The past few days have been exceptionally busy and interesting. It is strange to know that we have not been back in Houston for even one week. Yesterday I went to an art school to shadow for the day to get a sense of the position. It was a job I applied for online in the last week in which one of the preliminary questions was : “Can you paint realistically?” I took this to be a good sign and sent a small sample of my realism portfolio over. Less than 10 minutes later I got a call from the woman who owns the school essentially telling me I have the job if I wanted it. We arranged for me to spend a day at the school getting a feel for it before I dove in deeper, I’m glad we did that because it wasn't a good fit.
I wont spend much time dissecting the minutia of it all but essentially the existence of the school is predicated on helping kids fortify their college applications by having them participate in nationwide art competitions. A few things: none of these kids want to be here, there is no actual “teaching” happening here, and the entire thing is based on winning art competitions to help you get into a good school for engineering, medicine or law. It was one of those sorts of things. The extent of the teaching was more so giving unsolicited advice to kids making art who don't want to make art in hopes of winning a competition.
The nationwide high school "scholastic" (I think they’re called) competitions fascinated me. One of the other teachers (I’ll talk about him shortly) showed me a high quality publication featuring all the winners of the 2025 school year. There were some impressive works. The competition was divided across all sorts of lines like photography, conceptual works, painting, ceramics etc. Some of the work really stood out to me however I don’t have any documentations to share from the impressions they made on me - there was a conceptual work specifically that has really stuck with me. The idea of being a “top of the heap” artist and/or artistic thinker as a teenager is obviously very cool.
Anyway this was the school. It was really a forced (art) work labor camp out in the suburbs of Houston. The last note of the experience was that it was this enormous suburban home that had been entirely converted into artists studios. Imagine a space designed to be a residence but with no domestic objects and instead art supplies, clay, paint and easels in every room of the house. I will give them props for that, if only their students wanted to be there making art and weren't instead forced to have every single hour of their young lives structured with activities exclusively predicated on them getting into good colleges to get good jobs etc etc. At one point I asked the boss lady if anyone was planning on going to art school and she laughed and said No.
Last, last thing: It was a good environment for me to test my creative values in the sense that I was encouraged by the boss lady and the teacher I was shadowing to essentially get all up in everybody’s business while they reluctantly made their paintings. Essentially give unsolicited advice and criticism to the kids, and I just absolutely refused to do it. There was no chance in hell I was going to interfere in their creative processes. And this is why when I left the owner was as unimpressed with me as I was with the school. So that was that.
Afterwards I went right to my small municipal mural project and finished that up. The last few days have been spent painting an electrical box in West Houston and it was really enjoyable, not because the art is that exciting but it's always nice to be out and about getting paid well to paint. What’s funny - and I only disclose this because no one reads this - is that Magdalene had made this design years and years ago when we were living in Oaxaca and she was learning graphic design in Illustrator. So this design that I painted was actually hers and was profoundly silly (bad). But nevertheless it was chosen by this west Houston district. It really reinforces the notion that a) no one (not no one obviously, but many) don’t care about quality art - or are at least not able to discern the difference. And b) that there is this weird revolving door of money that essentially needs to be burned between the local districts (government) and these contractors or artists who get the work. There is so much money out there in public art it is truly mind boggling and obviously very intoxicating for those who are pursuing it. I see on some of these “Call to artists” catalogs hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars being given for X sculpture project and Y mural project. I am in the throes of applying for things like this as well as gallery submissions and things like the Amarillo Biennale which I spoke about last week.
The last thing I wanted to mention today was in line with the previous topic - the art school. One of the “professors” was an 80 year old man who paints, and paints somewhat decently well. What I found interesting and somewhat tragic was his frankness about his impending mortality. I find it exceptionally sad (the artist in me) to think about someone in the last years of their life with an urgency to make work but running out of time. Every art documentary I’ve watched about a Monet or a Gauguin for example, a figure whose body is failing but creative energies are still flowing, I empathize with immensely. Perhaps because I know one day I am likely to find myself in that same position. Anyway this is maybe the first person I have ever met in real life who is laboring under that reality. I will honor him by sharing this painting of a Boston Terrier:
That fact aside I did not find him nor his paintings to be significantly interesting. He had made a decent career painting horses and pets for clients in the states and in his native Colombia however his career seemed to very much be on the downturn. He was still trying to “hustle” his art in his 80’s. I won't find myself in this situation. He was also having to work at this atrocious school and drive all over Houston to the locations of the school to essentially breathe down the students necks to make art. I feel bad for him because obviously he’s doing this because he needs to and not because he wants to.
After writing this I will go to the East Side of Houston to oversee the very delayed culmination of a large collaborative mural project. At the Harrisburg Art Museum, on the backside, there are probably 12 or 15 extremely large garage doors where the artists have spelled out Houston Texas - with each door being a letter, and each door being an individual artist’s piece. Last summer I painted a design which was exclusively designed to be letter fill - it was a grouping of Cheetos chips painted exclusively with orange dots on a blue ground in a high contrast light. The design didn't make sense as its own thing as much as it was intended to be the letter fill for the space O. Today after one year of this thing being done I will go paint the O and finally get to see this project (or at least my door) culminate.
0 comments