HOLLY JOHNSON GALLERY

RANDY TWADDLE
Back to the Garden

November 16 – December 28, 2024

Holly Johnson Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Randy Twaddle: Back to the Garden, an exhibition of recent work on paper by the celebrated Texas artist. An opening reception for the artist will be held on Saturday, October 19th, from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. The exhibition continues through Saturday, December 28th.

Because of its beauty and potential for symbolism, Flora has long been a primary subject matter of still life painting, often as an allegory of mortality. In Randy Twaddle’s drawings, the flora depicted have been dead long enough to be largely devoid of color and the uniform morphology of a living plant, akin to those found in an herbarium. The figures in the drawings – stems, seed pods, vines – are drawn in charcoal, and though smudges from the artist’s hands are occasionally apparent, the medium is largely controlled. The grounds comprise poured coffee, an application more vulnerable to chance and gravity. The grounds work as backdrops or in some cases appear almost as shadows. In these drawings, Twaddle merges the objectivity of the herbarium with the visual and conceptual power of the still life to express a personal perspective coming to terms with the inevitability of death.

Twaddle writes about Back to the Garden — “Four years ago I moved from a loft apartment in Houston’s midtown to a house on forty acres outside Hempstead, Texas to run The John Fairey Garden, an internationally recognized botanic garden and cultural landscape created by artist and plant explorer, John Gaston Fairy.

The Garden and nursery take up roughly fifteen acres of the property, the rest is a mix of meadows and woods through which a spring-fed creek meanders. The move reintroduced me to an environment with which I am familiar; growing up in rural Missouri I spent countless hours outdoors, fishing, rock hunting, and exploring the woods, creeks, and rivers near my home.

My understanding of beauty was formed against that backdrop. For the first twenty years of my life I had little opportunity to apply it. Then, on the first day of class during my sophomore year in college, a professor said, ‘I will teach you jewelry making techniques and their relationship to balance in nature.’

Forty seven years later, I consider it good fortune to spend most of my days in the type of wonderland that nurtured my worldview; this time not as an innocent child but as a sixty-seven year old man making an effort to embrace the fact I’m much closer to my end than my beginning.

Toward the end of my mother’s hospice care, skin draped the bones of her fingers like a negligee. Its murky translucence enthralled me with a pull conventional beauty seldom possesses.

While alive and healthy, a plant’s leaves are virtually identical; death then bestows upon each an idiosyncratic elegance.

I think of these drawings as a petition whispered to the universe that a peculiar elegance might someday preside over my own transformation.”

Randy Twaddle, born in 1957 in Elmo, Missouri received a Bachelor of Fine Art degree from Northwest Missouri State University (1980) and a Master of Fine Art degree from the University of Houston (1996). He is currently the Executive Director of The John Fairey Garden Conservation Foundation in Hempstead, Texas. He co-founded and founded the branding and communications firms, ttweak, and Small Town, respectively. Twaddle has maintained a multi-disciplinary visual art practice for forty one years including drawings, paintings, prints, sculpture, textile design, rug design, graphic design, and musical and spoken performance.

Since the early 1980’s his work has been exhibited throughout Texas, as well as in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and New York. He has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Cultural Arts Council of Houston Harris County Artist Award, an Award in the Visual Arts, and an Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough Award from the Dallas Museum of Art.

His work is in the permanent collections of Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts; Archer M. Huntington Gallery, University of Texas, Austin, Texas; Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas; Frito-Lay, Inc., Dallas, Texas; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, Texas; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, Louisiana; The SBC Collection of Twentieth Century American Art, San Antonio, Texas; The University of Houston, Houston, Texas; and Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

DAVID AYLSWORTH
The Sun is as Big as a Yellow Balloon

November 16 – December 28, 2024

Holly Johnson Gallery is pleased to present The Sun is as Big as a Yellow Balloon, an exhibition of new paintings by David Aylsworth, while also marking the artist’s seventh solo show with the gallery. The exhibit opens Saturday, September 7, with a reception from 5 – 7 pm and continues through November 9.

David Aylsworth is an abstract painter who, throughout his career, has deftly embraced ambiguity in the painterly process. Characterizing his painting as purely nonobjective, however, is not exactly right. In this new body of work, the artist captures the awe of bearing witness to environments both real and imagined through the sensory experience of the picture plane. Overlapping forms and wide expanses hint at the landscape with vast horizon lines to suggest receding space. His choice of color – noticeably not naturalistic – plucks the viewer from the landscape and returns them squarely to the formalist qualities of oil on canvas.

The artist has spent years cultivating his process – approaching his paintings with instinct and curiosity. His compositions unfold without a premeditated study as a continuous cycle of actions and reactions. The seeming nonchalance radiating from his shapes and palette is in fact a purposeful irreverence. Imperfection is embedded in his method, as edges are never quite smooth, colors are scumbled or applied wet-on-wet, and surfaces expose thinly veiled revisions.

Regarding the exhibition’s title and many of his painting’s titles, Aylsworth recently elaborated, “My titles are mostly from show tunes which have meant something personal to me. Most people I know do not listen to this kind of music as often as I do, so I feel in a way that I have personal ownership of it. I admire how lyricists craft words to match the music, and I make spaces in the paintings that in my mind are largely theatrical. The lyrics allow me to express emotions that I cannot express in another way. Words frame images in my paintings in the way that they give form to the music that I enjoy. I also like it when the lyrics seem to not have a direct relationship to the painting, so the title can add another dimension beyond the painting itself.”

Art historian Sandra Zalman, Ph.D. writes about Aylsworth’s work, “Where there are brushstrokes, drips, clotting, and scraping, this process if foregrounded. But it is also evident in the most discursive way that shapes coalesce to articulate a larger story of mediation – the fine line between form and figure, or plane and ground, which speaks to the very human quality of fining opportunity in uncertainty, near connections, qualifications, and do-overs. The painting may play, and tease, and flirt, but their force derives from the quiet, unassuming way they confront these larger concerns.”

Aylsworth earned a BFA from Kent State University (1989) and was a Core Fellow Resident of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1989-1991). His paintings are included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Dallas Museum of Art; the El Paso Museum of Art; and the Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi. Aylsworth was the subject of a ten-year survey, Either/And, organized by the Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Beaumont, TX, and traveled to the Galveston Arts Center (2017). His paintings were also included in Painting: A Love Story at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (2014) and Working in the Abstract: Rethinking the Literal, Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2011). Additionally, many articles about his work have been published in noteworthy publications such as ArtLies, Art in America, The Dallas Morning News, and Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Aylsworth lives and works in Houston, Texas.

 Holly Johnson Gallery
1845 Levee Street @ Turtle Creek Blvd
214.369.0169,
Gallery hours are 10 to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday, and by appointment.
hollyjohnsongallery.com.