"This is my twenty sixth show at Wally Workman. During the three decades I’ve shown here Austin has changed from easygoing college town, famously portrayed in the film “Slacker,” to a major metropolis, with all the allure of a big city and many of the headaches. This gallery grew from a small frame shop to a full-time exhibition space, then a national presence.

My own work grew in scale as the years unfolded, from modest pastels at first to the big six footers in the current exhibition. But my artistic concerns remain largely unchanged. I create paintings which toggle back and forth between the real and the imagined, with an emphasis on light. My goal is to make light tangible and convincing, but also to free it from its strictly logical or descriptive function. For example, the Mesa painting in this show has one formation washed in warm, later afternoon light, while its neighbor is sunk in inexplicable twilight. Or a nighttime path beside a river has a spot-lit section but no visible light source.

The light in my studios, both here and in Taos, changes a lot during the day as the sun tracks, and again as the seasons change. This led me to a prolonged experiment. Is it possible to make a painting that shows well under any lighting conditions—extreme raking light, flat mid- afternoon light, halogen glare? The answer was ultimately no. Lighting matters in painting as much as it does in an Avedon fashion shoot. But the many variations of paint texture and viscosity that I used in my long experiment paid off in other ways. I learned control over the brush, how to add sparkle with impasto, how to keep a flat area flat. I became “more painterly,” as one of my wise teachers so often implored.

It is impossible to know how people will respond to any given painting. We are all so different in our perceptions. For some of my viewers a painting might work as a splash of needed color, or a reminder of how big the sky gets if you look. But my hope is that some patrons will be able to see these images as a kind of doorway to meditation, or daydreaming, or flight of fancy.

That’s what they do for me and my hope is to share that experience with you."

(Text by Will Klemm)