.com