The Art of Robert Lee Vanderpool

The

Alcalde The Longhorn Life

Of Paint and PoMo Robert Lee Vanderpool, BA ’00, BFA ’03, wants his art to enrich the human experience

“Western Tendencies” by Robert Lee Vanderpool, on display as part of Arthouse’s “New American Talent: The Twenty-First Exhibition”

LEE VANDERPOOL SIGNS HIS E-MAILS “LeeV”. It’s a clever wordplay — subtle, layered, mischievous. There’s even a visual element you might call, oh, artistic. There’s something else, too. Consider how LeeV responded to this quote from an art reviewer commenting on his painting “Western Tendencies” (shown above), on display as part of Arthouse’s “New American Talent: The Twenty-First Exhibition”: “It’s overthought, understyled, even kind of disheveled — but so much so that it’s compelling.” LeeV: “Yeah, I like that. As long as there’s a reaction and not complete, cold indifference, I’m good.” It’s a response LeeV’s after, with his art and his e-mails.

Vanderpool’s inclusion in the art show NAT:21 has certainly gotten him noticed.

In the three years between graduating and making NAT:21, he had been exploring the burgeoning Austin art scene but had never gotten press before he made the show. This is the fourth write-up he’s had since. Getting into NAT:21, he says, “is a big stamp of approval.” More than 1,100 sculptors, painters, photographers, and mixed-media masons from around the country applied to get in the show. Fifty-nine

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made it. Only one will win the $35,000 Texas Prize.

When asked to label himself, Vanderpool groans: “Let’s go with ‘postmodern painter.’ I make still-lifes out of fabric, and then I use light and space for dramatic effect and reinterpret them onto canvas.” Vanderpool clearly hates the canned, PR answer, so crude and obtuse. Like many artists, he squirms when pigeonholed. Though his subject matter varies considerably, many of his pieces deal with personal issues that reflect on a social level, simultaneously intimate and universal. He tries to tie in N o v e m b e r / D e c e m b e r 2 0 0 6 Th e A l c a l d e 71

‘Art can be anything you want it to be. It is an infinite amount of forms made from an infinite amount of mediums about an infinite amount of subjects.’ several images at the same time to make a picture, a process he says is kind of like life: “There’s always a bunch of things going on, but at the same time you can only focus in on so many things at one point. I’m trying to get the big picture, but I usually focus in on little areas here and there.” The result is a distinctive lop-sidedness in his composition that you might call his style. It’s what attracted guest curator Aimee Chang, MA ’01, who selected the artists in NAT:21, to Vanderpool’s art — the way it “straddles abstraction and representation,” she says.

As for a school of art, Vanderpool says that nowadays the catchword is “pluralism,” which he defines as “a concept that allows for multiple ideas, viewpoints, and behaviors to be held equal to each other, giving each different perspective a chance to be listened to.”

Deep breath. “This will hopefully create a democracy of ideas, regressing hierarchical statuses and producing new and better concepts from the resultant multiplicity.” Uh huh. “Basically, you can integrate ideas: if you love abstraction and you love landscapes, you can combine them. Or you can be into sculpture and into painting and somehow combine them to make installations. Everything’s becoming blurred and undefined.” Key words: multiple ideas, blurred and undefined. That’s pluralism.

Pluralist though he may be, Vanderpool’s concern with emoting responses makes him a quintessential modern artist, descended from the Surrealists and Expressionists of the turn of the 20th century and at home among contemporaries gunning for shock value.

Vanderpool acknowledges a strong influence from the Surrealists, but resists calling himself one. He quotes Picasso’s famous “Art cannot be chaste.” And when he recounts his first trip to the Blanton Museum, he recalls one incident in particular. “I saw this woman go by some lewd video projections and get really pissed off. ‘That’s not art,’ she barked, then stormed away in her high 72 Th e A l c a l d e N o v e m b e r / D e c e m b e r 2 0 0 6

heels, and I was like, ‘Yes! Goal has been accomplished!’ ” Vanderpool entertains some goals of his own, as well. He recently enrolled in Yale’s graduate art program for painting and drawing. After two years of study, he plans a move to a major city — New York, or somewhere on the West Coast — where he can show in galleries. After that, he plans to teach color theory at a university. “I’m a big fan of color,” he notes. “That’s why I like painting a lot — a lot of freedom with the color.”

Freedom also appears to be the leitmotif in Vanderpool’s conception of art.

“Art can be anything you want it to be,” he says. “It is an infinite amount of forms made from an infinite amount of mediums about an infinite amount of

subjects.” From this infinite mixture, art can “stimulate the senses, be a provocateur of thought, or both.” Vanderpool’s art seeks to do both. He sees artists’ role in society to be to offer new perspectives on the same old things. “It’s not just a tree there on the side of the road. It’s teeming with all kinds of insects and birds and life. There are different growth patterns to it. It has a history. There’s just so much involved with every little thing and the greater spectrum,” he says. These are the nuances he wants people to notice and realize. They are what make life more interesting. As for his own art, “I hope my art enriches human experience and illuminates the inner creative drives in others.” Even in signatures. — TimT (Taliaferro)

“Mother and Child” by Robert Lee Vanderpool

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