Artists from Texas

Harold_Joe_Waldrum

Harold Joe Waldrum (August 23, 1934 – December 13, 2003) was an American artist whose abstract works depict color studies especially of the old adobe churches of Northern New Mexico. He also used a Polaroid SX-70 camera to photograph many of the churches, initially as part of the process in creating his paintings. However, this collection of thousands of photographs became a body of work in and of itself and was exhibited at several galleries and museums.
Before pursuing an artistic career, Waldrum graduated from Western State College and became a public school teacher in Kansas, where he taught music and art for a decade-and-a-half. After receiving a graduate degree from Fort Hays State College in 1970, he became a full-time painter, moving to New Mexico, the focal point of much of his work.
In the later part of his career, Waldrum endeavored to preserve the historic churches that were the inspiration for his paintings. In 1985, he founded an organization to promote this goal and produced a series of documentaries about the deterioration and ultimately demolition of the churches. In the 1980s and 90s, he collaborated with a few printmakers to create a collection of aquatint etchings and linocuts in a style very similar to his paintings.
Waldrum died on December 13, 2003, and he is buried in Columbus, New Mexico, a village near the Mexico–United States border. His works are held in the collections of the Museum of New Mexico, the Palm Springs Art Museum, the Albuquerque Museum, and the Harwood Foundation of Taos, New Mexico.

Jack_Tippit

Jack Tippit (October 19, 1923 – October 14, 1994) was an American cartoonist whose work includes the comic strip Amy, which he produced from 1964 through 1991.

Mel_Casas

Melesio "Mel" Casas (November 24, 1929 – November 30, 2014) was an American artist, activist, writer and teacher. He is best known for a cycle of complex, large-scale paintings characterized by cutting wit, incisive cultural and political analysis, and verbal and visual puns that he called Humanscapes, which were painted between 1965 and 1989. Only a few of these Humanscapes address Chicano topics, though they are his most famous paintings, and "have appeared repeatedly in books and exhibitions" and "are rightfully regarded as formative icons of the Chicano art movement." Many of the Humanscape paintings, by contrast, are little known, as is much of the work Casas produced in the following quarter century.
Journalists frequently note that Casas uses paintings to "address cultural stereotypes." However, few of his Humanscape paintings (only six) explicitly treat Chicano topics, and few of those treat stereotypes: "Casas rarely dealt with ethnicity or stereotypes in an explicit manner in his 150+ Humanscape cycle of paintings (1965-1989). Two of his greatest paintings Humanscape 62 (Brownies of the Southwest) (1970) and Humanscape 68 (Kitchen Spanish) (1973), are brilliant and complex expositions of stereotypic attitudes. His Southwestern Clichés, the last 35 of his Humanscape paintings, of course deal with clichés, but only two include stereotypic images: Humanscape 135 (#2 Mexican Plate), 1984; and Humanscape 145 (SW Cliché), 1987." It has been argued that, given the broad range of his subject matter, Casas should "also be regarded as a major American artist."Casas' work has been collected by the San Antonio Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, Arkansas). In 2018, two of his large paintings were purchased for the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center in San Antonio. His work is also held in national and international private collectors. Casas' Humanscape paintings can be broken down into several topics, each of which follows a serial progression. Casas, who served as president of the Con Safo art group (1971–73), was a well known teacher, writer, theorist, and public intellectual whose business card listed him as a "cultural adjuster." At San Antonio College, Casas "taught an entire generation of artists in San Antonio, many of whom went on to have successful careers as artists, teachers, gallerists, and arts administrators."Casas' "Brown Paper Report," written in 1971, is an important Chicano and American cultural document. Casas emphasized the importance of "self-determination" and equality for Chicanos/as. Regarded nationally as one of the foundational figures of Chicano Art, Casas has also been called "the most influential of those artists who spent their careers in Texas during the second half of the twentieth century." Casas felt that once artists had a fair chance to exhibit in the United States, they would be accepted as American artists and become part of "Americana."

Tom_Tierney_(artist)

Tom Tierney (October 8, 1928 – July 12, 2014) was a noted American paper doll artist. He is credited with reviving what has been described by The New York Times as the "lost art" of paper doll making during his career which stretched from the 1970s to his death in 2014. Over the course of his career, he sold over 4 million paper dolls and 400 paper doll books to readers all over the world, including one to Pope John Paul II.

Dalhart_Windberg

Dalhart Windberg (born 1933 in Goliad County, Texas) is an American painter known for his use of light, color, and shadow in still life and landscape paintings.
Windberg was named for a popular entertainer of the day, Vernon Dalhart. He was in the army and did a tour of duty in Europe. In 1967, he quit working in order to paint full-time.
A Texas native, Windberg began to attract national attention in the 1960s. He studied under the Texas painter Simon Michael. Windberg was determined to paint like the masters, so he developed a way to have a smooth surface by using diluted modeling paste to prepare his painting surface. By using this technique he could duplicate the look of the masters without spending as much time on each painting.He has executed romantic still lifes and figurative oil paintings depicting life in Texas, Mexico, Spain and Greece. There are hundreds of his original paintings and thousands of his reproduced prints and giclées in circulation dating back to the late 1960s. His art is very collectable and has adorned the walls of people not just in Texas but all over the world. Much of his art reflects his travels around Texas, Louisiana, the Rocky Mountains, many National Parks such as Yellowstone, the Grand Tetons, and Glacier National Park as well as Monument Valley. His Mediterranean paintings emulate his travels to parts of Italy and Greece. His art has encapsulated scenery including fields of bluebonnets, working cattlemen, mountain lakeside cabins, roaming buffalo and deer, streams in the mountains, snow-covered barns, night-lit farmlands, lonely windmills, coastal lighthouses, candlelit wine glasses, small fishing vessels, and other dreamlike spectacles.Two biographies have been written about the artist: in The Paths of the Masters, published in 1978, and Dalhart Windberg - Artist of Texas, published by the University of Texas Press in 1984. Its title was bestowed on the artist by the state legislature in 1979. He has also written a book describing his "smooth surface" technique of oil painting.
Along with his sons Michael and Richard Windberg, Dalhart Windberg works in Georgetown, Texas at the Windberg Art Center. Windberg and his son Michael teach art classes, in the same manner as Windberg learned from his instructor Simon Michael. Students travel from all over the country just to get a glimpse of how Windberg paints, many of whom return time and time again, learning something new each time. Windberg has also created a line of fine art products tailored to his style of fine brush and palette knife oil painting, all of which is based on his many years of experience.Windberg and his wife Evelyn live and work in Georgetown, Texas.