My Blog's Slowdown

I haven't been posting for a while because every time I try to post a picture I get an "error 400" message. I'm terrible at having the patience to fix such things, but I'll try. It will be interesting to see if a pure text message will upload now.

Portraits of Don Mangus

Here are some portraits of the Mighty Mang created by some of my talented friends at SMU. A quick compressed charcoal drawing by Brian Cobble done in Roger Winter's Advanced Drawing class; Don Shields and I painted portraits of each other at his parent's fab MCM house in Oak Cliff. I had some great times at that place; a David Bates ebony pencil drawing, done while I was working at the Downtown Dallas Public Library. I worked first at the old building and then moved over to the new facility; Brian Cobble painted a faux-religious multi-panel piece (7 panels) based on an "art happening" where we took a David Bates life-sized paper-mache sculpture of "Salvador Dali" out to the Texas badlands and "executed" it with shotguns. Mark Bane also made a Super-8 movie of the atrocity. Naturally, a lot of beer was involved. "No Country for Old Art."

Anchor Park United Methodist Church, Anchorage, Alaska: Framed MarvinD. Mangus Display

Marvin Mangus

Anchor Park United Methodist Church

Anchor Park United Methodist Church

Anchor Park United Methodist Church

Marvin Mangus

Marvin Mangus

Anchor Park United Methodist Church in Anchorage has a nice framed-display showcasing some of the weekly service programs that featured dad's paintings as monochromatic cover illustrations. Alfred sent me a recent photo of this display piece. I still love the Mid-Century Modern design of the church.

"Anchorage's population grew as a result of the influx of military families and support industries after World War II and the Korean Conflict.  

First United Methodist Church on the Parkstrip was the only Methodist church in Anchorage and was bursting with worshipers. So there was a need to establish another Methodist church and new subdivisions were going up on the East of the Downtown area, mostly to house military families. 

These neighborhoods were canvassed to see who would want to attend a Methodist church nearby and enough people signed up to start a congregation in 1954. Money was secured to start construction on the main building, then an education wing was added in 1963, and the west wing was added in 2004. 

Membership has ranged from a low of 78 in 1954 to a high of 399 in both 1968 and 1994. Polynesian people, most from Tonga, established a fellowship in 1978 and have contributed greatly to the life of the church. 

Service to the community has benefited Bean's Cafe, Clare House, F.I.S.H., Alcoholics Anonymous, Boy and Girl Scouts, and many other groups and individuals over the past 50 years."

Dan Wingren: "Cataract," 1961

Dan Wingren

Dan Wingren

The Owen Arts Center, Algur. H. Meadows School of the Arts, SMU

George L. Dahl

George L. Dahl

George L. Dahl

George L. Dahl

The Owen Arts Center in the Algur H. Meadows School of the Arts was designed by celebrated Dallas architect, George L. Dahl, and it opened in 1965. Dahl reportedly never submitted a bill for the project. 

Late in his life, around the time I arrived in Dallas (the late 1970s), Dahl was embroiled in a series of bitter legal battles with his daughter (and her family) over a trust that had been set up by his late first wife. 

In order to secure her money, Dahl's daughter tried to have him declared mentally incompetent, just as he was about to remarry -- and it led to many other legal cases. Dahl won his competency trial, but more lawsuits over the money ensued. D Magazine covered it in a wrenching in-depth article...

George L. Dahl

George L. Dahl

George L. Dahl

George L. Dahl

George L. Dahl

Al Mangus in the lobby of the Owen Arts Center, standing next to a Auguste Rodin sculpture.

Memories of the Virginia Meadows Museum, 1965

Virginia Meadows Museum, SMU

Opening of the Virginia Meadows Museum, SMU

Dr. William B. Jordan and Algur H. Meadows

Virginia Meadows Museum, SMU

Formerly the Virginia Meadows Museum, now studio space, SMU

"The Meadows Museum is the leading US institution focused on the study and presentation of the art of Spain. In 1962, Dallas businessman and philanthropist Algur H. Meadows donated his private collection of Spanish paintings, as well as funds to start a museum, to Southern Methodist University. The museum opened to the public in 1965, marking the first step in fulfilling Meadows’ vision to create a 'Prado on the Prairie.'"

That was then. Now that the museum has been relocated to its own massive building, the original space that I "grew up with" has been converted to studio space and it's a heretical shock to my system to see how it's used now. Personally, as an exhibition space, I still prefer the original, more intimate space to the its newer super-sized one...

Jerry Bywaters: Landscape Paintings

Jerry Bywaters

Jerry Bywaters

Jerry Bywaters

Jerry Bywaters

Jerry Bywaters

Jerry Bywaters

Jerry Bywaters

Jerry Bywaters

Jerry Bywaters

Jerry Bywaters

Jerry Bywaters

Professor Jerry Bywaters (1906-1989) served for thirty-five years as a faculty member in Southern Methodist University’s Division of Fine Arts and as Director of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts from 1943 to 1964.

Underlying all of Bywaters’ work was some perspective on the interaction of people and the land, whether the land served as a source of livelihood, a stage for historical events, a backdrop for architecture, or simply as a source of artistic inspiration. For Bywaters, familiarity with the natural world and incorporating it and its effects were basic to his art. 

In a 1928 letter explaining his decision to work as a studio -- instead of a commercial -- artist, Bywaters reminded his father that “I must be out of doors.” Landscape afforded Bywaters an avenue of experimentation with media and he worked with equal ability in oil, watercolor, and pastel. Although his artistic heyday was the ten-year period from 1933-1943, when he was able to travel frequently to Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and West Texas, Bywaters continued depicting landscapes long after he had turned away from other subjects.