(uplifting music plays) (uplifting music continues) (uplifting music continues) - [Christine] Hello and welcome to The Bookmark.

I'm Christine Brown, your host.

Today my guests are Becky Duval Reese and David Everett from "The Art of David Everett: Another World".

Thank you both so much for being here today.

- [Becky] Thanks.

- [David] Yeah.

- I feel like this is a little bit of a rare treat because a lot of time these art books are just like a biography and we don't actually have the artist here to talk, so that makes it a little bit special today.

- Great, great.

- I wanna start, let's start with just generally, where did the idea for a book come from?

- Well, several years back I met Thom Lemmons at a CASETA conference, and he expressed the idea that A&M Press was interested in maybe doing a book at some point.

And little time passes, and Steve Davis from the Wittliff Collections managed to start corralling things.

And first, well he called me at the studio and asked if he and Becky could come by and maybe talk about doing a book, and that's literally where it started, which was in what year?

- Oh, we forget.

(group laughs) - Time's been a little funny lately.

(laughs) - [David] Yeah, yes, yes.

- It was literally about four years ago.

- So, Becky, how did you come onto the project?

- My career, I'm an art historian, art museum person, and I worked at the UT Art Museum and then I was Director of the El Paso Museum of Art.

And my study in the art history has really focused on Texas artists.

So I've done a number of kind of Pan Texas exhibitions on contemporary painting and sculptures, some history, Texas art history exhibits.

And then I retired from El Paso, moved to San Marco, met Steve Davis, and I'm on the Wittliff advisory board.

And so Steve kind of got to know my background and it was him putting us together.

- I was gonna say that you're credited as the editor of the book, but it's almost like you're a curator of it.

How did putting the book together differ or it was the same as putting together like an exhibit?

- Well, actually with David's, David was the curator for, for this book of just by virtue of the body of work that he has done in his wonderful career.

So he had had worked with Paul.

- Paul Bardagjy who is a photographer in Austin.

- And they had these beautiful photographs.

And so really David chose the work.

And then Christie Lee, our book designer, who did such a great job, kind of put them together and, you know, we guided, guided Christie like the prince of the drawings in the wood cuts are in one section, sculpture in another, and it was real collaboration.

- Right, right.

- That's wonderful.

I was gonna ask, how, how did the collaboration go?

But it sounds like it was easy.

- Well, for me, it was first time publication experience for me.

And it, it was really fascinating.

It was a lot of work, but it went really smoothly.

And we are lucky in that, like Becky mentioned, Paul Bardagjy, the photographer helped, helped me pull all the images together.

He helped with color balance, 'Cause about the first half of the book is photographs mostly by Rick Patrick, who's another Austin photographer, and then Paul Bardagjy doing about the, roughly about the second half.

But Paul pulled all the photographs together and did all the color balance, and he's a very well-known architectural photographer.

So he has been published a lot and he knows quite a bit about color reproduction problems, things like that.

- I think that something probably people don't realize how difficult it is to get, especially with something like art.

You want the color from real life to match what appears in the book.

And maybe even in the picture it looks right, but when you print it, it may not.

So that, that is a big job to have.

- And and that was really part of, I think the collaboration that like Christie, the designer, made sure that, that David could see the color proofs and that he could fine tune them.

And, and I really think because of all of that attention to the photography, it's part of the beauty of the book.

- Yes.

I would love our audience to know, as you mentioned, the biggest chunk of this book is just reproductions of the art.

So if you like art and you wanna see it at home, this is, I mean, this is as good as it can get without actually seeing it in person, I think.

- And we were just, when Christie Lee first presented this with her right out of the gate ideas for, you know, her proposal for the design, we were just knocked out.

I mean, it was a home run right from the start.

- Right.

- So I think what what kind of flushes out the book, it's there at, after the artwork, there's a section, and it's a conversation with David and Richard Holland, and in, in the book there are pictures of the two of them in David's studio talking.

But within that conversation you get David's biography and you talk about references and how ideas came to you.

And so you really get a really, I think, complete picture of David.

But from my point of view, I've always enjoyed hearing artists talk about their art more than a curator interpreting.

I, I loved that it was just so fresh that you and Richard talked, and then of course you edited it really hard and it really reads well.

But that, that tells people, you look at all these beautiful pictures, these beautiful photographs of David's work, but then you learn about David.

- And I know when I got to that part, I would read something and I would flip back, What does that look like?

I need to, I think, to refresh my memory.

So, and you're right, it is an interest, it's not just a straight biography, it's not somebody else's interpretation.

It's, it's guided by an interview, but it's your own words about what the art means and where it comes from, which I think is special.

- Great.

- So let's talk about your art.

A lot of your art has lots of elements of nature and the environment.

Where did that love of the natural world come from?

- Oh, since I was a little bitty kid, you know, first, first showed up on Earth, I would literally go out the front door.

I was born in Beaumont, Texas, which at that time was somewhat smaller, but you know, the petrochemical town, but in southeast Texas.

So it's, it's, you know, swamp country basically.

And literally walk out the front door across the yard, down to the street and there's a bar ditch, which most of the time in Beaumont is full of water and all the wildlife in there.

Everything from chordates and snakes to, you know, birds and to toads and frogs.

And you know, you start there and you're watching this inner relationship of all of these live forms and you're also, you know, watching color pattern and structure on, on these various animals and just really admiring it and just, you know, fascinated by this, this chain of events you're seeing occur daily.

And that just, you know, over a lifetime of watching that it, it just kept adding up to this imagery.

- But then you, you also talk about your grandfather, you know, and taking you and your brother on walks and teaching you the birds.

- Sure.

- And showing you and guiding you.

And I, I thought that was so important to your story.

- Right.

Again, it was someone else, you know, an older family figure who also enjoyed that natural world.

And my grandparents lived in Sour Lake, Texas, which is again, a tiny, really a petrochemical center, but it's in the big thicket in East Texas.

And my grandparents would take my brother and me out into on Pine Island bio.

And you know, we'd spend the day out there just looking at things and making observations and him pointing things out.

And you know, part of growing up in that situation is, you know, you learn the dos and the don'ts and you learn how to identify snakes and you know, there's certain snakes you, you can catch very easily and there are certain snakes you want to kind of avoid, but, and the same with birds.

You're just watching all of this wildlife, you know, it's, if it's like a Garden of Eden and I just, you know, just an amazing environment.

- Where did the love art come from?

Was your family artistic or did that come, was that just something innate in you?

- It was really innate, but it was funny when I was a little kid, kept hearing all this thing from family members that I was the only artist ever show up in the family.

But as I got older, I realized on my father's side of the family, my grandfather was a master welder, self-employed at his own welding shop.

And a welder is basically a sculptor.

He was just working with metals for a certain, for a different purpose.

And on my mother's side of the family, her brother was a design engineer.

So again, not only dealing with drafting problems, but he was also dealing with sculptural concepts and these machines he was designing.

So to me it's like I got hit from both sides of the family (laughs) - And it's almost surprising there weren't more around.

- You also talked in that interview at the back of the book, this is one of my favorite parts.

You talk about what an impact the library had on you as a child and as someone who's most surprised possession as a child was her library card.

I was, I was hoping you could talk more about why that was so impactful to you.

- Oh, it was when mom would go downtown, take me downtown, she had shopping, she had to do, this was in Old Town Beaumont, which sadly most of it no longer exists.

But we had the regional library, which is the Terrell Public Library, which is this beautiful old, I think it's a Romanesque style architecture.

It had initially been a church and very large building though, and gorgeous building.

But, of course, in those days everything was not air conditioned.

So you'd go inside and it was all open inside there with, you know, fresh air moving through there and you know, wooden floors.

They still had all of the, you know, stain glass there.

And then just, you know, thousands of books.

And as a little kid, I was really fascinated with archeology and paleontology and also eventually with photography and they had the entire bound set of life magazine there.

So, my mom would drop me off there and I would just wander in and just literally go to books and start pulling 'them out and reading 'them, you know, life magazine, pulling them out, you know, this is where I first became exposed to a lot of the great WPA era photographers and Tom Lee, you know, things like that.

And I would just time after time go in there and pull those out.

Or I'd wander upstairs into the science section or you know, the, the kid's section or whatever.

And you know, it was just this cornucopia of information there.

- So, still your book's own title.

It's like windows into other worlds, - Exactly.

- which is exactly why I loved it as a kid too.

You're in a small town - Yeah.

- And you can see out and that's, that's important I think.

- Exactly.

- Is that where the title for the book came from or where did the subtitle come from?

- David's title.

- It's just a title that came up.

(group laughs) - Well, you know, addressing the fact that, you know, I'm using not only imagery of the human figure, but also imagery of animal forms from the natural world and creating a another world using this imagery, which is, you know, there's a surrealistic edge to it.

There's a very personal edge to it.

You know, oddly enough, most of the animals depicted I've encountered in life, you know, you know, from regional animals to exotic animals.

And it's, so a lot of it really is, you know, very personal experience sort of mixed in.

- Like the cover of the book.

- Yes, that is.

- Explain how personal that is.

- Let's talk about this cover image.

- That was a piece of, of professional acquaintance of Francine Carraro who was curating a show that was going to be called Oil Patch Dreams and it was imagery of the Texas oil fields and it was going to be a traveling show and she was pulling it together and she called me at my studio and asked if I wanted to participate.

And I said, yeah.

And she said, Great.

She said, I know you don't have any piece in existence right now that you want to put in, but she said, Could you gimme a quick working title?

And I just said, Industry on Parade.

And she was like, Where did that come from?

And that was the title of a, a short documentary series that was on TV back in the 1950s that was, it was a black and white documentary about industrial processes.

And I just always loved the name of the show.

I used to watch it, you know, I'd watch it and find out how light bulbs were made.

So it came from that and it, using that title and associated with personal family history, basically everybody in my family's been involved with the petroleum industry in one form or another.

So pulled in my father, my mother, and my brother as depicted really like the nuclear family, you know.

- And your mom was a nurse?

- Yeah, my mom was a nurse and was her, the longest part of her career was spent as an industrial nurse for what became Mobil Oil.

It was initially called Magnolia Oil and then it became Mobil.

And of course Mobil is now ExxonMobil.

- And that's why the red horse.

- Yeah, the red horse is from Mobil from the, the famous emblem for them.

And then of course tying in the environment with the, the other critters in it.

(laughs) - But, and, and you know, using the family image also as sort of the nuclear family image.

- And choosing that image that work for the cover also helps the reader see that you, you also sculpt figures like people, but then also the animals.

So you know, a lot of the other, Can you open the book - Sure.

- Or does it work to show maybe?

- Yeah, we can open.

- A couple of his sculptures that are the more stacked animals.

- [Becky] Yeah.

- That there's.

One with animals and one with people.

- Good one if I, - So yeah, that's good.

- So we just have to hold it.

- Hopefully that'll work on your camera.

But, but maybe tell Christine how the stacked animals can - Yeah, I was gonna ask about how, why, why stacked animals, 'cause many of them are, are made up like this.

- [David] Oh yeah, yeah.

Well, certainly poetically, thematically, it relates to the, you know, the inner relationship of all of these animals, these life forms that truly interact daily and depend on one another sometimes in difficult ways.

But it, it's, it was a matter of using that imagery and tying it together.

And then often, well initially all the pieces had a figure in the, at least a human figure, sometimes several figures.

And of course, tying that in thematically and my background in sculpture was that I, I went to art school specifically to get a real academic background in human figure.

And, you know, got that background and for many years have taught life drawing and sometimes teaching sculpture, but mostly life drawing and incorporating that element of the human figure in there.

And then sometimes the human figure drops out entirely and it's just the, in a relationship with the animal forms.

- But, I remember, you telling me also about the stacked animals that on your walks with your grandfather and brother that you began to see like turtles stacked up on each other.

Or what was it?

A heron on an alligator.

- On an alligator.

You see that often, you know, turtles stacked up, you'd see, you know, deer out with egrets on their backs.

You know, you'd see it very commonly.

And it was all over the place.

And what I wanted to do was take that, those incidents that occur in nature and push them a little further so that they take on more of a dreamlike image.

- [Christine] Sure.

- Push them a lot further.

- Had a couple extra animals on top of there (laughs) and on top of the turtle.

- So, you know, it was, it was taking this imagery that I saw a lot and, and making use of that imagery, but just pushing it, seeing what I could do with it.

- [Becky] And you realize these are carved?

- Yes.

- [Becky] I mean this is wood.

- Yes, this is wood carve that's then painted.

I'm gonna, I'm gonna have to close it, but, but yes.

Can you talk about the painting?

'Cause you do talk about that a little bit in the book and it, originally you weren't painting them and then you started.

So how did that transition and why did that transition happen?

- Well, even early on, I, again, as a little child, very interested in archeology.

You find out if you're really reading that all of this ancient artwork, this sculpture that we're seeing was originally painted, you know, these ancient Greek pieces, ancient Egyptian pieces, you know, the pieces of Mexico.

These, these pieces were really colorful, you know, they didn't view life as this monochromatic stone or something, you know, it was more like what they would see in life.

So, I wanted to incorporate the color into it.

And, since I had focused a lot more and more on wood carving as it went along, I wanted to come up with a process where I could apply color to the surface, but at the same time, you know, carefully finish the surface to protect the wood and, and basically get the color I wanted.

So after long, long periods of time of trying to make the process more and more complicated, which of course is stupid, I accidentally in cleaning a brush one day I would, well I would do a natural finish with tung oil on the pieces, and I'm cleaning a brush with turpentine after that and, and I'm going, right, you know, tung oil with turpentine, oil paints for turpentine.

And so, I started experimenting and it worked just the way I wanted it.

And so it's, it is technically, it's a, it's a glazing process.

Each of these pieces have at least 10 coats of paint on 'them, sometimes more or sometimes 15 or 20, depending on what final visual result I want.

But I had to come up with a technique where I could paint a layer on the piece, have it dependably dry overnight so I could, you know, in the, the heat of the moment of really getting the idea of flowing, I wanted to be able to, you know, have that progress going day to day.

And the pieces would, would dry overnight.

I'd come in the next day, mix up the color I want, apply it with this wash with the tung oil and apply that paint, let it dry overnight, come in the next day.

So even the smallest pieces take a week and a half to two weeks to paint.

And that's in addition to carving them.

- [Christine] Sure.

Oh yeah.

- I mean, something like this, wouldn't you say it would take months and months?

- Oh yeah.

Well, a piece this large in this complex runs, you're running into at least three and a half to four months worth of work just for one piece.

- So, And I wanna ask, you mentioned that most of the animals are ones you've seen or that we could see in the environment here.

Does, does as, as an art historian for Texas, does that make this art maybe a little more Texan in flavor since it's, it's not just a Texan artist, but he's, he's creating what we can see all around us.

- Well, in ways of, I I think because yeah, that's one way of looking, you know, at this is, it's almost like a kind of an abstract interpretation of, you know, the, the flora and fauna around us.

But I think a book like David's goes beyond a border, beyond a region, you know, because this is, you know, this, this art is so unique.

There's nobody in the world who does this art.

And so I think the message that you have, the conversation you have in your work goes well beyond Texas.

It goes well beyond the United States, you know.

- Oh, sure.

I didn't wanna put anybody in a box.

I just think for someone who's from around here, it you can, that's the first way you can relate to it.

And then you look deeper and you see more and, and you get more meaning out.

- Yeah, yeah.

- And, and hopefully is, is like Becky was saying, hopefully, an European could walk into this and interact with it and, and see experiences in it that they can relate to.

And we were talking earlier about a lifelong interest in prehistoric artwork and you know, you can go into any of those situations of that work and, and see that same interrelationship of animals and human forms that are, that are depicted.

- Sure.

It's one of those things, as long as people have been making art, been making art with animals and people and the natural environment and the human environment all intersecting.

- Because it's life.

- Exactly.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Yeah, it's true.

- Yeah.

- Okay, well we're running a little bit short on time, we have about two minutes left.

What would you like to take away from for our audience today to be about your art or about your book or about life?

Anything.

(group laughs) - Not too much.

(group laughs) - Well it's, hopefully it's a universal image that really does speak to, you know, anybody who encounters it that, you know, whether it's, you know, at children, adults, anything like that, it doesn't matter.

There's another thing going on here that the, the pieces have movable joints, so you can actually interact with the pieces too by physically having hands on with them.

And that was intended as a participatory element and, and ties in also with another childhood thing I used to do, which was 3D animation.

And I just always liked the idea of, of being able to come in and, and manipulate and adjust what was happening in the composition.

So again, that was a, a thing where the viewer is sort of invited to come in and be included in the process and, and, you know, have that experience.

So hope, hopefully it's just a, a universal commentary that is approachable like that.

- I, I would also just like to say, I, I can see your book serving as an ambassador in the larger world about the quality of work A&M Press does.

- Oh yeah.

- And we enjoyed working so much with everyone at the press.

We learned so much in this process and we really respect the work they did and, and the commitment the press has made to Texas art since 1974.

- Yeah.

- So we're, we're really happy to be associated.

- That's so kind of you to say.

We really want every book to be, you know, an ambassador of our good work.

But I do think the art books have something special 'cause it's got that visual element.

- Yeah.

- Well, we are out of time.

I wanna thank you both so much for being here.

This was a fantastic conversation.

The book again is The Art of David Everett: Another World.

Thank you so much for joining us, and I will see you again soon.