'Jerry Bywaters: Lone Star Printmaker'

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Monday, August 3, 2009

It doesn't get more Texas than the art of Jerry Bywaters.

The late Paris, Texas native and longtime Dallasite pioneered the style that became known as Lone Star Regionalism. His expressive images captured the landscapes, the small towns, the architecture and the ordinary people of Texas and Southwest.
bywaters.jpg

'Jerry Bywaters: Lone Star Printmaker,' an exhibit now at the Blanton Museum of Art, gathers 39 prints the artist made from 1935 to 1948. It also features source photographs and some archival materials that illuminate the Bywaters's printmaking process.

A member of a group of young painters known as the Dallas Nine, in the 1930s Bywaters helped define a regional artistic identity for the Lone Star State. His interpretations of landscapes, urban spaces, small towns and local characters gained widespread popularity and helped propel Texas artists — and art about Texas — into the national limelight.

Bywaters was fond of taking trips around the state, often with his fellow artists, with sole purpose of finding real life scenes to capture in his fluid, folksy style. Always respectful of his subject matter, Bywaters nevertheless highlighted the whimsy he saw in such scenes as small West Texas towns with hastily built main streets lined by falsefront buildings as an attempt to give the place an air of dignity.

It's gentle, but there's a slight air of irreverence to many of Bywaters' scenes of Texas.

Bywaters also traveled to Mexico where he met famed muralist Diego Rivera. Afterwards, not only did Bywaters incorporate Mexican themes and styles into his art (several prints in the are proof), he also was the first person to author a published review Rivera's work in the United States.

'Lone Star Printmaker' shows the outcome of Bywaters efforts to produce multiple copies of his work so the Texas regionalist aesthetic could spread far and wide.

'Jerry Bywaters: Lone Star Printmaker' continues 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays, 1 to 5 p.m. Sundays through Nov. 8. Blanton Museum of Art, Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Congress Ave. $3-$7, free Thursdays. www.blantonmuseum.org.

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Get Back
Francisco Matto created bold modern art with the timeless graphic style of the past

By Robert Faires
Austin Chronicle
August 7, 2009

Draw a circle. (Or, if you prefer, a square.) Now, somewhere inside that figure place two dots. Voilà! You've drawn a face. Not the most detailed mug ever put to paper obviously and not even boasting all the features we associate with a human countenance, but a face all the same in that we recognize it as such. See, once we humans started working out how to represent ourselves in marks, we discovered pretty quickly that simple shapes and lines will read as human forms, and as long as there's something to delineate a pair of eyes within a frame – dots, dashes, circles, even little X's – we're hardwired to see it as a face, a fact that has been taken advantage of by artists from the cave painters at Lascaux to good ol' Charlie Schulz.

You can count Francisco Matto among that fraternity as well, as you'll see the minute you step inside the illuminating retrospective of this Uruguayan artist's work assembled by the Blanton Museum of Art after an exhibition in the 2007 Bienal do Mercosul in Brazil curated by Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, the Blanton's curator of Latin American art from 2002 to 2008. Greeting you as you enter "Francisco Matto: The Modern and the Mythic" is a quintet of his totems – rough wooden sculptures of human and animal figures mounted on thin planks and thick blocks of wood – two of which belong to his Venus series. To judge by the materials and shapes alone, you might take the duo for musical instruments; both feature long thin necks atop shapes either boxlike or curvy like a guitar. But the handful of marks on them – two side-by-side vertical dashes at the top of each neck, a horizontal line across each body with two circles above it, a vertical line dividing the strip of wood connecting each body to the totem's base – give these cobbled together boards eyes, waists, nipples, and legs. These are, however basically represented, people.

And you'll run across quite a few of them as you wend your way through the six decades of work represented here: a pair of Venuses, one tall and narrow with a petite guitar body and the other short, wide, and rectangular; a couple cut from glittering white marble, she with a tiny rectangular head atop a bass fiddle body and he with the same minuscule head atop a wide, square block with a large notch carved out of the bottom to create two legs; and other figures like these placed within geometric frames and grids that contain the similarly simplified shapes of birds, snakes, fish, livestock, clock faces, arrows, crosses, houses, vases, and more. They are the populace of a world utterly flat and devoid of decoration, just raw shapes occasionally defined by thick black outlines and unrepentantly brash primary hues.

For Matto, abstraction was a peeling away of the complexity and ornament of 20th century life in favor of a connection to the past: the simple, graphic representations of the world that he so admired in pre-Columbian art. In those spare forms he saw a way of distilling an object to its essence, an expression so pure that it would resonate with viewers regardless of their homeland or culture or time. More than the specific and detailed representational art of recent centuries or the abstract work of some of his contemporaries, this art of unadorned clarity would speak to a viewer of the spirit of a thing in a language sure to endure into the future.

And sure enough, a kind of primal power announces itself in many of the works included here – say, the Naturaleza muerta con plano de color y línea (Still Life With Color Plane and Line), with its stocky bottle roughly painted in umber and its pitcher and glasses sketched in bold black ovals and diagonals; Puerto con cielo rojo (Port With Red Sky) and Puerto en colores primarios (Port in Primary Colors), two views of the same shipyard that blaze with their huge fields of red and yellow; or any of the many works with grids that resemble printers' type cases filled in with tiny keepsakes or else some pictographic messages. Whether or not you can decipher their content, you can make out clearly what each object in them is, just as you can identify a face in that circle with two dots. Matto compels our recognition with the same bold simplicity of old.

And we have the opportunity to measure that ourselves, to compare Matto's style with that of the ancients, thanks to the Blanton's inclusion of a section of pre-Columbian artifacts belonging to the University of Texas' Department of Art & Art History. Here are clothes, jars, and bowls that are 600, 800, 1,000 years old, decorated with much the same simple geometrics and thick outlines as this 20th century modernist employed. Seeing these provides valuable context for viewers, not simply as background for the constructive universalism school of thought to which Matto subscribed but as a lifelong source of fascination and inspiration for the artist. With this, as with a companion section on the School of the South, detailing the influence of artist Joaquín Torres-García on Matto and his South American contemporaries, the Blanton expands our sense of who this artist is through the world he lived in, its past and present. The way this show is presented is a testament to the breadth and depth of the Blanton's holdings of Latin American art, not to mention its commitment to exposing the region's art to a broader – and pointedly North American – audience. Bringing the first comprehensive career exhibition of this South American modernist to the United States is further proof – as if any were needed after such exhibits as "The School of the South," "The Geometry of Hope," and "Jorge Macchi: The Anatomy of Melancholy" – that our own Blanton is a global leader when it comes to celebrating and promoting the art of Latin America.

As I'm admiring one of Matto's totems, it occurs to me that I'm standing in roughly the same spot where, a few months earlier, I had stood and admired the sleek, smooth chairs of Charles and Ray Eames in the exhibit "Birth of the Cool." And I'm struck that here are artists of the same era and even something of the same philosophies that nevertheless represent kind of opposite extremes. Matto and the Eameses were all modernists, all stripping away ornamentation to create something simple and pure. And all were intent on reaching the widest audience possible with their work. But where the Eameses were taking advantage of industrial mass production to give everyone a chance at having a chair of the same design, Matto was creating something that might speak to everyone but that was still a distinctly individual work, crafted by his own hands. With the one, it's something you own. With the other, it's something of your own, as universal and yet personal as a circle with two dots in it that you've drawn all by yourself.

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Amy Grappell's 'Quadrangle'
Four in Legion

By Wayne Alan Brenner
Austin Chronicle
August 7, 2009

Amy Grappell's video installation Quadrangle is part of the latest exhibition in the annual "New American Talent" series at Arthouse. It's a short and jewellike work of cinema, 20 minutes' worth of fine camerawork in which two separate interviews are arranged, with embellishments of still photography, into a dynamic diptych that often displays both interviews simultaneously, their timing set to provide complementary silences and dialogue.

The interviews are with Grappell's parents, Deanna and Paul, now long divorced, about the years in which those two became involved with another middle-class suburban couple while Amy and the other kids were growing up. Involved: emotionally, sexually, cohabitationally.

It was, you know, the Sixties.

"I wanted to talk to my parents, to do some research, because I was thinking about doing a screenplay based on our story," says Grappell, whose first film was the narrative Shady Grove (1997), a sort of love story set in Austin and New York, and whose most recent film, the documentary Light From the East, was featured at South by Southwest in 2005. "But the initial interviews went well – my parents' story is kind of stranger than fiction, and they were very generous about sharing it with me. The person who shot it is Christian Moore, and we've been making films for years – we've worked together on pretty much every film project I've done, and he knows my parents well, so we were able to be with them in a very informal way. And I worked with a wonderful editor who recently graduated from the UT film program: His name is Aaron Raff, and he's been working with me for the past year."

But Quadrangle is no rendering of a screenplay, nor even a long documentary.

"As I was researching, shooting, and looking at the material," says Grappell, "it just seemed to take shape – as more of an art piece than a documentary at that point. So I created this piece as a video installation with a museum setting in mind, but I think the diptych structure could be applied to a longer documentary as well – because it's not used in an arbitrary way. I'm not a big fan of using tricks like that; I've almost never seen a diptych that I thought was necessary or had a real purpose in terms of the story and how it unfolds. But with this one, I think it allows two very different, definitive points of view to overlap – which allows the viewer to make up their own mind what they think about the story."

And what do her parents think about the piece?

"Well, initially they were a little worried, but now that they've seen it, I think they feel good about it. They seemed surprised and actually pleased with the piece – because it's pretty even and balanced, because of the way their story's told. I don't think that anybody looks like the bad guy. I think they were a little concerned about that before they saw it."

And what do you, reader, think about Quadrangle? A short trip Downtown to Arthouse will reward you with an answer and also provide the opportunity to view the rest of "New American Talent: The Twenty-Fourth Exhibition."

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'New American Talent: The Twenty-Fourth Exhibition'
Arthouse at the Jones Center through Aug. 23

By Wayne Alan Brenner
Austin Chronicle
August 7, 2009

New American talent? Who couldn't get behind an exhibition that's new and features Americans with talent? In fact, forget "get behind" – that's an outmoded form of expression, isn't it?

– like starting a review with a series of questions? Who couldn't immerse themselves, even profitably, in a pool of the most current visual art to be culled from that wider, incessant ocean of American creation?

You won't find that person at Arthouse, eyeing the materials manipulated, the hues rendered, the potentials given solid form (following little function but whimsy or concern's expression) and resisting vacuum in the venue's rooms. You'll find other people: representations of people, anthropomorphic objects or images spiking a familiar shape into the collection's diverse array of made things.

You'll find Space Suit Form With a Burden of Platonic Solid Talismans by Houston's Garland Fielder; this is an arresting mannequin-based sculpture that seems a distillation of the entire figurative-amid-the-abstract exhibition. (Hamza Walker, director of education for the University of Chicago's Renaissance Society, who juried this show, mentioned this piece in his opening-reception remarks, carefully inserting a shim of artistic intent between this work and what's encountered in the more commercial fashion industry. We got the feeling that the example was also an example of synecdoche.)

You'll find Elemental Topography, precise iron castings of a single female body, arranged neatly in more than a dozen distinct pieces, upon a large wooden table. The whole woman responsible for this disparate woman is Erin Cunningham of Austin.

You'll find Austinite Leah DeVun's series of photo-portraits of girls dressed as Disney character Hannah Montana, the costumed personas of these young women usurping their own identities the way photography usurped painting as a record of what's real.

You'll find Kristin Wanek of Los Angeles continuing the celebrity focus with a series of carefully crafted media-icon dioramas documenting Lady Diana Spencer's campaign toward the U.S. presidency with Jesse Jackson as her running mate.

You'll find Amy Grappell's video installation Quadrangle presenting a look into part of what the sexual revolution of the Sixties wrought among her parents and their closest friends.

You'll find these and other examples of people depicted and nonfigurative pieces that are yet redolent of the artist's vibrant humanness and pure abstractions that your own eyes must, if necessary, provide the humanity for, and your discoveries will, we insist, do you a world of good. Because new artistic creation, whether burdened or enhanced by Platonic-solid talismans or otherwise, is by no means an outmoded form of expression. And we stand squarely behind that statement.

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'A Couple of Ways of Doing Something'
Up, Close, and personal

By Robert Faires
Austin Chronicle
August 21, 2009

name in the 1970s, this pioneering painter and photographer brought you closer to the human face than almost any artist in history. Eyes the size of footballs, noses the length of a hockey stick, mouths the length of a baseball bat, and all of them rendered with such a scrupulous, almost preternatural fidelity to the source that it was startling, even unnerving, to look at. This was wide-screen HD in the days before wide-screen HD even existed, and it did just as much to make you reconsider what a face looked like, what a portrait was.

Laguna Gloria Art Museum, the original incarnation of what is now the Austin Museum of Art, was among the earliest museums to show Close's work, and now, more than three decades later, the institution is favoring the city with another solo exhibition of Close-up art. "A Couple of Ways of Doing Something," which opens this weekend at AMOA's Downtown galleries, focuses on work he's done over the past eight years, including 15 daguerreotypes – yes, that oldest of photographic processes – that are each smaller than a sheet of paper.

"The thing I love about daguerreotypes," Close has said, "is that everything I love in photography was already there in the beginning: 1840. The incredible detail. The incredible range, from the brightest highlight of white, sometimes solarized, almost bluish in color, to the deepest, deepest darkest, most velvety blacks. I love the fact that, as opposed to so many photographs that are painting-sized, which 30 people can stand in front of, each daguerreotype requires the active participation of one viewer. It's intimate, one-on-one, personal."

That doesn't mean, though, that Close has abandoned the large-scale format for which he's so well known. The exhibition also features seven 8-by-6-foot digital Jacquard portrait tapestries based on the daguerreotypes. A digital scan of the original is rendered into a computer program for the warp and weft threads, which the loom then processes into a tapestry composed of up to 17,800 colored warp threads.

Close has also used some of the daguerreotypes as the basis for a series of 26½-by-20-inch ink-jet pigment prints. The high-resolution scans allow for the images to be enlarged many times without losing any tonal fidelity or detail.

The 20 digital pigment prints are paired with poems by New York School poet Bob Holman, former host of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe poetry slams and now host of the Bowery Poetry Club, who riffs on the personality and style of each photographic subject. (And if you'd prefer to hear Holman reading the poems himself, you can dial up a recording on the free cell-phone audio guide that's part of the exhibition.)

There are also a pair of 47-by-40-inch photogravures, showcasing the late 19th century process of etching a photographic image onto a metal plate. In all, this traveling exhibition, organized by the nonprofit photography advocate Aperture Foundation, offers Austinites an opportunity not only to catch up with Close but to get close to faces in a way that bridge the earliest days of photography with the most recent. That's more than "a couple of ways of doing something" – it's damn near all of them.

"A Couple of Ways of Doing Something" is on view Aug. 22-Nov. 8 at the Austin Museum of Art – Downtown, 823 Congress. For more information, call 495-9224 or visit www.amoa.org.

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'Jana Swec and Jared Theis'
D Berman Gallery, through Sept. 5

By Rachel Koper
Austin Chronicle
August 21, 2009

Jana Swec and Jared Theis have a two-person show of new works up at D Berman Gallery. Sometimes in a two-person show, the curator will pair contrasting styles or perhaps artists who are friends. These two Central Texas artists had never met before this show. The harmony of their art pieces together in one room is immaculate and prescient. Both artists use pulsing line qualities and muted color schemes to create expressive pieces. They both use abstracted linear forms that are imbued with a throbbing musical force.

Theis is a ceramic artist whose work includes some found objects and many musical references. In 27 Measures, a line of black-and-white porcelain tiles stretch along a wall. The varied tiles repeated contain a dark line, some smooth white areas, and lava-rock texture. These three elements roll through the piece, giving it a pace something akin to a song. Unaccompanied is a large floor-displayed sculpture made of stained ceramics, nails, piano keys and parts, and hardware. The base is a large iron piano frame; Theis builds up coiled clay vessels that seem to grow up out of it, like a coral reef. Most ceramic artists begin forms with a coil and smooth out the lines; Theis leaves them all visible to create a snaking linear texture in these effusively tubey sculptures. Disparate materials are delicately united to create these otherworldly landscapes.

Swec's use of twisting lines works in concert with Theis' repeated coils and off-kilter textures. She exhibits an amazingly intricate series of finely lined ink drawings. In the series, old gnarled tree roots seem to morph into elephants and then back into branches. In her talk at the show's reception, Swec mentioned the "obvious" connection between rough bark and elephant skin and their literal trunks. What also became clear is that she loves elephants, their shapes and their dedication to their families. She spoke of how trees grow so slowly and that the drawings take many hours of rhythmic rendering. These trees are twisting and knotting over one another; they are dense and create a world of their own. I can look at these intricate forms for a long time and not get bored. I like getting lost in the elephant/tree forest fantasy.

Last Saturday afternoon I sat and listened, blissfully relaxed as these two visual artists performed a few songs. Swec sang without a mic, and Theis played acoustic guitar. The closing song, "Hallelujah," is one that many would recognize: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and Rufus Wainwright have covered it on their albums. The performance gave me real goose bumps. It was just pensive and beautiful, like their artwork. Kudos go to David Berman and his staff for bringing this magical duo together in a brilliant yet subtle pairing.

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Artist Chuck Close considers the human face, and then considers it again
'A Couple of Ways of Doing Something' shows Chuck Close experimenting yet again with the idea of the portrait

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Thursday, August 27, 2009

Consider the human face.

Artist Chuck Close has done so for decades, finding ways to deconstruct an image of a face only to painstakingly put it back together. And his experimentations have distinctly changed the very definition of what a portrait can be in the 21st century.

While most American artists in the late 1960s considered painting dead — portraiture and representational painting perhaps even more than dead — Close eschewed the ideas percolating around him in New York and instead cut his own path, creating massive photo-realistic painted portraits that were typically based on photographs.

Now nearing 70 and with a long list of laurels, the celebrated Close still is experimenting with ways of portraying the human face. And "A Couple of Ways of Doing Something," an exhibit recently opened at the Austin Museum of Art, reveals the artist's thoughtful explorations of photogra-

phy in dramatically different formats, materials and scales.

Organized by Aperture, the New York-based nonprofit organization devoted to all things photographic, "A Couple of Ways" demonstrates the intriguing creative journey on which Close has embarked since 2001.

Training the lens on his circle of artistic friends — the same cadre that have served as subjects of Close's paintings for years including Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson and Cindy Sherman — Close starts his foray with photography's earliest form — intimately sized daguerreotypes — then sidesteps to large-format digital pigment prints and finally dives into colossal digitally generated tapestries.

Why consider the human face at just one scale, Close posits, when you can consider the face — and then consider it again — in myriad forms and sizes? For Close, the topography of the human face is too complex for just one view.

For that matter, is a portrait limited to only an image? Not in this exhibit. An integral part of "A Couple of Ways" is the praise poetry by New York School poet Bob Holman (who originated the now-famous poetry slams at Nuyorican Poets Cafe) that accompany each of Close's digital pigment prints. Just as Close's forceful yet intimate portraits stand as intimate but probing studies of each face, so do Holman's laudatory prosodies. "It's always about the person," writes Holman.

Close began experimenting with daguerreotypes in 2001, intrigued by the unforgiving nature of the medium and the hyper-detail that heightens facial flaws and marks. "The thing I love about daguerreotypes is that everything I love in photography was already there in the beginning," says Close in an interview in the exhibit catalog. "The incredible detail. The incredible range, from the brightest highlight of white . . . to the deepest, deepest darkest, most velvety black."

Fifteen daguerreotypes are featured in the exhibit, each 10-inch-by-18-inch silver-coated metal plate intimately displayed in its own black case. There's a curious thing about a daguerreotype. For all of the medium's precise detail, it's is an elusive thing: Because of the way it refracts light, a daguerreotype must be viewed at a specific angle in order for the image to be visible. "A mirror with memory" is how 19th-century writer Oliver Wendell Holmes described the daguerreotype shortly after its invention.

And it's just one way for Close to render the human.

Merging 19th-century technology with that of the 21st is another way. Though daguerreotypes were originally one-of-a-kind images that could not be reproduced, they can now be digitally scanned, which is what Close did to create the super high-resolution inkjet prints, which make up the second aspect of the exhibit. With their luscious tonal fidelity, the 26-inch-by-20-inch prints have a rich, silky tactileness to their finish. And yet the warts-and-all detail of each face is there in contrast to all the velvety tones.

Not content with just two ways of doing, the process-obsessed Close takes this series of ever-enlarging photos one step further. Long intrigued by tapestries made on 19th-century Jacquard mechanical looms (which can create optically blended colors from multicolored threads), Close took his digitized daguerreotype scans to a modern digital Jacquard loom to create the colossal 8-foot-by-6-foot portrait tapestries on exhibit. Each black-and-white tapestry is composed of as many as 17,800 threads in dozens of colors.

And again we get another variation of the original daguerreotype portrait, this one overwhelming in its scale, truly velvety in its finish and with the sharper lines in each face softened somewhat by the plush nature of the tapestry fabric.

(Close's forays into using the Jacquard loom have single-handedly re-introduced the Jacquard technique back into world of fine art.)

And yet the transition from shimmery daguerreotypes to rich-toned prints and luxurious tapestries reveals that Close is most interested in not just faces, but in the ways of looking at them.

"From the very beginning, what I wanted to do was mitigate against the standard hierarchy of the (traditional) portrait," Close once told an interviewer. "At first I just wanted the artificiality of the photograph between me and the painting. And then 30 years later, I'm still making portraits from photographs."

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'Jerry Bywaters: Lone Star Printmaker''
Blanton Museum of Art Through Nov. 8

By Robert Faires
Austin Chronicle
August 28, 2009

The mountains look like they erupted out of nowhere, so mammoth that they dwarf everything near them, diminishing the road running past them to a white ribbon, even crowding out the sky so that a passing thunderhead has to graze their rocky shoulder.

Anyone who has driven west across Texas and seen where the plains give way to the mountains should appreciate Jerry Bywaters' rendering of the same. The Texas regionalist, whose depictions of Southwestern culture and nature helped put our state on the artistic map in the 1930s and 1940s, captures that startling break in the landscape and the looming character of the mountains. His thick black shadows add an ominous weightiness, his great sweeping curves across their faces limn the impact of eons of erosion, and the wispy lines by one mountaintop elegantly convey a high-elevation storm as glimpsed from far below. Bywaters distills into graphic simplicity those elements that inspire awe when you're confronted with the Texas landscape in all its grandeur.

Landscape figures heavily in Bywaters' work as seen here, a collection of 39 prints made from the mid-Thirties through the late Forties. It's the focus in many pieces, as in the images of the Chisos Mountains, monumental and forbidding, often towering over a human habitation – a boxy white pueblo or a ranch house the size of a fingernail. Sometimes, as with his picture of a huge, prickly maguey or his portrait of a cowhand and his pony, the landscape is relegated to the background, and yet it remains a forceful presence, whether as a mountain, large despite its distance, or a long, low horizon, conveying the West's vast expanse. In Texas, Bywaters seems to say, the landscape is inescapable. It shapes us, and we are it.

Sometimes that idea is visible in his treatment of his human subjects. In his image of a Mexican mother, which owes much to the style of Diego Rivera at his most mythic, the kneeling figure fills the frame, as massive as a mountain, the cloth over her shoulders and around her head appearing as stiff as stone and the folds in the fabric like grooves worn in a mountainside. Similarly, in his portrait of an old clown, the numerous wrinkles creasing the circus performer's face look like lines cut by streams across a rock face; along with the heavy-lidded eyes, they speak of time wearing on us, leaving its mark. The poignance of the message, though, is leavened by the marks of his trade: a comical hat and dabs of dark greasepaint around his eyes and on the tip of his nose.

That's a touch that reveals a bit of the social satirist in Bywaters, the chronicler of the time with a keen eye for the details that show our human foibles and follies. It's also evident in Opera at Popular Prices, an image of a performance at Dallas' Majestic Theatre, where the artist's vantage point is in the back row of the balcony, so the stage is obscured by ceiling fans and lamps from above and audience members' heads from below. In Election Day in Balmorea, he crams so much detail into this view of cowboys clustered in front of a West Texas drugstore – a flyer for a rodeo, a barber pole, a half-dozen different styles of Stetsons and boots, signs for Dr Pepper and Coca-Cola, a standee for the movie Fools in Paradise, a vote total board on which Pappy Lee O'Daniel's name can be read – that he comes off as a Lone Star William Hogarth.

In this as in all the works in the exhibition (organized by the Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University), you can sense Bywaters' affection for his home state, which goes a long way toward communicating the drive behind the Texas regionalism of his time and how the Dallas Nine and the Lone Star Printmakers – both groups to which he belonged – drew the attention that they did from inside and outside Texas. What with Flatbed's retrospective of Cynthia Brants, the "Texas Treasures" exhibit from the Center for the Advancement of Early Texas Art, and Kelly Fearing's inclusion in the Texas Biennial, 2009 has already been a great year for rediscovering the state's artistic heritage. "Jerry Bywaters: Lone Star Printmaker" adds to that, further enriching our appreciation for the artistic pioneers who shaped our images of the land that continues to shape us.

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