Drawing Things Together: Rhopography and Rodeos
The 1981 Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo was spreading rodeo fever throughout the city, but I was more interested in my neighbor’s classical record collection and the white Swedish modern bookcase that contained it. So it came as a surprise when the Rodeo inspired 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. 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 that drawing, and I can still feel the frustration of getting the proportions of the pot just so. I remember the time it took to meticulously draw the repeating pattern of the phoenix, which somehow seemed to float 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, 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 stood apart from the 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 of a workaday object drawn 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, Ms. Hopkins, liked the drawing enough to set it on a life of its own. She spoke about it in unfamiliar words and engaged the class in conversation about the story it told, and those stories it implied. I sat on the periphery of my classmates, observing them as they observed my newly sanctioned “talent,” which made it all the more easy for them to make fun of my particular mode of estrangement. My drawing became an agent. It performed something of my fashion – something like the aesthetic calm of my neighbor’s all-white living room. It also performed a kind of resistance to the narratives that I saw others performing around me. A performance meant to neutralize a wall of wild mustangs through utilitarian stillness.
Ms. Hopkins selected the drawing as our class entry for the school-wide rodeo art contest and it advanced through successive layers of competition within the school system. Finally, it was sent to the city-wide student art contest at the Houston Livestock Show and rodeo.
I only went to the Rodeo once, years later. I wore a black cowboy hat with a silver mustang stick-pin attached to the brim, and I saw my first live music concert (Charlie Pride on a revolving stage). But in 1981, I didn’t get to see my art on display at the Astrodome. As was usually the case, my parents had many other concerns to attend to. My father came home late from his career in the business of black gold. My mother worked at all hours, keeping up with bills, folding the laundry, cooking dinner and caring for the needs of my sister with Down syndrome.
Several weeks or months after the contest, my picture returned. It had been placed in a beveled mat, with various notes attached to the back, and a large blue ribbon from the City of Houston. The framed and festooned drawing enchanted me. Its new attachments hinted at a trail of stories from its long journey. I felt a Rousselian star on my nine year-old forehead. More significantly, I took up the habits of an artist.
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.
Something like an artist circa 1982.