artist in residence

Lyndsey Jones

“I want to make it big,” says Lyndsey Jones with a laugh. The question, “What are your hopes for the future?” was admittedly a silly one. The 21-year-old White Rock area resident has remained, since early childhood, unfalteringly on-track in her quest. She’s been playing the piano competitively since age 5 and, as an adolescent, started voice training. She sang in the high school pop choir, and kept practicing and studying music throughout her college years. These days, local nightspots love her Stevie Nicks-meets-Norah Jones presence so much that she has ongoing gigs at Terilli’s on Greenville and The Library at the Warwick Melrose Hotel (as well as one at a venue in Plano). “I’m booked about 5-6 nights a week right now,” she says. She spends her daylight hours working at Z Gallerie, a hip north Dallas furniture store, and says that she loves interior design and concedes that design could be part of her future plans. For now, however, “music is my life,” she stresses. Her current album, “What a Day,” consists of jazzy covers from Alicia Keys, Van Morrison and Sara Bareilles, plus an original — the title track. She’s working on a second album that will showcase her songwriting talents.

—Christina Hughes Babb

CATCH JONES MONDAYS AND THURSDAYS AT TERILLI’S OR TUESDAYS AT THE LIBRARY BAR. Visit lyndseyjones.com or iTunes to purchase “What a Day.”

Gustave’s dogs

Lakewood resident finds artistic career in spray paint

Alexander Gustave Tollen of Lakewood is an asset manager and something of a doit-yourselfer. Many years ago, his wife saw a painting she liked in Architectural Digest. He thought it looked simple enough to copy. “It turned out pretty terrible,” he says of his copycat efforts. “I mean it wasn’t that bad, but it was not great, either.” That subpar painting, however, sparked Tollen’s artistic career. In the following years, he took a few classes, and he practiced making art as much as possible. About four years ago, he started working with spray paint and stencils, inspired by graffiti artists. It took about three years, but he eventually perfected a process with consistent results. Now Tollen specializes in dog portraits, working under the name Gustave. His portraits are known as Gustave’s dogs. And they’re wildly popular. One recently sold for $600 at an auction benefitting St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Tollen works from pictures, but he likes to spend time with the dog in person as well. “They’re very representative of the dog,” he says of the portraits. “When your dog will do a certain thing — turn its ear or have its ears back or something that the dog does — that’s what I’m trying to capture.” He puts a base layer of several coats of spray paint on the canvas and then he uses a hand-cut stencil to create the im- age of the dog. So far, all of the work Tollen does for commissions has been dog portraits. But he also makes art for himself, stencils based on photographs of architecture, train platforms and flowers, among other subject matter. He often hangs his artwork in Times Ten Cellars, whose owners are friends. He currently is working on an architectural painting that is all in gray scale, which means he is using about 13 shades of gray spray paint to get the look he wants. Tollen never had formal art training until a few years ago, and the first drawing class he ever took was at Michael’s, the craft store. Later, he took an art class at Brookhaven College and a photography class at Richland College. “I’ve used the community college structure a lot because you can get a lot of bang for your buck,” he says. Contact Tollen at alexander.gustave@yahoo.com.