The South Texas Series

I remember occasionally sitting on a rise in the ranch overlooking a vast valley and seeing numerous remolinos, dust devils, kicking up dust in the distance.  To this day, the image remains fresh in my mind, fraught with meaning.  It is probably images of remolinos that comprised the first works in the South Texas Series.  The remolinos, sun-generated hot air currents, became a metaphor for, among other things, perhaps “the sands of time” that cover and preserve everything.  But I also felt a need to include real items in this series and started using actual South Texas dirt and sand and grass and mesquite leaves in these new works.  That led to the idea of constructions made of found materials, old scrap lumber and an assortment of metal scraps, old, rusty, shot-up tin cans, rusted corrugated metal and even car hoods from the junk-yard.  Cranky materials pose technical difficulties but I am always up to challenges. I do a variety of work, some modes more scripted than others, but I have a need for doing less scripted work and cut loose, be improvisational and this series affords me the opportunity.

One such piece is “Canonization in South Texas by an Imaginary Pope”, a quasi-religious piece featuring the image of Don Pedrito Jaramillo, a legendary South Texas folk figure, a faith healer, a curandero.  It is a mixed media painting on an old car hood, pointing up and corrugated panels on each side.  It was once suggested that this was “rasquachi” art, a term that had crept into the lexicon of Chicano Art.  Basically, it means art created from humble, kitschy, lowly or scrap materials.  In my family, the term “rasquache”, spelled with an “e” at the end, not an “i”, was used derisively to describe something as mediocre.  I don’t consider a car hood or corrugated metal as lowly or mediocre at all.  “Rasquachismo” was never my intent for that piece though I am indeed a fan of some “rasquachi” art.  The term “rasquachi” does make me uneasy, though, because it can create a stereotype if broadly applied.  Maybe “el rasquatch” lurks out there….

Pablo Picasso was one of the first artists to elevate lowly, “rasquache” scrap materials to great art.  In the collection of The McNay Museum in San Antonio is a Picasso collage from 1912 called “Guitar, Sheet Music and Wine Glass”.  It is a favorite I visit every now and then and I have a long history with it.  It was during a college art class field trip to San Antonio in the mid 1960s that I first went to The McNay, my first visit to a real art museum, and it was that Picasso collage that, for me, became emblematic of excellence, elegance and sophistication, real art by a famous artist.

Almost 40 years later, in 1999-2000 I felt honored to have a retrospective exhibition at the McNay.  Then, in fairly recent times, I was notified by the head curator at the McNay that a piece of mine in their collection, a mixed media assemblage of old weathered plywood and bits of  rusted metal and incised images called “Cono’s Christmas Buck” had been selected to be in an exhibition titled “Recycled, Repurposed, Reborn:  Collage and Assemblage”.  The centerpiece of the exhibit was Picasso’s “Guitar, Sheet Music and Wine Glass”.  I felt I had come full circle.

So….circling back to our subject, my South Texas musings are a reinvention of what we commonly see and take for granted in this part of the country and I, as a result, have come to a better understanding of the parallels that universalize our existence and enable us to relate from our cultural nook to a grander whole.

Though I have no beliefs myself, I have, in my own way, respectfully dealt with the pervasive religiosity native and unique to the area.  Other related areas of exploration and expression have been the ecology, problems of the borderlands, immigration and that dreadful border wall.