July 2010

Increments of Destruction: Chris Jordan / AMOA- Downtown

That Summer Feeling: Davis Gallery

Work by Robert Levers: Flatbed Press

Blanton gears up for higher profile

Talking trash with art: Chris Jordan / AMOA- Downtown

Covert Stories: Ian Shults / Wally Workman Gallery

L. Nowlin Gallery makes a splash in black and white

Increments of Destruction
Chris Jordan's 'Running the Numbers' at Austin Museum of Art

By Wayne Alan Brenner
Austin Chronicle
July 2, 2010

"What is any ocean but a multitude of drops?"

– David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

A picture, they say, is worth a thousand words. And how many numbers is that picture worth?

Americans use 60,000 plastic bags every five seconds. Twenty-eight thousand 42-gallon barrels of oil are consumed in the United States every two minutes. Four hundred twenty-six thousand cell phones are "retired" in the U.S. every day. One hundred million trees are cut down in this country each year to make the paper for junk mail.

Big numbers. Ooh, ooh, big giant numbers. The implications would chill you, maybe even inspire heart-racing terror, if only you could wrap your head around all those big fucking numbers. But, cognitively, we're at a loss; we're stuck in the tallying of prehistory. One, two, three, many: That's about it. You move into the hundreds and beyond, you might as well try to get to first base with infinity. What would these big numbers even look like?

Chris Jordan, whose mind-blowing "Running the Numbers" exhibition is currently shocking the verticals at the Austin Museum of Art, knows what those numbers would look like. He's depicted what they do look like, in image after wall-sized image, using research and photography and software and a design sense of the caliber more often used to sell you things than to portray the hazardous consequences of reckless consuming.

Twenty-nine thousand, five hundred sixty-nine handguns in a pile as large as the eye can see, equal to the number of gun-related deaths in the U.S. in 2004. Two-point-three million folded prison uniforms stacked together, equal to the number of Americans incarcerated in 2005. One hundred twenty-five thousand $100 bills ($12.5 million), the amount our government spends every hour on the war in Iraq, arranged to form an enormous portrait of Benjamin Franklin.

You think you've logged a lot of hours in Photoshop, design maven? The point-and-click muscle of Jordan's right index finger could probably flip a Humvee.

"The pieces that are on display here," says the artist, "I didn't use any stock photography; I did all of them myself. Like, to make the Seurat piece with the cans," he nods toward his homage to A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, "I went to all the markets in town and brought back 80 aluminum cans. Then I made a little pedestal in my studio and photographed each can at five different rotations – so if a bunch of cans ended up next to each other in the final image, they wouldn't look too duplicative. Then I turned down the lights and made five pictures ... turned up the lights and made five pictures ... and did the same with neutral lighting. So I ended up with 15 pictures of each can at different brightness levels. And then, in Photoshop, I made a slightly cooler and a slightly warmer version of each one of those, and I cropped them all so they were exactly the same pixel size, so they'd fit together with no white space in between. And I ended up with a folder of ... I can't remember exactly how many, something like 400 or 800 images in a folder. And then I worked with a photo-mosaic program. I knew I needed 106,000 cans, so I got a high-resolution image of the Seurat painting and rezzed it down until it was exactly 106,000 pixels, so each pixel could be replaced by one can. And the mosaic program goes and finds that pixel number 1 in the upper left corner has an RGB – a red-green-blue – value of whatever, and it goes and looks through all the images in the folder, and it averages the pixel values for all of those images, and it goes 'Oh, can number 623 goes right there.' And so on, until the entire thing is completed."

But, hold on a minute here. The internationally renowned Chris Jordan, the man whose "Running the Numbers" tours all over the country and has been presented at the TED talks and featured in newspapers and journals and magazines and TV shows and blog after blog after blog? He has no ... interns?

"Now I have interns, because it recently occurred to me, 'Wait, I don't need to do 20,000 cut-and-paste clicks in Photoshop: I could have someone help me!' But I didn't have any when I was creating the pieces for this exhibition."

The work, in these photographic mosaics and the other, nonallusory pieces: labor-intensive, for both man and machine. The results, due to Jordan's professional manipulations of shape and pattern and hue: stunning, for all who can see. The irony: not lost on this artist who, before he moved deeply into photography and the cautionary beauty he could render from its potential, was a corporate lawyer for British Petroleum, defending that beleaguered company against litigation surrounding an oil-pipe explosion.

"That's right," says Jordan, nodding, a lopsided smile brightening his handsome features. "And of course, the general irony of my work is very uncomfortable to deal with. The pieces themselves are all printed on petroleum-based plastic paper, using petroleum-based inks, and they're laminated with petroleum-based surface laminate. They're framed in wood and put into wooden crates, and they travel around the country in a truck that leaves a thousand-mile-long line of diesel smoke behind it everywhere it goes. And I flew here in a jet to say that." He laughs, and his laughter is tinted with embarrassment and rue.

"I would guess," says your reporter, "that the effect these pieces probably have will far outweigh that footprint, though, right? Because how many thousands and, with the Internet, eventually millions of people are going to see this work and make changes in their lives? Even incremental changes, which will build up. I mean, the next time someone goes to throw something away – that cell phone, those bottles, a plastic bag – the visual memory is going to stop them, going to make them think. Because of the art you've taken pains to create here."

"Yeah," says the artist, "I'm like the guy at the party where everybody's clinking their glasses and having a good time, and I'm like: 'No, no, no! Everybody stop – we have to deal with the big bloody rhinoceros head over in the corner!'"

The work: labor-intensive, for both man and machine. The results: stunning, for all who can see. The impact: Only time will tell, as the world turns and the human-produced detritus that's confounding and killing so many of its inhabitants continues to pile up. But Jordan – with a bloody rhinoceros head to guide him – toils on.

"When you stand back from one of these pieces," he says, "you can't make out the individual images – you can only see the collective image that they add up to. And then, when you move closer, you see that the collective is made up of lots and lots of individuals. And when you get up really close, you can only see the individuals and you can't see the collective anymore. It's this sort of deep, zooming thing that we have to deal with as individuals in an incredibly complex society, in the world of 6.7 billion people. And I wrestle with the question – and I think we're all wrestling with it, in one way or another – of 'Do I matter?' And 'Does my consumption make a difference, to the point where I should make changes to my behavior?'

"Because it's easy to make the argument that, if I bother to turn off the light when I leave my studio, there are still whole cities of millions of people with their lights on all the time, so will it really make a difference if I try to reduce my own consumption?

"In the green movement, there's this kind of one-dimensional argument that you keep hearing, which is that Every Vote Counts and You, Too, Can Save the World. Which is true, really; but there's this other truth, and that's that each of us is one of that 6.7 billion. And another way you can look at it is: Of course every one of us matters. That's how we got into this giant mess in the first place: hundreds of millions of people behaving as if they don't matter. And the question I have is, 'How can we collectively begin to choose a different way, given that we're all individuals with freedom of choice?' That's the issue I'm trying to raise with all of this work."

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'That Summer Feeling'
Davis Gallery through August 28

By Wayne Alan Brenner
Austin Chronicle
July 2, 2010

A perfect way to capture that summer feeling, this show. The Davis Gallery's regulars, especially strong when it comes to landscapes, turn the walls of Bill Davis' multiroom space into vistas of Texas and further – but these are vistas you can peruse in easy, air-conditioned comfort while the G-type lone star blazing outside bakes the living tarnation out of every uncovered citizen.

Susu Meyer and Laurel Daniel frame the wilderness in oils that capture the serenely colorful majesty of what we might plan our vacations to escape into. Although that "serenely" has to be amended in the case of Meyer's Dancing Light, which seems to almost compete with Randolph Howard's nearby Distant Light for Impressionistic Landscape Most Likely To Be Mistaken for a Kaleidoscope Experiencing a Petit-Mal Seizure; gorgeous, we mean, but startling. Albert Bronson's digital photography eschews color for brilliant black and white, conflating the interiors and exteriors of a Western ghost town in several images along one room's long wall. The rural boonies get left behind with Sam Yeates' expertly shaded figurative paintings and with Bryan Cobble's large Suburbia, in which Cobble has rendered asphalt-textured parking-lot lines and chain-link fencing and the interlocking shadows of trees with such evocative, pastel-wielding skill that you'd think his hands were guided by built-in lasers.

Out of the country and into the city, David Leonard's expansive oils go all divine Polaroid on concrete jungles with their soaring, peopled verticals, the streets of San Francisco and New York and Chicago right before your eyes and your eyes compelled (especially by the canyon of light sparked by a foreground manhole cover in The Thirsty Scholar) to follow wherever they lead.

Now that you've entered the city, walk into an art gallery. What you might find there is what's also featured in this summer show at the Davis: Joseph Hammer's beautiful collages, built from old texts and other printed materials; his The Spectator, in fact, turns the mirror back on you, viewer, its omnium-gatherum of card-stock shards forming a lowercase "i," the base of which is dressed in black and the dot of which is as blue as the big Texas sky beyond these gallery walls.

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'Work by Robert Levers'
Flatbed Press through July 31

By Wayne Alan Brenner
Austin Chronicle
July 9, 2010

The artist Robert Levers, who for many years taught painting at the University of Texas, is, sadly, dead and gone. Well, he departed back in '91. But, as with all artists, there are traces of his life left behind in works, the more stately mansions built during a distinguished career, and, as with some artists, these traces – prints, drawings, and paintings – are sufficient in their composition to provide joy and provoke thought among those of us yet living.

"Sufficient" itself is insufficient to describe the effect of viewing Levers' creations, several of which are currently on display in the front lobby that welcomes you to Flatbed Press headquarters.

Your eyes may be first drawn to his pen-and-ink drawing titled Who Goes There? on the far wall: It's such a large piece, and the heavy, perfectly composed blacks resist inattention. It's an image of a group of ... what are they? Soldiers? Military scientists? Armed guards? All of them clad in uniforms and gas masks, barely discernible inside the cloud of toxicity in which they're warily standing, weapons ready. Who goes there? Is it the figures themselves whose identities are challenged, or is the question directed toward an unseen intruder, perhaps the very viewer of the artwork? The figures, masked and interchangeable, could be anyone, even imposters of a sort that would require weaponry to deal with: The shape-changing aliens from John Carpenter's The Thing, even, from a movie based on the John W. Campbell Jr. story called ... "Who Goes There?"

The closer wall of Flatbed's lobby holds three untitled ink-and-watercolor pieces, each presenting a colloquy of businessmen hovering, with skullish and partly disintegrated faces, over surreal scenes in a style reminiscent of the illustrations of Seymour Chwast, say, or Milton Glaser, but more surreal than what our Seventies-infected eyes are used to seeing from those masters. Monochrome these works are and as beautifully shaded as they are strange.

The biggest piece is beyond the display table in the lobby's center. The biggest piece is no fancy inkwork on paper, no watercolor wonderment: It's a full-color oil-on-canvas masterwork that takes up most of the large wall with its weird grouping of four men, one masked, one sitting, all rendered in painterly realism, gathered to form what the title tells us is an Honor Guard. Maybe, we could easily imagine, this is the honor guard that accompanies whoever the figures of Who Goes There? are protecting or protecting against.

Do you need an excuse to visit Flatbed World HQ and see again all the usual magnificent prints lining its long hallway – works by Julie Speed and Luis Jimenez and Bob Schneider and others? You could leverage the journey as that, but this small and elegant showing of Levers' work is, like life, for no matter who goes there, a worthy destination in itself.

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Blanton gears up for higher profile
After year on job, director hopes to boost image, add money for acquisitions.

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Saturday, July 10, 2010

The art at the Blanton Museum's "New Works for the Collection" exhibit tells a story.

But that story isn't necessarily about art. It's about money — or the lack thereof.

Of the 84 works on exhibit, only 20 were purchased with museum funds. The rest were donated.

Ned Rifkin, who took over as the director of the University of Texas museum one year ago this month, faces a big challenge on this anniversary: how to expand and raise the museum's status amid university budget cuts and the worst economic downturn in a generation.

"It's a very odd time to be trying to implement discernible change," Rifkin said. But that's what he plans to do. He and his staff have come up with a five-year strategic plan that he hopes will steer the nation's largest university art museum in terms of square footage into a new era.

The strategy centers on more fundraising from a wider base of donors. It also calls for streamlining programs and exhibits, altering the tradition-laden exterior of the building to better immediately identify it as an art museum, improving the visitor experience and positioning the Blanton to be the region's flagship museum.

"All museums are having to rethink themselves now," Rifkin said. "The times call for it."

The Blanton's plan comes as Austin's visual art scene is poised for major realignment.

In September, UT's art department will open the Visual Arts Center, a 22,000-square-foot space in the Art Building that will feature five galleries and host exhibits not just by UT art faculty members and students, but also by visiting international artists. The center is taking over the space that housed the Blanton until 2006.

Then in October, Arthouse, the arts center on Congress Avenue, will reopen after a $6.6 million architecturally adventurous renovation that will triple the gallery space to more than 20,000 square feet. Arthouse is known for presenting cutting-edge contemporary international art. (Meanwhile, the Austin Museum of Art remains in its temporary home in the lobby of an office building while its plans for a major facility of its own are on hold.)

It's time for the Blanton to raise its profile, Rifkin suggests.

"We can't do this without Austin, and we want (the city's) engagement," Rifkin said. "But (does Austin) really want a dynamic, vital art museum, and is that museum the Blanton? I want to make a case for the Blanton."

However, Rifkin wonders whether Austin is ready and willing to return the interest. "I think as Austin grows and deepens, hopefully people will see what (the Blanton) can offer and want to take a leadership role in supporting it," he said. "Yes, we're UT's museum of art, but that doesn't mean UT or the state is really supporting us to the extent that it also fully serves the community of Austin."

The museum's current budget is $5.8 million, down from $6.4 million in 2006, the year the Blanton opened the doors to the first building of its new two-building, $83.5 million complex, prominently perched on the south edge of campus.

About $2.1 million, or 36 percent, of the Blanton's budget comes from UT and the state. But the museum has to come up with the rest. About $1.6 million comes from grants, memberships and contributions. About $1.4 million comes from revenue generated by the Blanton's endowment of $30 million. And about $700,000 comes from admissions, museum shop sales and facility rentals.

Museum attendance held steady in 2009 at about 130,000, and the Blanton's membership roll totals 5,667.

"We don't necessarily have fewer donors, just substantially lower donations than we've had in the past," Rifkin said. "And UT has already gone through one across-the-board budget cut, and we've been warned to anticipate another. How that will affect the museum is hard to know until we know what the (budget cut) might be."

It's relatively rare for a university-based museum to aspire to be a city's flagship art destination. And the Blanton isn't directly comparable to many university art museums, much less flagship city museums such as the Kimbell in Fort Worth or Houston's Museum of Fine Arts.

Collegiate museums usually start as modest student-focused affairs within an existing art department, rely almost wholly on gifts of art and money from alumni and hence develop with collections that usually lack depth and are sometimes even eccentric.

"University museums aren't typically the places filled with great masterpieces," Rifkin said. They're "usually very idiosyncratic institutions."

The Blanton has fared better in its 47 years than many other university art museums and not just in terms of its big, new home, the biggest donation to which, $15 million, came from the Houston Endowment Inc. in honor of oilman and UT alum Jack S. Blanton. Blanton himself donated $5 million toward the new facility, and the late novelist James A. Michener donated $10 million.

The Blanton's collection of modern Latin American art is recognized as one of the best in the nation. Its collection of prints and drawings is one the finest in the region. And the museum has strong holdings in European art from the 14th century to the 18th.

But in financial terms, its status shrinks. Currently, endowment funds earmarked for acquisitions provide just a little more than $100,000 per year — small change in a global art market.

The Suida-Manning Collection of Renaissance and Baroque art, valued at $35 million, ranks as the Blanton's most important single acquisition to date. The Blanton paid $22 million for the collection in 1998, with descendants of the Suida-Manning family counting the remaining $13 million as a donation.

More recently, the Blanton has found support from a few philanthropists such as Austin residents and UT alumni Jeanne and Michael Klein, who have begun to make significant gifts of contemporary art. The Kleins, who made their fortune in oil, are recognized as some of the top private collectors in the world.

But even given the recent generosity of a few supporters, the Blanton can't compare to such collegiate museums as Harvard University's Art Museum, where in 2008 Emily Rauh Pulitzer, widow of newspaper scion Joseph Pulitzer Jr., gave $45 million in cash and nearly $200 million worth of paintings by Picasso, Modigliani, Giacometti and other top artists.

In Texas, the Blanton's resources also don't compare. Houston's Museum of Fine Art has an endowment of about $780 million, down from nearly $1 billion before the 2008 stock market crash. Fort Worth's Kimbell Art Museum derives about 65 percent of its $12 million annual budget from an endowment that currently stands at about $398 million. And last year, the Kimbell made world headlines when it purchased — for an undisclosed sum — Michelangelo's first known painting, "The Torment of Saint Anthony," a work so rare no expert in the art world would put a value on it.

"We're severely undercapitalized," Rifkin said. And he knows it's his job to find more money. "This is a more challenging job than I've ever had before."

Rifkin, 60, came to the Blanton from Washington, where he had been the undersecretary for art at the Smithsonian Institution, the top administrator overseeing eight museums. He resigned from the Smithsonian in 2008 and was taking a year to pursue independent projects when he accepted the Blanton job. He replaced Jesse Otto Hite, who retired in 2008 after 30 years with the Blanton.

Earlier jobs included stints as director at Houston's Menil Collection and Atlanta's High Museum and as an art professor at UT-Arlington. At the University of Michigan in the 1970s, he wrote his doctoral dissertation on avant-garde filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni. In addition to his position at the Blanton, Rifkin holds a professorship in UT's art and art history department. He plans to teach a seminar this year.

Rifkin has spent much of his first year getting to know the myriad social circles that orbit around UT. He is a sports fan, having played basketball as an undergraduate at Syracuse University. So rubbing elbows with alumni at UT home games has been part of his circuit.

Still, Rifkin admits there is much to learn about his new hometown, where live music and film dominate the arts scene.

"Austin's visual arts have the potential to be as important as the music scene here, but it will take some time," he said. "My goal is to make a reach into the community and make the case for why (art) is valuable for the community to support."

Rifkin also realizes that much of what people know about the Blanton is the storied architectural controversy that resulted in the museum's conventional Spanish Revival style and a building many don't recognize as an art museum. Architectural experts advocated a modern design, but university regents favored a more traditional style in line with the campus's older buildings.

Rifkin acknowledges that in terms of a building, he has to make do with what's already been done.

"Some of the feedback we got (during interviews with visitors) is that people don't even know this is an art museum," Rifkin said. "And that's the aftermath of the decision of the regents to make (the building) look integrated with the rest of the campus. What (the regents) might not have realized is that they were taking away one of the major levers a museum can offer: a sensational building."

To address that issue, the strategic plan calls for more visible banners on the building's exterior and better signs on nearby streets. Rifkin and the Blanton curators also will begin to consider what kind of sculpture or multimedia artwork such as video projections might be suitable for the plaza or other outside areas.

"This building really needs some élan," Rifkin said. "We need to ... make it more inviting and visible."

Inside, Rifkin wants to step up efforts to make museum information immediately available to visitors. He also has asked curators to rethink how and where exhibits can be presented, as well as make better use of hallways and other spaces. Rifkin said the popular Petrobelli Altarpiece exhibit in last fall became a case study for future efforts. It featured a large-scale reconstructed multipiece Italian Renaissance altarpiece painting by Veronese, on loan from several museums. It was a one-painting blockbuster that drew in crowds.

"It may be time for doing fewer things, but with more creativity," Rifkin said. "I want the Blanton to be not just a place but a force for creativity and culture."

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Talking trash with art
America's excess waste becomes copies of famous masterpieces

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Saturday, July 17, 2010

What does mass consumption look like?

We might read about the quantity of refuse our consumer-driven lifestyle produces — millions of plastic bottles, cell phones, brown paper bags and aluminum cans. We might even see charts or graphs showing the tons of detritus we produce.

But do we know what that detritus really looks like?

Chris Jordan does. Or at least the Seattle-based artist offers to show us a means of comprehending the staggering waste we produce with his monumentally sized photographs.

Two of Jordan's photo series make up the exhibit "Running the Numbers," now at the Austin Museum of Art. The exhibit is on loan from the Washington State University Museum of Art.

Using either a large-format camera or the magic of digital editing, Jordan transforms numbers too big to comprehend — the 2 million plastic beverage bottles used every five minutes in the U.S., the 426,000 cell phones discarded every day — into huge, alluring images that are part documentary, part environmental call to action and part beautiful picture.

The exhibit begins with half a dozen photographs from Jordan's series "Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption." Shot between 2003 and 2005, the series focuses on recycling centers, industrial yards and shipping container sites that we rarely see.

Jordan approaches these locales as if they were the noble natural landscapes immortalized by such photographers as Ansel Adams and Elliot Porter, capturing details with precision, carefully regarding the composition of each scene. Indeed, Jordan's obvious references to the tradition of landscape photography — and to landscape painting, for that matter — are deliberate. He wants to you to confuse the desolate with the beautiful, inspiring awe and horror at the stunning amount of our waste.

As Jordan once said, his purpose is "to raise the consciousness of the viewer so that they start thinking more about the collective that we're all a part of."

Jordan trained as a lawyer and practiced for 10 years as a corporate litigation attorney. (He completed his undergraduate degree here in Austin at the University of Texas.) Then in 2003, at the age of 40, he resigned from the bar, formally disassociating himself from the legal profession to pursue his lifelong interest in photography.

The work of Jordan is widely collected and exhibited. (One of the photos on display at AMOA is from the museum's permanent collection.) And Jordan is as much a media personality as an artist, a frequent environmental commentator appearing on everything from "The Rachael Ray Show" to the World Economic Forum in Dubai to CNN.

The bulk of the exhibit at AMOA comes from Jordan's series "Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait." For "Running," Jordan used raw data on consumption to drive each of his images: the 1.4 million brown paper bags used every hour in the U.S.; 380,000 kilowatt hours of electricity, the amount wasted by inefficient residential use; or the 2.3 million orange prison uniforms representing the number of Americans incarcerated annually.

Shooting relatively smaller quantities of these things — maybe just a few hundred brown paper bags, for example — Jordan then built a larger image digitally, carefully ordering the composition to a specific effect.

As in his earlier series, Jordan mimics art history. In his hands, 106,000 aluminum cans — the numbers disposed of in the U.S. every 30 seconds — becomes Seurat's famous "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884," the pointillist masterpiece depicting civilized Parisian society at play. And in "Skull With Cigarettes," 200,000 packs of cigarettes — equal to the number of Americans who die from cigarette smoking every six months — become the distinctive memento mori skull image that frequents art history. And those 2 million plastic bottles? Jordan pools them together to suggest one of Monet's water lily paintings.

Jordan's deliberate art-historical references start to feel stretched thin as the "Running the Numbers" series progresses. (The current exhibit features 16; Jordan has made more than two dozen in the series and continues to add to it.) However, Jordan is intent on making his point deliberately.

And he makes the point loud and clear: The sheer volume of the waste our consumer culture generates is appalling. But ordered and visualized in a specific way, that waste becomes horrifyingly beautiful.

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Covert Stories
Workman Gallery presents the transgressive art of Ian Shults

By Wayne Alan Brenner
Austin Chronicle
July 23, 2010

The artist Ian Shults, a disarmingly young man working out of his self-built Eastside studio just down the road from the Blue Genie Art Industries headquarters that employed him for 10 years, is gleefully fucking with your sense of midcentury nostalgia.

We say "disarmingly" because of the skill evidenced in his paintings and the paintings' sense of history: You expect to encounter some graying art-geezer before you meet him and are taken aback to see what looks to be one of the heavier sk8r dudes you had to dodge on your way to the painter's solid digs. We say "fucking with" because the 1950s to 1960s scenes of social transgression that Shults renders in a vintage-paperback style are partially obscured by blotches of acrylics or by a stuttering of the images in consideration, an almost cubist treatment of the settings the human figures are captured among. And we say "gleefully" because you don't do a thing, constantly, unless you're glad to be doing it or you feel you have no other choice, and Shults, who could instead be chilling with a Sazerac at the East Side Show Room or tearing up some club with his punk band, the Ends, spends so many of his hours strategically applying pencil and pigment to panels. Certainly almost all of his hours since January, when he began preparing a new series for his first show at Wally Workman Gallery on the (Shall we say tonier? Oh, let's, and pass the canapes.) west side of town.

A year ago, although Shults was a decent painter doing pretty interesting work, this solo show might've seemed like Wally Workman was doing a bit of a favor for the artist by providing a new audience and a recognizable whiff of prestige. As of now, from what we've seen, the bigger favor the canny Workman is doing may be to her own gallery: This man Shults, toiling diligently to expand the parameters of his craft and his aesthetics, is creating work that few could happily ignore. This man Shults, although we're fortunate that he'll also remain in Austin with his wife and his community of friends and his live-music stomping grounds, is going places.

We, on the other hand, merely went to his studio to conduct this interview:

Austin Chronicle: It looks like you've deconstructed covers from 1950s paperbacks – all those lurid images, the drifters-in-motels sort of thing. Do you paint the complete image and then subtract portions of it, or do you leave out certain parts and ...?

Ian Shults: I kind of do both. I'm painting everything, all the colors, all over the place. Then I go back after I'm done with that; I start bringing the background colors into the people, and putting in some of what I left out before, and so on. After the basic image, it's just about being spontaneous. I do tend to make a complete form before I go at it with the blobs of paint, but I don't know what's going to be left there when it's done.

AC: Where do you take your images from?

IS: If I don't draw them myself, I search through photo blogs, nonstop, hours and hours a night. There are some weird photo blogs out there; you've got to thumb through a lot of porn and other things, and you can find these old-timey pictures. Like, this one is from one of those vintage Italian porn magazines that are done in comic-book form. Or sometimes I'll go out and shoot people at parties and stuff. So I'll get the basic images, and then I'll screw with them in Photoshop, add what I need to add and draw what I need to draw to make them better. Some of them have more splashes and nastiness, and I'm trying to do panoramic backgrounds behind the figures in some.

AC: What's your training, or is this a natural talent that you've added to?

IS: I'm self-taught, really. I drew and sculpted when I was a kid, did a bunch of graffiti. Then I got into the Skagen-Brakhage company. Rory [Skagen] has been kind of my mentor from the beginning. I've known him 14 years or so; he got me directly out of high school. I showed him some of my stupid drawings, and he kept me around and gave me jobs to do. I was a part of Blue Genie from the beginning, and I wound up doing a lot of the design work and pretty much all of the sculpting. I left there because, well, the business was changing, and I really wanted to do something on my own. Took me a couple of years just to build this place. And then I kind of fooled around, I had a few different series of paintings, but this one, this style came out for the East Austin Studio Tour last year. I wanted to do something completely different. It's really my first complete body of work.

AC: What did your stuff look like before this?

IS: It was more like a mixture of realism and cartoons. I was more into doing superrealistic stuff, but once you've got that down, it gets kind of boring just by itself.

AC: Well, this stuff you're showing me, your realistic stuff and the added cartoons, from just a year ago .... The figures you have in this current series look even better – magnitudes better. Is it just that you've been practicing so much?

IS: Well, yeah, you do it and you learn. And I've worked at it pretty steadily: I've been painting every day since November. I paint angularly, so I wanted to work on that, I wanted to work on my brushstrokes a lot more, and now my style is looser than it was before, but there's still a lot of information there.

AC: Yeah, with these new ones you can see every single brushstroke, they're like wide, flat planes of color. And the older ones are more detailed, with much smaller ... but they don't look as basically real. So, all this time painting, is this your day job now?

IS: No, I'm also a bartender.

AC: Dude. Where do you bartend?

IS: Billy's on Burnet. Of course, the dream is to be painting full-time, but the pay is good, and I have four days off of work each week, so it gives me time to paint.

AC: And then you get to go and bring people booze. Sounds like a good break.

IS: [laughs] No – I hate it, I hate it. I dread going to work every day. When I know I could be doing this instead, it's kind of hard to go in there and deal with customers. Even when I was working at Blue Genie, because it was full-time, I found it really hard to paint when I got home. I was just so drained.

AC: There's so often a distinction made between fine art and commercial art. And people would probably call this series "fine art" but say that your work for Blue Genie was "just" commercial art. What about you? What if somebody offered you thousands of dollars to do a painting for a movie poster, and you had a bunch of leeway but definitely had to include, say, Brad Pitt's face in it somewhere, would you do that?

IS: Well, seriously, I might do it. But doing anything that somebody else wants you to do is ... pretty tiresome. I want to do what I want to do.

AC: And what do you want to do?

IS: Right now I feel I need to have a cohesive body of work. But I'm also finding things that I want to get back to in the future. Like when I'm working on these paintings and I've painted the head of a figure but the rest of the body is still just drawn: I think that's pretty cool. I'm thinking about exploring that in the future, with more line work, with some colors filled in here and there, maybe more deconstruction.

AC: All of these paintings seem so narrative, like there's a whole story coming to and leaving each scene you've captured.

IS: Yeah, that's the idea. I take images that make me feel something, and I try to paint them in a way that will make other people feel something too. There are stories, but you can make them whatever you want. I couldn't say what, particularly, is going on in each one. But it's implied that something weird is going on.

AC: Mostly sex and money, it looks like. And how much do these paintings go for?

IS: I'm thinking that the big ones will be going for about three grand. And we haven't talked about the smaller ones yet.

AC: At that price, they should go like hotcakes.

IS: Yeah, although I don't think I could make a living doing this, showing just in Austin. But I think this could be a good branching-out spot.

AC: Especially with the Workman Gallery exposure. Have you shown there before?

IS: No, this is the first time. Wally called me up last December and offered me a show, a solo show in July.

AC: Damn, man. Did she see your stuff at EAST, or what?

IS: No, she – well, I brought in a couple of prints and showed her what I was doing. So she hadn't seen an actual painting until recently. But a good friend of mine caters for her openings a lot of the time, and she told Wally, "You should check out this Ian Shults guy." And Wally said she'd heard my name before – other people had mentioned me to her – and so she called me up that day, 10 minutes later. And I was like, "Oh my god, this is crazy."

AC: What do you think of the current art scene in general in this town?

IS: It's real weird coming to the gallery situation from just, like, the normal Eastside situation. I've been involved in big group shows around here, because me and Michael Schliefke put on a couple of them, and they've been huge successes, but not really selling a ton. It seems like, over where Wally is, that's where the people are interested in actually buying art. The Eastside has an incredible amount of awesome artists, so I think the scene is definitely here, but the buying scene is somewhere else.

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L. Nowlin Gallery makes a splash in black and white

By Luke Quinton
Austin American-Statesman
Friday, July 23, 2010

Lesley Nowlin's gallery consists of two little rooms with a lot of impact.

Up a few stairs off West Sixth Street, the door opens onto the main exhibit space, whose gray walls are covered with photographs for "The Portrait," L. Nowlin Gallery's latest exhibit.

Nowlin, with short hair and a tiny silver nose stud, has an aura of confident determination as she sits at her desk, enveloped by the images she has selected. She is thrilled by her latest exhibition. "It's so diverse. This is my favorite show that I've done so far."

The diversity stands out, but so does Nowlin's eye for images with a forceful presence. They are by turns mystical, transcendent, gut-wrenching and comical. Most are black and white, and they're framed in silvery steel or blond or red wood, some thin and shallow, others set deep.

Nowlin, a well-known Austin photographer, began working as a gallerist in May of last year, after being approached by the Wally Workman Gallery, which joins the L. Nowlin Gallery at the hip.

The walls are mostly stripped of explanations, titles or lists of materials, giving them a streamlined look. Surrounded by the forms of so many provocative people, you realize the unique space a portrait occupies. "I love the face," Nowlin says. "I think it can tell so many stories."

The works average between $300 and $500, with a few that fairly can be called bargains. Take Austinite Megan Carney's stunning "Dad, Everyday," a vivid black-and-white image of her father and his reflection, as he dives into a glassy swimming pool, surrounded by foliage. It's at once moving and comical.

Then there are Nowlin's favorites, by London's Giuditta Del Vecchio. Two large, grainy, almost sepia portraits that came from a Proustian exercise: the subject stared at a picture from his childhood while the artist captured a long exposure. "It's eerie, beautiful and haunting," says Nowlin.

Raised in Austin, Nowlin moved to Boston after graduating college, but New England didn't quite take, so she used that time to photograph her own projects, like war protests and twins, an ongoing project for Nowlin, who's a twin herself.

Now she's been back for six years. "I came back because I needed connections, I needed work. I wanted to really focus on photography and not bartend or waitress," Nowlin says.

Nowlin continues to shoot her own works, and has recently embarked on a third business: mixed-media commissions.

Nowlin credits the East Austin Studio Tour with helping her get organized. "It just made me put my work together in frames and put a show together on my own."

It also led to her meeting with Rachel Haggarty of Wally Workman. When the F8 Gallery was about to close, Workman approached Nowlin and suggested she'd be a good fit for the space.

A year later, Nowlin is still enthusiastic. "It's about the print. I love the print. I love making an image come to life on paper, and it's purposeful and it's direct, and it's art. I like that idea, and that completion and that creation."

There remain some challenges. "I don't know how to sell art; I'm just learning," Nowlin says. "I just know what I like and I know what I want to put up here." Part of the challenge, she says, is locating clients who "love and want to buy black-and-white photography."

The latest group exhibit seems to have set a new spark for the gallery. "The Portrait" was L. Nowlin's first open call, and its first group show. She saw 200 submissions from 10 different countries, slicing it down to 40 photographers, 50 images and six countries.

Upcoming is a show of Polly Chandler's Polaroids, which will go up and then come down for a week so the L. Nowlin can show work from Bruce Davidson, the iconic Magnum photographer, after which the Chandler show goes back on the wall.

The momentum continued with this month's opening party, which Nowlin says "was so packed, it was uncomfortable." The old house got a little toasty. The two galleries make for a big gathering —"We ran out of 600 cups, that's all I know," she said.

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