Lee Jamison: Ode to East Texas

L ee J amison Ode to East Texas

April 13 - May 5, 2018

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS

On View: April 13-May 5, 2018

Opening Reception : Saturday, April 14, 6:00-8:30pm

Artist Talk: Saturday, April 21, 2:00-4:00pm Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS An Introduction in Two Parts

When you think of Texas what comes to mind?

If you’re like most people in America today you think of big skies and open plains. Monument Valley may pass before your imagination along with great rocky passes, cacti, and bluebonnets. Even those of us living in Texas may find ourselves thinking such things. My initial impulse in the theme of this show was to rehabilitate East Texas and the Piney Woods as a subject for Art, not so much to substitute for that image, but to augment it.

In defense of the stereotype, there is high plains landscape.

There are mountains. There is near desert- and cactus. And, obviously, even in East Texas there are bluebonnets. But for Texans first settling in the wild frontier those were not the first things that came to mind about the nation, and later the state, they knew. More than half of early Texans lived in piney woods.

In those times Austin (or, rather, Waterloo) and Bastrop were not “central” Texas. They were isolated outposts of the wild west.

The “Heart of Texas” was in what we now call “East Texas”.

As a teenager and young adult I used to be amused at the image of Texas projected in media. One John Wayne movie starts at a train station in Liberty, Texas. In the background we see the spires of the great American west. But, of course, the real Liberty is on coastal plain between Houston and Beaumont. After watching a short-lived television show set in Houston in the late seventies my parents guffawed at a scene in which Houstonians were forced to stop in their evening freeway commute to make way for a cattle drive, mountains in the background…Texas has an image crafted, perhaps cynically, in California.

called the “Pine Curtain”. To live in the region is to disappear to the rest of the world, much as Eastern Europe once had.

There is no good reason for this absence from mind. This region of soaring pines, farms, rolling grasslands, and hills still is Texan to the core. It has its own peculiar sense of place and even its own sub-regions. And it is the place where Texas got its name. But for East Texas there would be no “Texas” at all.

On one hand this, then, is an all-too-brief reintroduction of some of the visual richness of East Texas for a world that has bought a little too much into what other people say Texas’s image of itself ought to be. But on another it has become something very different.

As I explored the region in paint I rediscovered something I’d realized about myself as a young painter in my twenties. I can’t paint a place until it has a human story to me. Failing to recognize what that story was even delayed the completion of one of these works for more than a decade. The power to put a place on canvas in paint bubbles up from an underworld of associations with people, places, and events from my past. In the narratives for each of these works some of these associations can be seen. They are haunted with neighbors from Dodge, childhood events, and the historical heritage of East Texas and East Texans.

So, in a real sense, the "Ode" of the title is not merely sung to places behind the Pine Curtain. In it the pines have become a kind of wood-henge, an opening to another world. The song you see here mirrors an underworld of spiritual associations and personal exploration.

As an artist I began to find this canonical vision of Texas disturbing. I lived in East Texas and the place I lived in was beautiful and rich with human history and stories. But what was most disturbing was the creeping realization that this region I loved and that was so full of the heritage of the state had essentially disappeared from the collective mind even of Texans.

In East Texas there is a phrase to describe this phenomenon. It’s Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

-Lee Jamison Huntsville, Texas March, 2018

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS East Texas

By Carolina Castillo Crimm, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus, Sam Houston State University

Few Texans, save those who live in East Texas, have understood or captured the essence of this birthplace of Texas. The land, little noted and often dismissed, hidden behind the “Pine Curtain,” holds a treasure of views and vistas. Only a talented artist sees and appreciates this captivating landscape. Lee Jamison is one of those artists. Having lived in East Texas, he is able to share the emotional bond with beauty that is born of the land itself. With this collection of paintings, we are at last afforded a glimpse into the beauty and the wonder that is East Texas.

Several years ago I took a group of university students to East Texas. We were to carry out a reenactment of a Spanish Land Grant ceremony at Rusk. One of the students wore a uniform for a government official, another wore a priest’s robe, our scribe carried dip pens and India ink, and the notary provided large authentic looking land grants from the Texas General Land Office. Our plan was to help the children who came to the festival learn about the earliest settlement of Spanish Texas. It was not our efforts, however, that recreated the memories of the past. It was the land itself. We were as overwhelmed by the beauty as the children.

Texas History as we know it started in East Texas. It didn’t begin on the Rio Grande or in San Antonio de Valero or San Antonio de Bejar or on the Mustang Plains around Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe Victoria. Especially, it didn’t start at the Alamo, much as many would like for it to have happened there. It began in what we know as the Piney Woods and the Big Thicket, an area noted for its silent beauty, its dappled colors, its rich wildlife, its independenceminded settlers, and its inaccessibility.

Why has East Texas been almost forgotten in the lore of Texas History? Historians have focused on the Rio Grande, on San Antonio, on San Felipe de Austin and the settlements around the Brazos and the Colorado. But it is here among the pines that the first efforts of Europeans centered. It is also here that conflicts and controversies and three hundred years of history have bred an unusual group of notoriously independent Texans. East Texas, and the East Texans who live here, are different. It is their history that has made them that way.

For thousands of years before the advent of the first European settlers, East Texas and its thick pine forests and the rich riverine plains remained the private preserve of a variety of native tribes.

Among them were the Caddo, an advanced and highly developed people who had little interest in accepting the ideas of the Spanish

To reach East Texas, we drove northeast on Highway 21, the original route of the Old Spanish Royal Road, noted on road signs as OSR. In places we saw the ancient ruts of the Camino Real, that long ago link that connected the entire Spanish empire from Mexico to Texas, from Florida to California. Before long, the deep forests of the Big Thicket enveloped us. Like driving into a dark sea green tunnel, the towering trees arched over the highway, closing us in on either side. The light softened to a misty green gloom. The stifling summer air cooled. Windows open, we could hear the birds twittering and chirping overhead. We never saw deer or wild animals but it was easy to imagine them in the dense underbrush that crowded the road. Ahead were the San Francisco de los Tejas mission, the Caddo Mounds, and the little town of Alto, named by the Spanish for the highest point on the Camino Real. This was, after all, where Texas began.

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS or the later French or English. The forests and plains gave them everything they needed to survive and create a culture which enabled them to successfully fend off the advances of the European interlopers.

settlement, pushed for missions among the tribes of East Texas. San Francisco de los Tejas (“Tejas” said to have meant friend or ally) and four other missions soon struggled to survive in the thick forests of East Texas, an alien and difficult land for the cattle-herding padres.

With the arrival of Columbus and his trail of Spaniards, the quiet forests of East Texas sparked initial interest in the Europeans. After mapping the coast in 1519, Alonso Alvarez de Pineda and the Spanish turned their attention farther south.

That same year, Hernán Cortés had opened the gold and silverrich Aztec Empire to the eyes of an envious world. It took him two years, and an alliance with the native enemies of the Aztecs, to conquer the immense empire. Wisely, the Spanish had soon taken over the complex and efficient Aztec bureaucracy, right down to the tax collectors and their carefully recorded notations.

Although the conflicted Spanish debated the importance of Christianizing versus enslaving the natives, King Carlos I voted in favor of the priests. His orders, in the 1550s, unleashed a mass of missionaries onto the New World, including East Texas.

The Caddo, however, after undergoing Christianizing efforts in the form of long, translated religious harangues, had no interest in the Spanish or their missions. The settled tribe willingly traded with the newly arrived French, but in 1690 they effectively drove the Spanish and their missions from their territories, something the Pueblo were doing at almost the same time a continent away in New Mexico. Only the presidio and mission at Los Adaes would remain, a critical outpost for Spain’s continued hold on East Texas.

By extension, this “capital” of Texas, protected the silver mines in central Mexico.

The first actual Spanish intrusions into Texas began with the explorations by the shipwrecked Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. He wandered across Texas in 1528 identifying many of the tribes as potential converts. His plan to return to these people he had befriended was not to be. The exploration of the center of the future United States was granted by royal authorities to Francisco Vazquez de Coronado in 1541. His hopeful journeying, however, turned up no gold. Spain gave up on Texas and focused its attention on the rich Mexica empire. Although missionaries considered East Texas, the tribes were left to their own devices for the next hundred and fifty years.

In 1684, it was the fault of the French that Spain suddenly took a panicked interest in its province of East Texas. Whether Rene Cavelier Sieur de La Salle really missed the mouth of the Mississippi or simply wanted to slip a little closer to the rich silver mines in central Mexico, his appearance on Matagorda Bay alerted the Spanish to the importance of Texas. Hurriedly, the Spanish inserted their missionaries throughout the area.

The missionaries, ever at the forefront of Spanish

European politics changed the attitudes of both Spanish and French in 1700. When the last of the Spanish Hapsburg kings died in that year, the French Sun King, Louis XIV, placed his grandson on the Spanish throne, an effort that took almost 14 years of warfare.

The move ensured that France and Spain, cousins though they now were, would face off against each other in East Texas, each seeking to protect its empire. The Spanish settled Nuestra Señora de Pilar de Los Adaes at present day Robeline, Louisiana, 30 miles east of the Sabine while the French established their fort at Natchitoches on the Arroyo Hondo tributary of the Red River. The two traded contraband, in contravention of the Spanish laws, but encouraged by the French.

To reach their distant capital at Los Adaes, the Spanish opened a path through the dense forests of East Texas. Again the French intervened. In 1713, in response to a letter from the Spanish missionary, Father Hidalgo, a French trader named Louis de Juchereau de St. Denis used the new road to enter East Texas. An able diplomat, St. Denis made his way to San Juan Bautista on the Rio Grande where he was promptly arrested as an illegal foreigner carrying contraband trade items. He would be only the first of many such illegal intruders.

After his very pleasant incarceration on the Rio Grande, during which time he courted Manuela Sánchez, the granddaughter

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS of the presidial commander, Diego Ramón, he was sent to Mexico City. He convinced the Spanish government to put him to use as an emissary. Returning to Texas, he married the beautiful Manuela and the couple moved back to East Texas. Over the next fifty years, St. Denis and his descendants helped to establish better relations between the Spanish, the French and the natives.

San Antonio, placed half-way up on the Camino Real in 1718, became the way-station to supply the needs of the soldiers and priests in East Texas. San Juan Bautista, on the Rio Grande, (the river continued to be called the Rio Bravo throughout the Spanish period), at the southern end of the Camino Real in Texas, launched the expeditions, the mule-loads of trade goods, and supplies for the presidios and missionaries on the distant frontier.

By 1803, another threat appeared in East Texas—the Americans. The young republic of the United States, under orders from President Thomas Jefferson, purchased Louisiana and New Orleans from Napoleon. Spanish citizens fled from Louisiana, many settling in East Texas. Anglo horse traders and contraband runners proliferated throughout the area. The border remained unclear as Aaron Burr and James Wilkinson worked to create a new Republic west of the Mississippi River. When that didn’t happen, Wilkinson and Spanish governor Simón de Herrera, without permission from either Spain or the United States, agreed to establish a Neutral Ground between the Arroyo Hondo and the Sabine River. In doing so they created a happy lawless home for anyone running from crimes, convictions, or court cases in either country.

Perhaps it was this freedom from governmental intervention and the remote hideaways of the Big Thicket that attracted an unusual group of settlers to East Texas. Unlike the cotton plantations and farms of the river valleys of the Austin settlements, unlike the open ranges of South Texas and the vast reaches of West Texas, East Texas could close itself off and hide from outsiders when they chose to. It was an ideal place for those wishing to avoid problems of all sorts.

Inspired by the 1810 revolts in Mexico by Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, Texans, too, were tempted by independence

from Spain. In 1813, the Neutral Ground provided Bernardo Gutierrez de Lara and Augustus Magee, two Liberal Federalists, with a handy army from those independence-minded settlers.

Gathering volunteers by offering lands, Gutierrez de Lara invaded, captured Goliad and San Antonio, and attempted to create the first republic in Texas. He wrote Texas’ first Constitution and Declaration of Independence and had high hopes for his new republic. The Centralist conservatives of San Antonio had different ideas. They called on the Spanish government for help. The small army of Liberal Federalists were wiped out at the Battle of Medina by the Spanish Royalist General, Joaquín de Arredondo. Those who escaped fled to their homes in East Texas.

Mexico, however, faced more controversy. A liberal revolt in favor of a Constitutional Monarchy in Spain in 1820 convinced the Conservative Centralists in Mexico to side with their Federalist opponents and separate from Spain. After a brief couple of years under the aegis of Conservative Centralist Emperor Agustín de Iturbide, the Federalists gained control of the Mexican government with the Constitution of 1824.

In hopes of protecting their northern border, the government instituted the Empresario system. The Mexican government offered large grants of land to land agents who were to divide up the land and grant it to honest, loyal, upstanding Catholic settlers. In exchange, the land agent or empresario was to receive 5 leagues and 5 labors for every 100 families he introduced. The land was not for sale.

Perhaps it is not surprising that the first revolt against Mexican control occurred in East Texas, fueled by the arrival of Anglos. In 1826, Empresario Haden Edwards tried to grant land to his own Anglo-American pioneers but found that the land was already claimed by Spanish or Mexican settlers. Like so many in East Texas, those Spanish settlers had come illegally to the land.

It had happened nearly one hundred years earlier. When Louisiana was granted to Spain at the end of the French and Indian war in 1763, Los Adaes was no longer needed to prevent foreign intrusion. The king closed down the capital of Texas and moved it back to San Antonio. Unwilling to spend the money to provide protection for the remaining residents of Los Adaes, the King ordered

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS the families from the old capitol to resettle around San Antonio.

Given little water and worse land, the rebellious Los Adaes settlers, led by rancher Antonio Gil y Barbo, hated the land, the people and their treatment in San Antonio. Gil y Barbo begged to be allowed to return his friends and neighbors to their beloved East Texas. It took months of pleading with the Viceroy in Mexico City before the families were given permission to at least get out of San Antonio. They settled at a new town on the Trinity River they called Bucareli, in honor of the Viceroy. When floods, mosquitoes and Indian raids left them devastated, Gil y Barbo, with no royal authority, moved his people back to Nacogdoches.

It wasn’t Los Adaes, but it was East Texas.

By 1826, with the Mexican government now in power, Edwards tried to grant the Los Adaesaños land to his own people. They Mexicans objected. They had no titles to prove their ownership but they called in the troops from San Antonio anyway.

Threatened by the intervention of the Mexican government, Edwards revolted in the 1826 Fredonia Rebellion. He and his brother were defeated and run out of Texas. Gil y Barbo and his people remained on the lands of East Texas, albeit still without titles.

The Fredonia Rebellion triggered an inspection by Manuel de Mier y Terán. His 1829 report in turn led to the closing of the borders of Texas to Anglo-American immigrants from 1830 to 1832. Only good, Irish Catholics were to be admitted, and they went to South Texas. The attractions of East Texas, however, continued to lure settlers across the Sabine and the Red Rivers.

Illegal settlements sprang up around Anahuac, Nacogdoches and in the thick forests of the Piney Woods and the Big Thicket.

It was easy to hide from governmental forces, whether Mexican or Texan, and East Texas acquired more ethically-challenged settlers.

The border issue remained an ongoing problem. Was the border between Mexican Texas and the United States the Rio Grande? Or the Neches? Or Arroyo Hondo? Or even the Red River? During these debates, further questions about Florida

and distant Oregon and even Alaska and Vancouver Island also played a part in the discussions between Spain and the United States over their common boundaries. By 1819, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams and Spanish Minister Luis de Onís established the borders and submitted the Adams-Onís Treaty to their respective governments. The border was established as the West bank of the Sabine river, from its mouth on the Gulf of Mexico to the intersection with the 32nd parallel thence running north to the intersection with the Red River and continuing north and west to the Oregon border and finally to Alaska.

The successful independence movements in Latin America in 1821 required the United States to re-ratify the treaty with the newly independent Mexican government. When Texas won its independence in 1836, and again when Texas joined the United States in 1845, the border treaties had to be renegotiated.

East Texas continued to attract those fleeing from governmental control. The battles for Texas Independence from 1832 to 1836 may have centered in San Antonio, Gonzalez and Houston, but East Texas remained a critical life-line for supplies and men from the United States. Conflicts with Mexican forces erupted in Nacogdoches, at the port at Anahuac, and throughout East Texas led by the already independence-minded settlers.

From 1836 to 1845, attitudes of East Texans changed little during the years of the Republic of Texas. They liked their independence, their freedom to do as they pleased, and they were far enough from the weak Texas government in Houston, and then Austin, to ignore the dictates of the various presidents. After annexation and admission to the United States, East Texans clung to their free-wheeling ways.

Some noted that East Texas remained the westernmost extension of the Deep South. Lumber interests, a few cotton plantations along the rivers, and small herds of cattle in the open meadows amidst the pines linked the East Texans to their neighbors to the east rather than to the rest of Texas.

Some Texans have claimed that the 41 counties that make up East Texas are isolated from the rest of Texas by what is often called “the Pine Curtain.” It may be true that the thick forests and the

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS hidden recesses of the Big Thicket have provided hide-aways for some running from the law over the years. Whether it has been those escaping from the World War II draft or from bail bondsmen, the forests have provided safety and protection for East Texans.

Now, however, we have a chance to step beyond the Pine Curtain. The ethereal beauty of East Texas is here spread for us to enjoy. It has been overlooked and ignored for too long.

At last we can revel in what East Texans have known and loved all their lives. Lee Jamison, artist and East Texan, shares the wonders of the Piney Woods and the Big Thicket with the rest of Texas and the world.

Dr. Caroline Castillo Crimm was born and raised in Mexico City. She holds degrees from the University of Miami, Texas Tech and a Ph.D. in Latin American History from the University of Texas at Austin. Among her many books and articles is the award-winning De León: A Tejano Family History. After 40 years of teaching, she has recently retired and been honored as a Professor Emeritus from Sam Houston State University. She lives in Huntsville, Texas with her husband, Jack and has just started a new company, Historic Tours of Texas.

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

Lee Jamison: Ode to East Texas No.

Artist

Title of Work

Date

Medium

Size (inches)

2018

oil on canvas

1

Lee Jamison

Losses by Degree

2

Lee Jamison

Shadows Across Dodge 2018 oil on canvas 24 x 30

3

Lee Jamison

Where Once Were Giant Pines

2018

oil on canvas

18 x 24

4 Lee Jamison

5 Lee Jamison

Pine Grove Church of Christ

2018

oil on canvas

18 x 24

Framed by Shadows

2018

oil on canvas

12 x 16

6

Lee Jamison

Hilltop Icehouse

2017

oil on canvas

18 x 24

7

Lee Jamison

Fair Haven of Rest

2018

oil on canvas

12 x 16

8

9

Lee Jamison

The Rural Feed Store: Stubbs Feed, Trinity

2018

oil on canvas

36 x 48

Lee Jamison

Trinity County Courthouse and Jail

2018

oil on canvas

12 x 24

10

Lee Jamison

St. Joseph Catholic Church, New Waverly

2017

oil on canvas

30 x 40

11

Lee Jamison

Out to Pasture

2017

oil on canvas

24 x 36

12

Lee Jamison

Moving Shadow

2017

oil on canvas

30 x 60

13

Lee Jamison

Noon at Courthouse Square, Crockett, Texas

2017

oil on canvas

24 x 48

14

Lee Jamison

Shade Seekers

2018

oil on canvas

18 x 24

15

Lee Jamison

Big Thicket Hideaway 2018 oil on canvas 36 x 36

16

Lee Jamison

Roots of Texas, Mission Tejas State Park

2018

oil on canvas

24 x 36

17

Lee Jamison

Parade in Evening Shadows

2017

oil on canvas

16 x 20

18

Lee Jamison

Caddo lake Hunter 2018 oil on canvas 30 x 40

19

Lee Jamison

Early Evening, Caddo Lake

2017

oil on canvas

24 x 36

20

Lee Jamison

Ghosts of the Atomic Age

2018

oil on canvas

18 x 24

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

12 x 24

Lee Jamison: Ode to East Texas No.

Artist

Title of Work

Date

Medium

Size (inches)

21

Lee Jamison

Preserved by Neglect

2018

oil on canvas

16 x 20

22

Lee Jamison

Austin Street, Jefferson

2018

oil on canvas

30 x 40

23

Lee Jamison

Isolation: Martin Dies State Park

nd

oil on canvas

12 x 24

24

Lee Jamison

Sunset and Wind Shadow

2018

oil on canvas

12 x 24

25

Lee Jamison

Evening Sun and Spanish Moss

2015

oil on canvas

24 x 48

26

Lee Jamison

Woven Together: Polk County Courthouse

2018

oil on canvas

24 x 36

27

Lee Jamison

An Oilfield Christmas: Kilgore

2018

oil on canvas

30 x 40

28

Lee Jamison

The Most East Texas, Burr's Ferry Bridge, Sabine River

2013

oil on canvas

36 x 36

29

Lee Jamison

In the Hope of Resurrection

2018

oil on canvas

30 x 40

30

Lee Jamison

The Turning Bridge

2015

oil on canvas

48 x 36

31

Lee Jamison

Sunbeams

2017

oil on canvas

18 x 36

32

Lee Jamison

Wildflowers

2016

oil on canvas

24 x 30

33

Lee Jamison

Hayfield

2017

oil on canvas

12 x 24

34

Lee Jamison

Old Man at Dusk, Sam Houston State

2015

oil on canvas

36 x 48

35

Lee Jamison

Wild Things

2018

oil on canvas

48 x 36

36

Lee Jamison

Foundations

2016

oil on canvas

12 x 36

37

Lee Jamison

The Frontier Law Office

2016

oil on canvas

16 x 20

38

Lee Jamison

Don't Dawdle

2016

oil on canvas

22 x 28

39

Lee Jamison

Wood Duck

2017

oil on canvas

12 x 16

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS

1. Losses by Degree, 2018, oil on canvas, 12 x 24 inches.

Location: Roy Webb Rd. near intersection of Blythe Ranch Rd., Dodge, Walker Co. Tx To live in any place for a long time is to come to love, and then lose, people and things. As an artist I would fall in love with certain trees and views near my home in Dodge.

Certain people, too, were precious to me. Having moved to the community in my middle twenties I met people who had lived long lives their while I was still in the sway of the compressed sense of time of my youth. One of these was Edwin "Baby" Roark, an old pulpwood logger, who had lived in Dodge all (or nearly all...) of his then 69 years. Three years later we would lose him to complications of cancer. So much had happened in the interim, and I had grown so to cherish him and his extended family. The connection of this place, two miles distant from those events, is his eldest daughter, Jane, who lived with her husband, Charles Bartee, across a road you can't see from here to the right of the barn. I always connected this place with them, though it wasn't theirs. Charles and Jane raised good kids. Then Charles died about eighteen years ago. Then one of the children, Wes, died about ten years ago. The tree to the left was one of my favorites. Painting is intimately connected to grief for me.

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS 2. Shadows Across Dodge, 2018, oil on canvas, 24 x 30 inches.

Location: FM 405 about a mile north of Tx. Hwy. 190 in eastern Walker County

As I write this moment was about a year ago. It's a complex image of a place that is emotionally fraught. The place I stood in setting up the image was at almost exactly the spot where my wife and younger daughtcer were involved in a head­on collision with a pick­up truck driven by a man who had fallen asleep at the wheel. That was 22 years ago. Both came away with minimal injuries, but such things never completely go away.

The red store was a social center of the town of Dodge through W.W.II and into the 1960s. It had been owned by W.O. Hopper, and later by his widow. Years later Jane Bartee, my next door neighbor's daughter, bought it and for some time her family used it as a place where the family band would practice. Later, Jane would play the piano for the First Baptist Church of Dodge, whose steeple rises beyond the red store. My wife, Melinda, is their pianist today.

The little patch of trees immediately past the red store used to be the location of a little white frame storefront that was the location of a cabinet maker's shop. We started into Huntsville one day to find a car embedded in the side of it. After a few months it was demolished.

That had been next to the location of Dodge's first fire house. Years before the same place had been the location of the icehouse where my neighbor's elder brother, John Roark, had provided refrigeration for Dodge residents. That had closed in the late 1950s, as I recall.

Even the bend in the road has meaning. It was where the rail spur that went to Oakhurst from before the turn of the 20th Century had crossed the road until just a few years before we moved to Dodge.

People and things come and go. They leave footprints on the land.

The footprints fade.

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS

3. Where Once Were Giant Pines, 2018, oil on canvas, 18 x 24 inches.

Location: Tx. Hwy. 62, 1000 feet south of U.S. 287 near Corrigan.

From the time I knew I would be painting for a show specifically on EastTexas, one of the things I had most wanted to do was show some vestige of "old growth" timber. This doesn't seem like a bizarre idea at first glance. EastTexas is the size of New England. One imagines some nook of that good ­sized territory would have been overlooked in the random patchwork ofwildland tree farming practiced in East Texas's early days. Texas Parks and Wildlife keeps an eye on interesting things in the Piney Woods, so I looked on their website to see if old growth forests might be highlighted. As it happened, a particular spot on the map was indicated as having trees as old as 250 years.

I drove there full of expectation of a communion with nature in the midst of towering monuments of native pine...This was it­harvested within the last year.

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS

4. Pine Grove Church of Christ, 2018, oil on canvas, 18 x 24 inches.

Location: West of Hwy 62, 1000 feet south of U.S. Hwy, 287, immediately adjacent to the location of "Where Once Were Giant Pines" In this show, I have an example of the simple box­like church common across East Texas. But some rural congregations, especially after the turn of the 20th century, began to express higher architectural aspirations for their communities, albeit with limited means. This is a good example of one of these wooden structures. Note that beyond the old church stands the cemetery for this community. Behind the church are roofed galleries that are a dead giveaway for a local tradition of a homecoming, complete with a communal meal and board games (like 42 and checkers) on the grounds.

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS

5. Framed by Shadow, 2018, oil on canvas, 12 x 16 inches.

Location: U.S. Hwy 96 near Village Creek, Lumberton, TX

I didn't know what kind of mill this was when I stopped to look it over. It turns out to have been a rice mill instead of my first guess, which was some strange configuration of cotton gin. But then, I actually grew up surrounded by cotton fields in my pre­ teen years in "Occupied East Texas", otherwise known as northwest Louisiana. In any event this was a reminder of how prevalent agriculture was in East Texas and how modest mills of many kinds, cotton gins, sawmills, and others dotted the countryside.

As I explored here the shadows of the clouds slowly obscured the foreground until they covered the mill. How like time that was.

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS

6. Hilltop Icehouse, 2017, oil on canvas, 18 x 24 inches.

Location: U.S. 190, near Point Blank, Texas

On one trip into East Texas, Melinda and I passed a collection of old cars and trucks. This was too cool to skip, so we doubled back to take a closer look. East Texas abounds in these automotive mummies. It was easier to enshrine the dead vehicle in the side yard than it was to have it junked, so some families might have four and five or more automotive carcasses side­by­side in the sequence of their succession. Some people have started gathering them into informal collections. They may hold as many ghosts for others as they do for me. Here, I saw cars such as had driven me to Cub Scouts in elementary school and trucks like those of my childhood, but also like one with which the Dickeys had carted my garbage away in my early years at Dodge. Then there was another like the one my neighbor, "Baby" Roark, had used for thirty years hauling pulpwood. God only knows how much lead is sequestered away in my brain because I loved the smell of the exhaust from these things when I was a kid.

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS

7. Fair Haven of Rest, 2018, oil on canvas, 12 x 16 inches.

Location: Montague Church of Christ, at Montague Cemetery; Tx. Hwy 1723, Northwest of Cleveland The roadsides of East Texas are dotted with little white wooden churches, with their long­serving cemeteries alongside. These may be of a variety of denominations, but perhaps by the bias of my eye I notice a lot of them are, like this one, Church of Christ. In the late '80s we attended a little Methodist church, sans the cemetery, at Phelps for a couple of years before being asked to lead music at the First Baptist Church in Dodge. These are like families, richly intergenerational communities, often served by a young circuit riding pastor who preaches to multiple churches on a given Sunday. When the cemetery lies beside the church as it does here one can visit family members, anchors to a sense of place sometimes going back well over a century.

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS

8. The Rural Feed Store: Stubbs Feed, Trinity, 2017, oil on canvas, 36 x 48 inches.

Location: Intersection of Railroad Street and Tx. Hwy. 94, Trinity

Travelling north from Huntsville one passes Riverside and the crossing of theTrinity River next to "The Turning Bridge." A few minutes further north one arrives at Trinity, in Trinity County. Alongside the railroad tracks there is the bustling Stubbs Chemical and Feed. I love just to watch the people coming, going, and interacting at East Texas feed stores. Note that, at this store, chewing the fat while sitting on the feed sacks is such common practice, a seat back has been placed at the window to the right of the door, and the sacks are always set near a certain height. There are photos, drawings, and something of a community message board. The feedstore, now something of a fading institution, is as much a social tool as a source of supplies.

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS

9. Trinity County Courthouse and Jail, 2018, oil on canvss, 12 x 24 inches.

Location: W. First Street, Groveton, Tx.

We used to drive past this interesting building often on trips to visit Melinda'sparents near Nacogdoches. I've never seen another courthouse that looks the same or seems to be in the same family, though the claim is that this onebegan, in 1908, patterned after the Polk County Records Building in Livingston. It was then appended to. That seems to coincide with the odd pattern of Groveton itself, which has a unique downtown in which a little spur of Main Street juts off from First Street in front of the courthouse, like an outdoor movie sound stage. But even that doesn't symmetrically align with the courthouse. It's off center, as though to make a kind of nod to the jail.

Jails in East Texas appear to have been points of notable civic pride. In many counties they are prominently displayed, as this one is, on the courthouse square. In Jasper the WPA jailhouse is even placed in front of the courthouse. Here an Art Deco WPA jail is, as it were, given equal billing. But civility is not neglected in Groveton. Just beyond the courthouse on the same grounds is the public library. All this points to how temporally close we are to something like the frontier inTexas generally. When these buildings were built three prior courthouses (probably properly aligned with Main Street) had been burned in sometimes suspicious fires. Records had even been stolen and never recovered. TheTexas Historical Commission entry on this courthouse states that by the timethe first wing of this building was built (on the far right) the people of the county had been convinced of the necessity of a "substantial building" to protect public documents. Hence that original wing was called the "Records Vault." A rock Jail didn't just show the people were safe, but they were civilized in their treatment of transgressors. And, of course, a library proved the public cherished culture.

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS

10. St. Joseph Catholic Church, New Waverly, 2017, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches.

Location: Corner of Elmore and Walker Streets, New Waverly

We generally don't think in terms of specific ethnic communities in East Texas apart from black and white. But in New Waverly a Polish Catholic immigrant community grew up late in the 19th Century, and this is their "painted" church. This phenomenon is much more common in central Texas communities such as Fredericksburg, where the churches tend to be built of rock. But, though this edifice is built of wood, it is lovingly decorated on the inside and carefully preserved on the outside. Walking the grounds I became entranced with the character of this tree as though the two of them, work of man and work of God, had been matched to each other.

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS

11.Out to Pasture, 2017, oil on canvas, 24 x 36 inches.

Location: Jimmy's Auto Sales, near the intersection of Tx. Hwy. 19 and FM1893 On a solo trip north to Mission Tejas State Park, I stopped at another place with a collection of junk cars. These all seem to speak to me, reminding me of cars family members had when I was a kid. The aged cars of today are disturbingly near to me nowadays, unlike the antiques of thirty years ago. On my firstborn's first birthday, we attended an antique car rally stage stop at thegrounds of Sam Houston Memorial Museum. There were Model Ts and old electrics and even a Stanley Steamer, but the antiques were comfortably distant­1937 and earlier. At this junk stop there were cars from the middle 1970s, younger than the first, second, third, and fourth cars I could remember my parents buying. But the one that struck me most deeply wasn't that young. At a far end of the lot was a Mercury Comet 4­door. Even as a kid I liked theway Comets looked. They're difficult to date because the sheet metal never changed on them from '60 through '63, but this one appears to have been a 1960 model from the trim. Inside was a baby's car seat like the kind I remember my now fifty-­five year­old baby brother being set in in the early '60s. As someone who has felt a responsible parent's despairing pain when a car full of kids gives up the ghost by the roadside, I couldn't help but project the story of someone with an infant and suddenly no vehicle. I was projecting a monument to a fifty­-plus­year­old pain. My heart went out to someone whose children's children are long since grown.

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS

12. Moving Shadow, 2017, oil on canvas, 30 x 60" inches.

Location: Highway 19, between Lovelady and Crockett This work has been gestating in my mind for decades. Starting when I first started making the trek to the late, lamented Lon Morris College in 1975 each time I would travel Highway 19 from Trinity past Lovelady and up to Crockett I would crest a hill near Crockett itself and be reintroduced to this vista with its deep march into the distance. Its true that we have no real mountains in the Piney Woods, but Earth has no volcanoes to compare with Olympus Mons on Mars, nor do we have Alpine villages or rustic chalets such as one would find in Switzerland. We have softer, subtler, more humble things that have homes in our hearts as those things have in the hearts of others.

A little barn peeks almost furtively out of the trees, creating the sense of a human scale. A roofed food trough, literally a manger, has toppled over from the wear of ages. Here, too, the shadows play a role, gliding silently and gently across the landscape. They obscure in shade, and then reveal in sun, successive copses of trees as though guided by the hand of a stage manager handling a light board. It's odd, almost eerie, how certain spots have this effect on me. They seem to epitomize East Texas as a home to my soul.

As I write this, yesterday I was able to point out this spot to my wife in its winter coat as we drove up to see Kilgore, Tyler, and Jacksonville. She has watched it come to life in summer garb and was very appreciative. And with that one of my hiding placed hides in her as well.

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS

13. Noon at Courthouse Square, Crockett, Texas, 2017, oil on canvas, 24 x 48 inches.

Location: Courthouse Square, Crockett

Every time I visit Crockett it seems to be bustling. This is a busy little downtown, if traffic is any indication. And Crockett always strikes me when I'm actually there as being more picturesque than I remember it being. The courthouse is not one of the romantic Victorian structures from the 1890s, but was built in 1939 in the monumental Art Deco style of the time.

While it is, or ought to have been, a crime to reface a Victorian courthouse with Art Deco features (a la Woodville) buildings originally built as Art Deco government and business facilities (Think Empire State Building) have really worn well. This one is no exception. In the middle of an East Texas town square it seems oddly dissonant. On the whole, though, Crockett feels like a peculiarly complete pictorial package. I can never get over that.

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS

14. Shade Seekers, 2018, oil on canvas, 18 x 24 inches.

Location: Approximately 1/2 mile south of Mission Tejas State Park off of Hwy 21.

Golly gee, it was hot. Since I was a college boy at Lon Morris College in Jacksonville I have always loved traveling the stretch of Highway 21 between Crockett and Alto.

So, going back to see some of these fields I had always loved was a necessity. This one, though it seems less so flattened on a canvas, had always seemed to me filled with wonderful spatial relationships­the distant trees, the intervening field, the near middle ground trees, and so forth. But as I trudged along the highway, avoiding fire ant piles and slapping mosquitoes, I was beginning to question what the limits of necessity really were. As someone known for fedoras I was pleased to have worn a white Panama hat instead of my usual black felt fedora. Black, I thought, would be the worst possible color. And, somehow, I hadn't noticed them till that moment.

There in the shadows of every tree were many cattle, all black as midnight. And they all appeared to agree that standing in the sun wearing black was a bad idea.

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS 15. Big Thicket Hideaway, 2018, oil on canvas 36 x 36 inches.

Location: Big Thicket State Park near Beaumont

As a young artist just starting out I read a comment by Andrew Wyeth about his Pennsylvania works being proxy portraits of his father, the great illustrator, N.C. Wyeth. That has lingered in the back of my mind ever since.

This year marks a century since an atrocity happened in Dodge. On June 1st, 1918, a posse that included Sheriff T.E. King from the county seat in Huntsville, but also Justice of the Peace Sam Roark and other residents from Dodge and Huntsville, engaged in a lynching that resulted in the deaths of an entire black family, the Cabiness family, but for one member. The fallout from the event became an international embarrassment for the whole nation, even being trumpeted by Germany in its propaganda war against the Allied Powers in W.W.I. I am convinced that my neighbor in Dodge, Edwin "Baby" Roark, either witnessed the event itself as a three­year­old or witnessed the damage the fallout of the lynching did to members of his own family.

My experience of my deep East Texas country neighbors was a revelation to me.

Baby Roark could, on one hand, say proudly that he had never sat at table with a black person and on the other say with the deepest conviction of which he was capable that he never wanted to be anyone's enemy. He could face this contradiction entirely without irony. Yet in all my experience in Dodge the only people who ever told me they hated the man were white. Not one of many black folks, especially the old ones, I spoke to who knew Mr. Roark had ever had a cross word to say about him.

Mr. Roark's passivism was so visceral that even in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor he could not bring himself to kill. As a non­clergy Southern Baptist he could expect no consideration as a conscientious objector, so when the draft came he fled to the deep cover of the Big Thicket.

He spent the entirety of the war there, living off the land and getting occasional visits from his young wife, Vennie Mae. In this retreat for conscience, though, there is irony. Because if I'm right and the young Baby Roark learned his disgust for killing as a result of a community mass murder, what precipitated it all was a young black man who was resisting the draft.

According to Dr. Jeff Littlejohn of the History Department at Sam Houston State University the Cabiness lynching came about because the local draft board was unable to prove a birth date for George Cabiness, whose family claimed he was too young for the draft. For some reason this became an issue for the Sheriff and another Huntsville man, whereupon there was deemed to be cause for an armed confrontation that erupted into the slaying of the family.

This, then, is my proxy portrait of Baby Roark, a man who paid lip service to ancestral hate, but would not kill.

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS

16. Roots of Texas, Mission Tejas State Park, 2018, oil on canvas, 24 x 36 inches.

Location: Park Rd. 44 at Tx. Hwy. 21, Weches

At Mission Tejas nothing material remains that speaks to anything deeply historical. But this is the spot where Texas got its name. It originated as a Caddoan word sounding roughly like "Tay­shas", which meant "friendship" to the natives. The history of the mission itself, though, didn't bear the name well. Originally established primarily to cement Spanish claim to the territory against fears of encroachment by French claimants from Louisiana, over the course of about three years the crossed purposes of church and military officials created such hostility among the Indians that the mission was burned and abandoned.

The woods here were last harvested about eighty years ago or more in some spots. That makes them fairly mature for forests in East Texas. But that relative maturity does give one a chance to sense a little bit about what it was like to be in ancient woods.

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS

17. Parade in Evening Shadows, 2017, oil on canvas, 16 x 20 inches.

Location: Caddo Lake State Park

Here, in a cypress cathedral, is a peculiar routine with the air of reptilian ritual. As evening shadows lengthened on the pond it became more and more amusing to see a succession of turtles climbing the ramp of a branch, one after another. They then processed onto the trunk of a fallen tree to sun. Apparently, they eventually work their way to the end and then plop off into the water.

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS

18. Caddo Lake Hunter, 2018, oil on canvas 30 x 40 inches.

Location: Big Cypress Bayou, adjacent to Caddo Lake State Park

To the extent it is possible to credentialize being a regionalist artist I can trace my lineage through my Art professor, Willard Cooper, my aunt Edith Emmerich Mulling, and my cousin­in law, Frankie Morris to their teacher, Don Brown. Stories of Brown's eccentricities in America and abroad are legion. Cooper (who drove the same Model A Ford for the entirety of his adult life, himself ) could regale a class with them for hours. But the tale that always attracted me was that he lived on a paddle­wheel boat driven by a transplanted Model T engine and plied the waters of Caddo Lake, Big Cypress Bayou, and Cross Bayou.

There he would drop anchor and sketch and paint ancient cypresses, birds, and his nearly ubiquitous alligators.

This attachment to the swamp was deep in Brown's soul long before he went to France to study, showing up even in tales of his eccentricities abroad. Hearing of it made sense to me. So much of my own mind was woven through with places and experiences like his, and with other people­ felt by how images of their special places affected them. In a sense, then, this image represents someone sustaining himself via the waterways of his environment. And there is a blue heron in it doing the same thing.

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS

19. Early Evening, Caddo Lake, 2017, oil on canvas, 24 x 36 inches.

Location: Big Cypress Bayou near Caddo Lake State Park

Occasionally the subject of a painting is not so much the place as how the place touches something deeper. When I was a student at Lon Morris College in Jacksonville, a now­closed Methodist junior college that could trace its origins back to a Masonic school in New Danville in the days of the Texas Republic, music was a big part of my school experience. In my first year there the pretty Miss Melinda Olson was the choir accompanist. Four years later she would take me on as a lifetime project and husband, though we never dated at Lon Morris. My sophomore year I was in the school's publicity men's quartet along with a young Neal McCoy. But the song that stuck with me most was a full choral arrangement from a black gospel song called "Dark Water." "Dark water! Dark water! Let this sinner go!" The bass part is deep, rich, and haunting. When I saw this spot it sang to me.

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS

20. Ghosts of the Atomic Age, 2018, oil on canvas, 18 x 24 inches.

Location: Hilltop Icehouse, Tx. Hwy. 190 near Point Blank

Leonardo Da Vinci, probably to thumb his nose at the dusty, hard­ laboring Michelangelo, said that it was the privilege of the painter to listen to fine music, wear nice clothing, and hear the reading of poetry as he worked. I do listen to music, but I also have access to YouTube, and can listen to historical and scientific lectures and documentaries. As I worked on this painting I went through several documentaries on the Bomb and its effect on the generations of my parents and grandparents.

It could be said that there was never a generation more removed from the world of just two decades before than that for whom these were the wheels of labor. East Texas was a part of that transition, too.

Joe Cobbs grew up in Dodge. As a kid he had farmed bottom land nearby with his dad, guiding a mule­drawn plow by hand. When he grew up he joined the newly independent Air Force, becoming a tail gunner on B­17 bombers. He was credited with a kill of a North Korean Mig jet during the Korean war. Over the course of his career he saw the advance of technology such as I'm sure he would hardly have been able to imagine from behind the mule. His crew even participated in the air­drop test of an atom bomb. By the end of his career he was on crew in a B­52, flying well into the 1960s.

At all of his postings Joe would try to have a garden for raising vegetables. Always well­g rounded in the soil of East Texas, he was the most humble man I ever knew. We buried Joe in February of this year.

These simple, hard­ working vehicles remind me of Joe Cobbs.

And their contemporary, the B­ 52, still plies the skies of the Earth, protecting the interests of the United States.

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS

21. Preserved by Neglect, Jefferson, TX, 2018, oil on canvas, 16 x 20 inches.

Location: Near the corner of Market and Austin Streets, Jefferson, TX.

At opposite ends, south and north, of old East Texas are cities that are like museum displays on 1890s port centers. On the Gulf there is Galveston. At the head of navigation on Big Cypress Creek from Shreveport, La., there is Jefferson. Both were vital transportation centers in a regime dominated by sail and paddlewheel traffic. Galveston, for its part, stood alone on the Texas Coast as a cosmopolitan center and the state's largest city. Jefferson held a place of similar prominence in northeast Texas. As hubs of transportation on which all regional economic distribution was dependent each was a center to which people came for everything from employment to justice, to religious comfort. Each, likewise, dried up from a regional infestation of rail transportation. Jefferson preserves the irony of its loss in keeping a rail car once used by Jay Gould, who had sought to build a rail line through town. The city, comfortable with its dependence on river traffic turned the magnate aside.

He built elsewhere. The security of river commerce wasn't lightly held. It was so widely believed to be unassailable that expensive turning rail bridges were being built on Texas rivers as late as 1915 to facilitate steamboat traffic. To compound the issue, clearing of rafts of dead trees along the riverways of East Texas and Louisiana reduced back pressure on water flow and, though it had been intended to improve conditions for boats, lowered water levels so much ports like Jefferson could no longer operate reliably. Looking back, we owe a century of neglect a debt of gratitude for having preserved jewels like Jefferson. Vibrant progress has paved over the architectural heritage of Texas' biggest cities. That's not a bad thing. But Jefferson remembers the fabric of an older economy, pretty much intact. And that's a good thing.

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS

22. Austin Street, Jefferson, 2018, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches.

Location: corner of Austin and Polk Streets, Jefferson, TX

To walk around Jefferson's old town area is to feel transported from nominalEast Texas towns. This doesn't feel anything like Crockett, Marshall, orPalestine. What Jefferson hearkens to, almost weirdly, is New Orleans. But ifone thinks about it just a little bit there is probably a very good reason for this.Jefferson was far more intimately connected to that ultimate hub of watertraffic in the vast American interior than it was to the rail network that informedthe growing culture of the rest of East Texas. When it was cut off from rivercommunication it never really connected in the same way with that railnetwork it had only begrudgingly become a part of.So, from wrought iron, to statues, to pinnacles, to the intimacy of the oldriverfront Jefferson is a town that feels like it could teach lessons to my nativeShreveport about how to embrace being a Louisiana town Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS

23. Isolation: Martin Dies State Park, oil on canvas, 12 x 24 inches.

Location: Martin Dies State Park, off U.S. 190 near Jasper

Many places in East Texas are like worlds apart. Signs in many of our parks warn of alligators, largely because we people raised as city folk foolishly anthropomorphize beasts that long predated dinosaurs on the Earth. Nothing is more harmful to the alligator than convincing him what he previously thought was "dangerous food" is only "food". A deep disconnect fixes a chasm between two worlds.

When I saw this old pier it seemed almost allegorical of many such chasms between East Texas and the rest of the world.

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS

24. Sunset and Wind Shadow, 2018, oil on canvas, 12 x 24 inches.

Location: South of U.S. Hwy 190 eight miles east of Huntsville

It's reassuring to have places nearby that always ring with a special feeling in one's mind. I drive by this location several days a week and have liked this particular field since before we bought our house in nearby Dodge in 1984. Periodically owners have had cattle on the land here, though not at present. For much of that time there was no barn.

I think it has been there for only twenty years or so. The presence of the barn, though, made the field seem all the more responsive to the moods of Sun and season. This is an image from very late in winter, at sunset. An east wind blows across the farm pond. Wind "shadows" on the eastward side of the pond remain smooth, reflecting the distant trees. The lowering sunshine and lengthening shadows light the barn up as though it was on fire.

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS

25. Evening Sun and Spanish Moss, 2015, oil on canvas, 24 x 48 inches.

Location: Near the Sabine River

This is a composite from photographic sources that long predate my modern digital camera and cell phone with their GPS wizardry. With it one can detect a quirk in my relationship with color. Periodically I go back and forth between the brightest of impressionist palettes, especially with late evening works, and much more subdued colors.

It's always felt to me like there ought to be some perfect level of chromatic magic. And it's weird. Sometimes when I look at this one it is that magic. Other times I look at it and it's not. But that is also true of the world around me. Some days the colors themselves are more intense. Some days they are not. Yes. A psychologist has told me that was interesting.

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS

26.Woven Together: Polk County Courthouse, 2018, oil on canvas, 24 x 36 inches.

Location: Intersection of Tx Hwy.190 and U.S. 59, Livingston

This is a nexus of transportation and mind in East Texas.. Polk County is oneof the places most deeply cherished in my late mother­in­law's memory.

Itwas a place of childhood joy from country living for her, even as it wasremembered as a place of hard life and poverty by her parents.Highways 190 and 59 meet on the far left, and immediately behind us a railline crosses the highway. The rumbling of that rail line over a century has soshaken the records vault on the right it has been necessary to shore thebuilding up with steel braces. This building, then, is also the one exactlycopied in 1908 as referenced in my notes for the painting of the Trinity CountyCourthouse and Jail. The 1884 building that previously occupied the spot nowheld by the Classical Revival style courthouse was designed by Eugene T.Heiner, who also designed an 1889 courthouse in Huntsville, a twin of whichmay now be seen in Wharton. The 1913 building seen here is likewise similarto the smaller 1914 Marion County Courthouse on the left of Austin Street:Jefferson.The Alabama­Coushatta Indians, beloved of Sam Houston, have theirreservation in Polk County. The path they used to take to visit each other,blazed ages ago by Caddoan tribes, was essentially that taken by the buildersof Highway 190 in knitting east and west together.

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS

27. An Oilfield Christmas: Kilgore, 2018, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches.

Location: Corner of Main and Kilgore streets, Kilgore

Heading up to Northeast Texas was, in part, a reprise of a piece of my earlymemories from childhood. Once when I was a kid of six or seven Daddydecided to take a Saturday to do an East Texas trip from Shreveport. It wasvery consciously a TEXAS tour and eventually became the root of my half­joking claim that I was born in "occupied East Texas". We started by crossingthe Red River to Bossier City, then crossing back via the Earl Long Bridge tothe foot of Texas Street. We went up Texas Street to First Methodist, turnedleft onto Texas Avenue, and followed that as U.S. Highway 80 all the way intoTexas.

In Texas we continued to Kilgore, where steel oil derricks left over fromthe boom of the 1930s and '40s stood haphazardly all across the city.These were representative of one of the greatest mineral finds in Americanhistory. It not only meant that East Texas was generally more prosperous thanmuch of the rest of the country during the Great Depression, but it made theregion strategically valuable. A large percentage, some say much more thanhalf, of the oil that fueled the Allied Powers' Herculean effort of W.W.II camefrom the East Texas oil fields. Kilgore was front and center of that. Justbeyond this particular spot is an area called "the world's richest acre". Sosure, East Texas is not generally regarded as a place of glamor. But this wasthe gas station of the free world.Some derricks still are spread about, and it is possible even today to see renthouses and active pump jacks sharing the same lot, but for the most part thebig structures have been regimented to an orderly distribution arounddowntown. It does make for a spectacular Christmas display Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS 28. The Most East Texas, Burr's Ferry Bridge, Sabine River, 2017, oil on canvas, 36 x 36 inches.

Location: Bridge from Tx. Hwy. 63 to La. Hwy. 8I

I originally chose to come to this spot because though I have crossed theSabine here twice I'd never purposefully tried to go to this easternmostaccessible point in the state as a destination in itself. This 80­year­old bridgecrosses the Sabine at a place rich with history. Burr's Ferry, on what was thencalled "The Old Beef Trail", was the place Sam Houston had first been aimingfor in the Runaway Scrape. It would later become a point of contention in theCivil War, as a key supply route from industries in Houston to Confederateforces in more pressed regions.It turned out (Our visit was two months before Hurricane Harvey.) the bridgethere had recently endured a trial by flood. Heavy and persistent rains in theSabine River Floodplain in spring of 2016 pushed Toledo Bend Reservoir tothe highest levels in its history. This forced the Corps of Engineers to open theentirety of the reservoir's floodgates to their maximum level. The level of theSabine was more than thirty­six feet above its normal flow, the worst floodhere since 1884. The historic Burr's Ferry Bridge had water flowing over thedeck for two days, causing significant undermining of pilings on the Texasside.I didn't know any of this as I walked along the side of the bridge down to theriver's edge, but it didn't take a lot of prior knowledge to recognize that thelittle saplings taking root at the tops of bridge supports could only have thesix­inch­deep soil in which they were growing in unusual circumstances.

The remediation of this flood damage saved the old bridge and left a massive,six­pillared structure holding up the great piling on the Texas side. Aftermusing over this for a moment I stepped down to the water's edge, walking asfar East as I could get at that point. A little south of this spot there is a bend inthe Sabine that juts about a thousand feet further into Louisiana, but there areno roads to it. I could be reasonably secure in believing that, of the 28.5million people in Texas I was for that moment the most easterly still on Texassoil. But for occasional cars clunking across expansion joints it was quiet.This was a moment apart­most appropriate for the region I'm examining

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS

29. In the Hope of Resurrection, 2018, oil on canvas 30 x 40 inches.

Location: Off Tx. Hwy. 1293 between the communities of Bragg and Honey Island On the way back from our trip to Big Thicket State Park north of Beaumont we traveled a back country road fringed by tree farms. Elsewhere in this show I have referred to early logging practices as "wildland farming", by which I mean practices verging on technologically advanced hunter­ gathering. Here the practice is farming, pure and simple. But unlike the farming of corn, wheat, or cotton the crop is sown and gathered over the course of a generation. It requires patience, long­term planning and execution, intergenerational commitment, and hope. Here the sun sets on one cycle of this long commitment, seeming to highlight a desolation ­and death. But in the distance there is bright hope. The Sun will rise again.

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS

30.The Turning Bridge, 2015, oil on canvas, 48 x 36 inches.

Location: immediately east of Tx. Hwy 19 on the Trinity River channel at Riverside This is, so far as I know, the last turning bridge to have been built in Texas. Itwas designed to be turned by a single man using a hand crank. Thisparticular bridge was built in 1915 to replace an identical structure originallybuilt in 1911 and destroyed in flooding in 1914. That, too, had replaced anearlier structure designed to allow river traffic to get past rail crossings.Transitions in transport economy are fascinating because they are such anillustration of how our minds can fail to grasp a sea change as we are in themidst of it. It seemed very important to the people who built this bridge’simmediate predecessor to make sure riverboat traffic could pass unimpededto ports up and down­ stream. But the advantages of rail for transport of bulkshipments were so great that cost, not access, was causing the extinction ofcommercial river traffic.It seemed appropriate, in the light of this obscuring of our minds’ sight, topresent my reflection on this remarkable engineering feat in service of a lostcause through a screen of foreground limbs and branches.

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS

31. Sunbeams, 2017, oil on canvas, 18 x 36 inches.

Location: Dodge­Oakhurst Rd. ½ mile east of FM 405, Dodge When we lived in Dodge I would frequently get out before the sun rose towatch the colors of sunrise on fog. Such mornings are rich with both brillianceand subtlety. Sunbeams and shadows stream through three­dimensionalspace and moving back and forth one can get the sense the light and shadeitself have palpable substance. One ought, it seems, be able to touch theform of it, to grasp it by the edge and carry it home. So, I guess, I've done just that.

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS

32. Wildflowers, 2016, oil on canvas, 24 x 30 inches.

Location: A field off of Paul Dixon Rd. about two miles west of FM 405, Dodge Some subjects refuse to be painted. I first started painting this in 2005, but itwas like a difficult child who could not see herself as I saw her. Over thecourse of a decade I would come back to it many times. The field sits next tothe property of Jerrell Price, a retired Houston police officer now in hisnineties. Jerrell is a richly textured, fully human, country man. I love him forhis contradictions as much as for his desire to live out his faith in God. A lot ofcity folk spending time with him would see prejudices without comprehendingthe beauty of the man. Jerrell loves to grow flowers, and especially lovedsharing them with his late wife. The painting became emotionally entangledwith what I feel for him.To finish it I had to make it rough and harsh. And it couldn't be airy and light,but firm, solidly rooted. There were places in it that had barred entry I had tocut out. It felt like I was taking carpenter's tools to the image. To have achance to be beautiful, to show the sweetness of its soul, this painting neededscars and injuries.

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS

33. Hayfield, 2017, oil on canvas, 12 x 24 inches.

Location: off Dodge Oakhurst Rd., Dodge

The things that recommend images to me come from a variety of factors.Some of them are a product of my fascination with people and economies ingeneral. Some are attachment to specific people and the places that becomereminders of them. Some, though, just rise up from me and how given placesand visual stimuli affect me. This work is one that comes from the last group.Sunrises in the early mists of Dodge have treated me to wonders of colorfulabstraction. In emotionally trying times I’ve noted that I tend to see colorsmore brightly. This morning walk was taken during one of those trying times. Itis beautiful, and it is East Texas, but it is also me seeking solace in the placeto which I’ve become most attuned.

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS

34. Old Main at Dusk, Sam Houston State (originally Normal Institute), 2015, oil on canvas, 36 x 48 inches.

Location: formerly on the campus of Sam Houston State University­burned 1982

“Old Main” was one of the most beautiful public buildings in Texas for nine decades. Part of a surge of public construction in Texas in the prosperity of the late 1880s and ’90s, the new main building for Sam Houston State Normal Institute also coincided with a resurgence in the reputation of Sam Houston as people acquired some emotional distance from the cataclysm of the Civil War. His prescience in efforts to avoid Secession, and his incredibly accurate predictions for the war and its aftermath, had finally found an audience in the clarity of experienced hindsight. This renewed appreciation for the great man was expressed in the new building in a series of memorial windows on the second floor. It was a memorial seen best from the interior of the building. But that meant that, when others made paintings of Old Main by daylight after its demise in 1982, the memorial aspect of the building’s intent was lost. Old Main, in those pictures, became like the anonymous photos of someone else’s ancestors in an antique shop.

I decided three years ago to make this right by doing a painting that would, as faithfully as possible on this scale, show the stained glass memorials to Sam Houston and others as they appeared in about 1928. Doing the painting as an evening image allowed me to light the windows from within. This also speaks to the importance of East Texas in Texas history. Much of the early canon of the state’s heritage was born in Huntsville, partly from the recollections of people such as Joshua Houston and others who had known Houston personally, and partly from people such as Anna Hardwicke Pennybacker. Mrs. Pennybacker was a graduate of the first class of Sam Houston State Normal Institute and wrote “A New History of Texas” in 1888. That would be the standard classroom history text in Texas for forty years.

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS 35. Wild Things, 2018, oil on canvas, 48 x 36 inches.

Location: 1600 block of 14th Street, Huntsville. Tree since removed.

Even though I spent my early youth in the relative metropolis of Shreveport I was very much more a free-range kid than my grandchildren have been. I recall making explorations of storm sewers, traveling what seemed like thousands of feet in low darkened tunnels punctuated by the skylight of a street drain. I thought of it as a benefit of being small. A bully might think it was neat to convince a little five-year-old to enter a storm drain, but he had no power over him once he was there. Sure, my Mama would have been horrified to know of these adventures at the time, but I both spared her that and managed not to get lost or swept away.

Likewise, after we moved to Dodge I would hear of the childhood adventures of Baby Roark and Pete “Doc” Fowler. They would, on a whim, run off to the deep woods around Dodge, taking small rifles with them if they could get away with it. Wild things were there. And they weren’t story-book wild things.

Though I was afraid of great heights as a child I would climb trees to about the level of ten or twelve feet if they were sturdy. My grandkids had been wanting the experience of climbing on sturdy trees. In September Hurricane Harvey gave it to them and some other neighborhood kids by felling my favorite of the trees in my neighbor’s yard. The beautiful century old “Witchy Oak”.

But as they climbed about in the chaos of the hurricane’s victim, communally exploring the adventures of space pirates, I mused that these kids, under the watchful eyes of a gaggle of moms and neighbors, were missing something I and many generations of East Texans had taken for granted. They were being saved from the fear of high branches by adults and constantly being warned of impending danger.

Some of what I am was forged in the freedom of a storm drain. Some of what my Dodge neighbors would become was shaped in facing the unknowns of a deep forest.

To this day I can recall the keen sense of loss at trying to climb down to a storm drain in Jackson, Mississippi at seven years of age and realizing I was no longer small.

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS

36. Foundations, 2016, oil on canvas 12 x 36 inches.

Location: Grounds of the Sam Houston Memorial Museum, Huntsville It’s an interesting thing to see a tree slowly adapt to the changes in its environment. This one has endured probably sixty years of people tramping the topsoil away from its roots.

With a little erosion each year that process has exposed a great mass of its root structure, yet it has remained well founded in spite of the assault. I became fascinated with the almost Oriental beauty of the root sculpture and periodically return to it to see how it is progressing. Nature is creative in ways we can barely appreciate.

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS 37. The Frontier Law Office, 2016, oil on canvas, 16 x 20 inches.

Location: Museum grounds of Sam Houston Memorial Museum, Huntsville Sam Houston’s connection to East Texas is obvious. But the story of this humble seeming law office rippled well beyond the local community. Joshua Houston, a slave who came into Houston’s household through his marriage to Margaret Lea in 1841, was a remarkably intelligent and practical man. During Houston’s long absences from Huntsville due to service in public office Joshua would be charged with the upkeep of the law office. Houston’s extensive library of the classics, of law books, histories, and the like was kept in this office. Joshua made good use of them.

Prospering from his skills both as a stage coach driver and as a blacksmith, in the period after the Civil War Joshua Houston would be found on the board of trustees of no fewer than four of the churches formed by newly freed blacks in Huntsville. He was also a major force in local black education. He was elected to the Texas legislature many times, and was so fully respected by leading whites that he was last elected to the legislature in 1888, more than a decade after the close of Reconstruction. Houston’s son, Samuel Walker Houston, would go on to establish an industrial training school for blacks in East Texas and then close out his career as the superintendent of Huntsville’s pre­integration black schools.

A strong suspicion exists in historical circles that Joshua is also a source of much of the history written by historians, such as Anna Pennybacker, with connections to Huntsville and Sam Houston State.

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS

inches.

38. Don't Dawdle, 2016, oil on canvas, 22 x 28 inches.

Location: Grounds of the Sam Houston Memorial Museum, Huntsville As we recover from our brief encounter with something resembling winter each year there is an explosion of new life. At what our kids formerly, and now our grandkids today, call the “duck pond” this is expressed in ducklings and chicks. Periodically I’ll recall that in this same spot by what is called “Lake Oolooteka”, after Sam Houston’s adoptive Cherokee father, Houston’s own large young brood discovered these same annual adventures in new life that my own little ones enjoy today. So long as we are mindful of it, it is, indeed, a great privilege to be so close to the human side of Texas history.

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS

39. Wood Duck, 2017, oil on panel, 12 x 16 inches.

Location: Lakeview United Methodist Conference Center, Private Rd. 6036,near Palestine Hundreds of lakes dot my region. I love that all over East Texas there aremoments like this where the quiet eye can rest and drink the waters. It issimplicity woven from complexity, a lone, tiny duck swimming toward the sunlitreeds at the edge of a lake with a myriad of small ripples trailing behind. It is anothing under the enormity of the sky until someone gives it a moment towrap a thought about it.

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS LEE JAMISON (B. 1957) As a very young child, Lee Jamison developed an interest for art. He started drawing as soon as he could hold something to make a mark with. He recalls beginning to paint around eight years of age and he was constantly involved in art classes through high school. He chose to major in art at Lon Morris College, a small Methodist junior college in Jacksonville, Texas, and completed his degree at Centenary College in Shreveport, Louisiana.

Jamison feels that drawing is a form of expression, similar to writing, and he simply expresses things he knows through his art. He enjoys working in series which are often rich with historical influence. While he has no set process for creating a work, he describes his paintings as ideas vaguely bubbling up from below. His historical works always begin with a recorded event but the potential connection of historical occurrences to modern-day issues drive him to create pieces compelling to the viewer. Essentially, Jamison’s artwork is his own historical exploration.

Since 1982, Jamison has been a full-time artist. He is known for three major specialties: landscapes in oils (particularly of East and Central Texas), large murals, and historical paintings. His landscapes have been the mainstay of a career spanning a quarter of a century. His mural projects have included major works for the Driskill Hotel in Austin and The University of Texas at Austin. His historical works draw on his knowledge of Texas history and include numerous works on the Texas revolution.

SELECTED BIOGRAPHICAL AND CAREER HIGHLIGHTS • 1957 Born in Shreveport, Louisiana • 1977 AA, Art, Lon Morris College, Jacksonville, Texas • 1979 BA, Art, Centenary College of Louisiana, Shreveport, Louisiana

• 2011 The Sam Houston Project, produced nine credited works for combination documentary film and website on the life of Sam Houston • Resides in Huntsville, Texas SELECTED EXHIBITIONS • 2008-15 The Texas Aesthetic, Annual Exhibition, William Reaves Fine Art, Houston, Texas • 2010 Huntsville by Artificial Light, Sam Houston State University, Hunitsville, Texas • 2010 Water Rites: Rivers, Lakes, and Streams in Texas Art, William Reaves Fine Art, Houston, Texas • 2010 The Presence of Light: Sky and Light in the Texas Landscape, William Reaves Fine Art, Houston, Texas • 2012 Contemporary Texas Regionalists, traveled: Haley Memorial Library & History Center, Midland; Gage Hotel, Marathon, Texas • 2013 Restless Heart: Contemporary Texas Regionalism, San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts, San Angelo, Texas (catalogue) • 2013 Celebrating the Regionalist Legacy in Texas Art, William Reaves Fine Art and the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts at the Gage Hotel, Marathon, Texas • 2013 A Tribute to Texas Rivers, William Reaves Fine Art, Houston, Texas • 2013 Hill Country Love Affair: Interpretations of a Texas Heartland, William Reaves Fine Art, Houston, Texas • 2013 Summer Encore Exhibition, William Reaves Fine Art, Houston, Texas • 2013 Holidays at the Haley, Haley Memorial Library & History Center, Midland, Texas • 2014 Painting in the Texas Tradition, traveled: Turner House, Dallas; Pearl Fincher Museum of Fine Arts, Spring, Texas (catalogue) • 2014 Intersecting Plains: Views of the Texas Coast & Texas

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS • • • • • •

• • • •

Drought, William Reaves Fine Art, Houston, Texas 201415 Holiday Show featuring the Contemporary Texas Regionalists, William Reaves Fine Art, Houston, Texas 2015 Ties that Bind: Contemporary Texas Regionalism, Turner House, Dallas, Texas 2015 Texas Visions: Contemporary Texas Regionalism, Nave Museum, Victoria, Texas 2016 Contemporary Texas Regionalism: A Holiday Show, William Reaves | Sarah Foltz Fine Art, Houston, Texas 201617 The Texas Aesthetic, Annual Exhibition, William Reaves | Sarah Foltz Fine Art, Houston, Texas 2017 Of Texas Rivers and Texas Art, San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts, San Angelo, Texas; Texas Capitol Ground Floor Rotunda, Austin, Texas; Witte Museum, San Antonio, Texas (book by same title published by Texas A&M Press) 2017 AS IS rural realism, The Grace Museum, Abilene, Texas 2017 Lone Star Legacies in Contemporary Texas Art, Haley Memorial Library & History Center, Midland, Texas 2017 Contemporary Texas Regionalism: A Holiday Show, William Reaves | Sarah Foltz Fine Art, Houston, Texas 2017 An Artist's Response to Harvey- In Real Time, Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, Texas

• • • • •

Scott E. Johnson Memorial Mural, Huntsville, Texas Texas Memorial Stadium, University of Texas at Austin, Texas Waco Mammoth Site Murals, Waco, Texas Walker County Storm Shelter Mural, Huntsville, Texas Seven Days of Creation, First United Methodist Church, Huntsville, Texas

SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTIONS • Bastrop County Historical Association Museum, Bastrop, Texas • Lon Morris College, Jacksonville, Texas • First National Bank of Texas, Crockett, Texas • City of Huntsville, Texas • Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, Texas • Centenary College of Louisiana, Shreveport, Louisiana • Commercial National Bank of Shreveport, Shreveport, Louisiana (acquired by and now operating as Regions Bank) • First National Bank of Bastrop, Bastrop, Texas

SELECTED PUBLIC COMMISSIONS • Bastrop County History Mural, Bastrop, Texas • Driskill Hotel Ballroom, Austin, Texas • Elgin Community Mural, Elgin, Texas • Kellogg-Pritchett House, Huntsville, Texas • Mayborn Museum Complex, (numerous murals and dioramas, significant work on installation of the museum, and work on development of the Emergence of Man Gallery), Baylor University, Waco, Texas Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com

LEE JAMISON: ODE TO EAST TEXAS The Mission of Reaves | Foltz Fine Art

Reaves|Foltz Fine Art is dedicated to the promotion of premier Texas artists, from Early Texas Masters and Mid-Century Pioneers to Contemporary Regionalist Artists. The gallery showcases many of the region’s most accomplished and recognized talents who maintain a significant connection to the state of Texas. The gallery represents and exhibits artists working in a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, works on paper, and photography.

The History of Reaves | Foltz Fine Art Since the gallery started in 2006 as William Reaves Fine Art on Brun Street in Houston, the exhibition program has been augmented by survey and group shows that investigate current themes in contemporary art within a historical context. Sarah Foltz joined the gallery as Director in 2013, became partner in 2014. At that time, the gallery becameReaves|Foltz Fine Art, and relocated to 2143 Westheimer in the historic River Oaks District. William Reaves retired from the gallery in December of 2017, and Sarah Foltz assumed ownership.

She is dedicated to maintaining the core mission of the gallery.

In addition to promoting the work of represented artists, our strength is guiding and educating both the new, as well as the seasoned, collector. We actively advise and assist institutions and private individuals in the acquisition and sale of artworks. Many of our represented artists have been acquired into impressive private and institutional collections around the world, with many earning their first museum exhibitions through the gallery. The gallery has mounted numerous monographic exhibitions, as well as published scholarly catalogues, and has aided in the publication of several book projects, both on represented artists and key environmental issues affecting Texas landscape and wildlife. Critically acclaimed gallery artists and their work have been reviewed nationally and locally in publications, such as Art in America, Art Houston, Paper City, Southwest Art, Texas Monthly, Art Ltd., Glasstire, The Houston Chronicle, Art + Culture Texas, and Culture Map, among others.

William Reaves|Sarah Foltz Fine Art also has a strong reputation as a secondary market specialist, offering research and source artworks of exceptionally high quality with the utmost discretion. The gallery offers the following art services: Fine Art Appraisals, Brokering, Consulting, and Sales.

Gallery hours are Tuesday-Saturday, 10am-5pm and other times by appointment.

William Reaves | Sarah Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road Houston, TX 77098 713-521-7500 info@reavesart.com

Sarah Foltz, Gallery Owner Mariah Rockefeller, Director

sarah@reavesart.com

mariah@reavesart.com

Reaves | Foltz Fine Art 2143 Westheimer Road • Houston, TX • 77098 Tuesday - Saturday • 10am - 5pm • 713.521.7500 • reavesart.com