Drawing Things Together: Rhopography and Rodeos
The 1981 Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo was spreading rodeo fever throughout the city. Of course, I was more interested in my neighbor’s classical record collection housed in a white Swedish modern bookcase, but the Rodeo soon became the impetus for one of my first projects as an artist.
My third grade art teacher at Lamkin Elementary gave our class an assignment to draw something “western” in celebration of Rodeo week. As usual, I thought far too long about the assignment, frustrating myself to near paralysis, but eventually drew a glorious crayon image of a Native American clay pot on a large sheet of manilla paper. The pot featured a zig-zag pattern of a phoenix, which I pulled from my memory of an image I had seen in a magazine about the American southwest.
I was nine years old when I made this drawing, and I still feel the frustration of getting the proportions of the pot just so. I also remember the time it took to precisely draw the repeating pattern of the phoenix, which somehow seemed to float above the pot on another plane of the paper. I remember how flat the pot looked, not like the real thing, and I remember both hating and liking that flatness. Most of all, there was the satisfaction of having drawn the only picture in the class of, well, a pot. Most of the boys challenged each other to draw cowboys taming kicking mustangs or bulls, while girls grouped together to draw Pre-Raphaelite-like lambs in fields of bluebonnets reminiscent of scenes from our copies of By the Shores of Silver Lake.
But this pot was something between the more popular images of nature tamed into submission, and nature admired at a dreamy distance. Something interior seemed more appropriately “western” to me – a still life before I knew anything about genres of domesticity in the history of art history. It was an object of clay, fire hardened for everyday utility and painted with austere aesthetic ornaments.
My teacher liked the drawing and decided to set it on a life of its own. She spoke of its composition and engaged the class in conversation about the story it told (or didn’t tell). I sat on the periphery of the social world of my classmates, observing them as they observed me – admiring my sanctioned “talent” while still making fun of my particular mode of estrangement. My drawing had become a source of agency. It performed something of my fashion – something like the aesthetic calm of my neighbor’s ultramodern living room. It also performed a kind of resistance to the narratives that I saw others performing around me. A performance designed to tame wild mustangs with utilitarian stillness.
My teacher selected the drawing as our class entry for the school-wide rodeo art contest. It won, and advanced through successive layers of competition within the school system. Finally, it was sent to the Astrodome for the city-wide rodeo student art contest.
I only went once to the Rodeo, a few years later. I wore a black cowboy hat and saw my first music concert (Charlie Pride on a revolving stage). But in 1981, I didn’t get to see my art on display. As was usually the case, my parents had many other concerns to attend to. My father often came home late from his career in the business of black gold. My mother worked from dawn to dusk, keeping the accounts in order, folding the laundry, cooking dinner and caring for the many needs of my sister with Down syndrome.
Several weeks or months after the contest, my picture returned. It had been framed in a beveled mat, with a large satin blue ribbon from the City of Houston attached. The ribbon enchanted me. In my small nine-year-old world, I felt a Rousselian star on my forehead. More significantly, I took up the habits of an artist – watch things happen, map the controversies, translate the feelings, respond and repeat.
Surprising are the ways that a booming economy (fueled by new scientific advances in offshore drilling) can transform a livestock auction (of animals bred in laboratories at Texas A&M University) into a cultural performance of a city’s unbridled expansion (and inevitable bust) by bestowing blue ribbons not only to the best heiffers, but to a introverted child’s drawing of a decimated nation’s petty wares.