Richard Stout - Gulf Coast Communion: 35 Impressions of the Texas Coast 1950-2009

Richard STOUT

Gulf Coast Communion

Bolivar Roads 50 x 72 acrylic on canvas

35 Impressions of The Texas Coast 1950-2009 William Reaves Fine Art • April 3-April 25, 2009

Richard STOUT

Gulf Coast Communion

Black Wave 26 x 69 oil on canvas

Fridays and Saturdays, April 3-25, 2009 10:00 AM – 5:00 PM* *(other times and dates by appointment)

William Reaves Fine Art 2313 Brun Street Houston, Texas 77019 713-521-7500 www.reavesart.com

Schedule of Events: Friday/Saturday, April 3-4, Collectors Preview Saturday, April 11, Opening Reception (Artist Present), 6-9 PM Saturday, April 18, Gallery Talk By The Artist, 2-4 PM Friday/Saturday, April 24-25, Closing Weekend Through this exhibition, the artist and William Reaves Fine Art also pay tribute to the resiliency of coastal communities in the aftermath of hurricanes recent and past, and together are pleased to contribute a portion of the sale of each painting to restoration of The Galveston Art Center.

complex negotiation between nature’s construction of us and our construction of it. By questioning the systems of order we impose on the world, Stout breaks down social and Out of nowhere comes a sense of peace or foreboding. intellectual hierarchies and reintroduces the play of intuition The moment of revelation is also inevitably the moment of and lyrical metaphors. As such, the art becomes a spiritual tragedy. We are awakened by a dream. It’s been said that we endeavor which delves into the essence of being. Spanning never really forget anything, and all our pasts lie deep within some six decades, the works simultaneously challenge our us somewhere waiting for a stray sight or smell to bring them notions of transcendence and our foothold on this earth. to the surface again. But memory is more than looking back Stout’s landscapes tap into memories and emotions - about to a time that is no longer. It is looking out into another kind darkness, strange places and the wonder of that which of time where everything continues to grow and change with attracts and frightens us for reasons unknown. Nature is the life that is in it still. And yet, what is a timeless moment? present here, but still in hiding; it is simultaneously close What instant is without date or duration? Most of us would and distant, encompassing and evading. Everything looks so have to admit that we have known peak moments which very familiar, yet its meaning crosses over into regions that seemed to lie so far beyond time that the past and the future are charged with the paradox of territory recognizable yet melted away into obscurity. Lost in a sunset; transfixed by a uncharted. Stout moves us into a visceral key, enabling us to play of moonlight on a crystal dark sea which possesses no address the most primal of human concerns: the difference bottom; caught and held still-bound by the crack of thunder between outer and inner worlds, between transcendence and echoing through mists of rain. We dream of traveling through metamorphosis, between impermanence and permanence, the universe – but is not the universe within ourselves? We a mixture of what vanishes and what remains. Stout’s may sense spirit as eternity or as vast nature finding their unabashed sensuality and his sensitivity to human frailty way into our lives. Eternity with its worlds – the past and and regeneration give the work future – is in ourselves or a tactile presentness, while nowhere. Each of us journeys his enigmatic imagery reaches alone to this world and it down to the immemorial and is our nature to seek out atavistic. Certain images – belonging. The quest is in grasses, seeds, flowers, earth, at least one sense the same air, water – have been lodged, for all of us because it is like tough shells, deep in our primarily a journey in search. souls. They are part of our We search for a self to be. inner world, shadowy forms We search for other selves that find their correspondences to love. We search for work outside in nature, in the cosmos to do. And even when, to Trouble in America-Storm in the Gulf 25 x 40 acrylic on paper – oceanic and cleansing – one degree or another we find where everything that emerges also has its place, whether these things, we find also that there is still something crucial engagingly active or obscurely tangled in the cycle of growth missing which we have not found, we search for that unfound and decay. These are elements of the natural world – images thing too, even though we do not know its name or even if it on the threshold of being, on the border between material is to be found at all. For there is always some magnet that and immaterial, between articulated form and the inchoate. draws our eyes to the horizon or invites us to explore behind Stout’s works investigate the world rather than represent things and seek out concealed depth. We know that the real it, reminding us of seasonal change and the transience nature of things is hidden deep within them. When we enter of existence. Accordingly, they attend to the lonely but the world, we come to live on the threshold between the pleasurable activity of looking. The landscapes concentrate visible and the invisible. This tension infuses our lives with on the duration of vision – time, the memory of time, the longing. specific lunar radiance of dreams. By doing so, Stout speaks to the solitary viewer in each of us who is moved by summer Richard Stout’s paintings and works on paper of the light, roiling seas and evening stars. And then he reminds us Gulf Coast convey the unsettling quality of a captured that those things touch off in us a deeper desire. It’s as if he moment in eternal flux. In these shifting, destabilized visual peels off layers of the apparent richness of ourselves, arguing fields, everything contends with, interrupts and invades us back to the realm of great, raw objectless longing. everything else. Meaning is mercurial, thereby colliding our

Richard Stout: Gulf Coast Communion

“Communion,” of course, not only refers to a religious or spiritual fellowship – the sacrament of the Eucharist received by a congregation – but also an intimate communication, an interchange or sharing of thoughts. Stout has lived in Southeast Texas all his life: landscapes and interiors of family homes in Beaumont, Houston and Rollover Bay serve as arenas in which the artist deals with significant themes and emotions – life, death, fear, destiny, devotion, ascension.

Significantly, Stout has been most touched and moved by the absolute flatness and surreal threshold of sea and land along the Gulf Coast near Bolivar Peninsula. “We had a small cabin, a wooden barge with bunks and sleeping porch,” says Stout.

“My mother and father had this place together with some aunts and uncles starting in 1928. There was no road – you had to drive down the beach to get to the barge and that was when the inter-coastal canal was being built. We had an oyster reef right in front, which is now polluted. When I would come home from the (Chicago) Art Institute, you could just reach down and get oysters – open them up and slosh them down. That sense between the wild and civilized, that sort of windy desolation is like the desolation of the heart.” For Stout, the bleak Gulf marsh, the highly charged sky filled with moisture and the intense white glare continue to serve as vessels of memory. “It’s an uncomfortable light, a holy light having to do with pain,” says Stout. “The Gulf Coast glare is not the golden blue light of California. This is no paradise,

Salt and Cedars 20 x 26 oil on canvas

but some sort of purgatory, a kind of limbo. The land behind the sea is not beautiful, but edgy. It’s muddy, filled with mosquitoes, snakes and alligators. But it’s mine; I grew up with it. I could have lived anywhere, but I chose to live here.

The house was surrounded by water on three sides. I could hear the water all night; I could smell the cattle. It’s highly romantic and dangerous. The first house had tin awnings and was just three feet above land. I’ve always regarded the water here as a kind of mirror, a foil, that I can reflect on.” The

house was destroyed by Hurricane Carla in the early 1960s, rebuilt, only to be destroyed again by Hurricane Ike. The slab and cisterns are all that remain of the former structure. What we are exposed to is universal: the vulnerability to outside blows of even the most intimate bonds, the way transience makes a ghost out of everything that happens to us.

Frozen Point 48 x 60 acrylic on canvas

A prevailing notion of landscape painting implies that the artist must capture some likeness of a certain geographic locale. To render a sense of place an artist should have a kind of primitive soil-consciousness of his native region.

For Stout, the understanding of a place includes but goes beyond the local characteristics of a given topography and becomes a matter of the artist’s intuitive grasp – not just of the immediate or local, but also of the larger, universal implications of what has been discerned in a given “place.”

Stout has the courage and intelligence to inform his work with what he sees and feels. He is intensely aware of his surroundings and responds to the Gulf Coast with an acutely critical, objective observation as well as a highly intuitive sense which sometimes borders on an understanding beyond a merely physical reality. Rollover Bay enabled Stout to find his true self, the core of his being. Communion, suffering, transcendence all collectively constitute a worldview that the artist seeks to investigate in his work. The enduring question of how we respond to the world as a physical and spiritual environment establishes the leitmotif. Toward that end, Stout’s investigation is often framed within the context of a journey at once literal and allegorical, whose changing landscape continually challenges the very limits of perception and consciousness. Flowing associatively, Stout’s images traverse a strange yet hauntingly familiar territory that evokes the realm of dreams, memory and the imagination – those often subliminal and turbulent layers of experience in which the potential for self-discovery and renewal reside.

Clearly at odds with the cynicism of his age, Stout’s art is informed by spiritual values that continue to profoundly impact his development. Evident throughout is a concern with the representation of the sublime and the evocation of transcendent states.

Stout has always been an artist of tenacity, deeply conscious of the tradition he works in and the homages to other art that it entails. His work has changed considerably as it has developed over the decades, demonstrating the artist’s capacity for continuous self-criticism and awareness rarely matched by his contemporaries. Stout comprehends the nature of art at its most fundamental as a mutating, vibrant and evolving force. To many viewers, however, Stout’s Gulf Coast paintings represent the re-embrace of bygone values sorely missed in painting today. Their fine qualities of light, craft, surface, form and space blow fresh air into the lungs of an audience seeking the wholeness of a unitary visual expression. The successful bodies of work that Stout has produced during his career do not so much “develop,” one from the previous, as loop back and branch out, so each body of work cleans new visual space adjacent to the next. Accordingly, Stout’s earlier works may be taken as clearing a visible field for the later landscapes.

Throughout, he celebrates the everyday miracles that only paint can achieve, miracles that come from attention to and engagement with the materials at hand. As a whole, Gulf Coast Communion offers the Summer for Stefan 75 x 100 opportunity to consider a career in which shifts in subject matter or format occur around a fixed center of faith in painting’s essential worthiness and humanity. For the most part, Stout’s landscapes seem to invite an investment on the part of the viewer as an individual in conversation with the natural world. Devoid of human presence while at the same time soliciting viewer engagement, they embody the Romantic vision of nature as a space that transcends everyday human concerns even as they invite us to regard ourselves as part of a larger whole. Stout’s imagery has its antecedents in Caspar David Friedrich’s visionary horizons and the eerie stillness of the Atlantic Coast

luminist Martin Johnson Heade. The ecstatic physicality of Van Gogh’s bustling strokes have impacted Stout’s art; but so too have the seemingly slower ponderings and vacillations of Cezanne’s organic, planar geometries. Vaporous, humid air, cuts and slices of gable, yellow and brown posts by the sea, sudden drop-offs of water’s edge or a pier’s supporting struts - these images have found their way into his works, but in a condensed and fully digested idiom whose sources, far back in the 20th century, are Henry Matisse and Piet Mondrian.

What’s more, distances between wall and wall, window and sky, stairway and sea, take on the surreal strangeness of a Giorgio de Chirico painting.

Overall, Stout’s skies and seas are subjectively inflected – they have an emotional core. Some are lonely and meditative, some darkly ominous and forbidding. Others are brash and explosively ebullient, or erotically lush and sensual. The

acrylic on canvas

philosophical questions that emerge from these compositions, however, deal with the mystery and enigma of our identity and existence, our solitary state in the world, our limits in space and time, our desire for the infinite. We find ourselves suspended in a dimension in which normal logic seems to be absent: everything appears uncertain and illusory, clearly defined yet lacking precise points of reference. Stout’s images engender a counterposition between “here” and “hereafter,” between interiors and exteriors, in a play of architectonic spaces, planes and frames of labyrinthine effects.

Throughout, reverie and geometry are tied together in the

evocation of mood. Clearly, Stout works on at least two levels: constructing a painting in which shapes, colors and spaces form a set of unique relationships, independent of subject matter, while at the same time capturing and preserving the physical and emotional overtones aroused in him by visual experience. Accordingly, Stout fuses precise observation with geometric rigor and painterly sensuality.

Texas Skies 50 x 60 acrylic on canvas

There is always a deep sense of quiet in a Stout painting, of breath both held and released. His art is balanced between abstraction and realism, not because he moves from one to the other, but because he has found a space between the two.

The representational elements of a Stout painting act not only as signifiers of the outside world, but also as pretexts for the physical act of painting and as templates for viewing. They demand a scanning, allover read. But by keeping images close to the surface, they maintain the flatness of the picture plane while allowing us the pleasures of mental contrast or a modernist flip-flop between material surface and illusory depth. As we spend time with the paintings, as our eyes adjust, the space begins to open up. What we see are oddly angled, vertiginous space and variegated light and color that can sneak up on us. Significantly, the paintings have a life altogether their own distinct from the circumstances they depict. They join the buoyancy of a glance and the weight of a long-term scrutiny. All in all, Stout’s finely tuned paintings, animated by contrasting forces of palette and geometry, seem alternately Spartan and generous. It’s as if radiant energy has been collected between the modest and disciplined brushstrokes. We move from the sharp contour of paint to the large geometry of forms, weaving in and out of mottled flickerings of light, which bring us back again to the palpable vehicle of paint.

Stout constructs a compelling world, rich with primal associations. For him, the sea is both a place – a mobile surface full of portents, clues and meanings – as well as empty space. We come from the unknown. We appear on the earth, live here, feed off the earth, and eventually return back into the unknown again. The seas, of course, move in this rhythm; the tide comes in, turns, and goes back out again. Each of us came out of the waters of the womb; the ebb and flow of the tides is alive in the ebb and flow of our breathing. But mostly, the calm Gulf seas or cloudy skies evoke primal forms of escape and finality: they promise reassurance, blanketing submersion, as well as helplessness, abandonment, loss – at once untold contentment and utter desolation. “It reminds me of what I can’t see in Houston,” Stout says. “The horizon and sky are wonderfully exposed. I’m literally surrounded by water. The bay isn’t pleasant, and the water isn’t pretty, but it’s always changing – the weather, the clouds, the light. You feel vulnerable, isolated, exposed. The sea has always possessed a searching quality for me.” To all intents and purposes, the works deal with Stout’s knowing and sometimes fantastic conjuring of the Gulf Coast waters – his instinctive feel for this untamed region, its dangers and allures, its rhythms and emotional weather. In any case, Stout is clearly after something big, and certainly his work is unsettled and unsettling. Deep in these paintings is the need to be separate and the fear of it, and also, conversely, the need to connect and the fear of it. Our gaze enters the water and the water enters us. Water is an element of the soul – fluid, deep, changing, tidal, cleansing, nurturing, menacing. To know water intimately is to know something about ourselves and to appreciate its presence as a means for increasing the life of the soul.

On the Bay 14 x 20 watercolor and pencil on paper

In Stout’s early works, slithers of color appear like shadows on stylized volumes. The dark and wavy brushiness that make up the undulating shapes of The Black Wave

(1959) are alternately soft and hard, opaque and transparent.

The effect is absorbing and sumptuous – a strange sense of space, a feeling of suspension in time and transcendence into another world. Stout imbues his compositions with a mysterious and boundless intensity. Everything seems potentially weightless and on the verge of dissolving into the

Breakers 8 x 12 oil on canvas

luminous sfumato of the atmosphere. In Breakers (1962), Stout renders a turbulent sea with assured strokes of paint that are unexpectedly delicate. Tufts and furls of cobalt blue, green, orange and silver shift across the surface. The striated waves are both gritty and ghostly, solid and insubstantial.

The water is now smooth, now rippling, eddying, choppy, wavy, frothy, glinting with light. Its surface is like a thick metallic folded skin. This living, deep and obscure material has a mesmeric pull.

To discover who we are and what the nature of our being is, we must go beyond our experience in time to where it ceases to quicken memory and space is everything. As reminders of the temporal nature of life, the works of Gulf Coast Communion seem anxiously suspended between spirituality and doubt, balance and chaos. They’re wholly caught up in shifting references, acute perceptions and the complex magic of cognition. Stout questions what barely holds, summons forth what is mutable and contingent.

There is a strongly private, autobiographical element in the work; it refers to the death of his wife, to absent friends and conversations in rooms long since quitted. In this regard, the sheer visual beauty of Roadhouse at Gilchrist (1984), Silence (1985), Evening (1985) and Bolivar Roads (1985) often leads us to overlook the dark themes which lie at the heart of Stout’s achievement. Throughout, we are enveloped by the impersonal destructive forces of nature; and by the empty sea itself, the inevitable doom which is brought to us simply by the passage of time. The works seemingly radiate

the sinister beauty of fate’s indifference. The feeling is both alluring and terrifying. Although each painting is highly structured, it appears to be in a constant state of perpetual vibration. Each relies on dividing the field into geometric proportions determined by the placement of architectural elements, as well as the ensuing play of strong light and shadow across tilting planes and hard diagonal edges. The diagonals evoke both movement and vulnerability, while the layered spatiality suggests that the ground we stand on is hardly safe. Still, there is something mysterious but thrilling in the extreme calm and silence of Evening and in the luminous quality of light, a combination of waning sunlight and pale moonlight. Flowing sensuously in warm yellow “flesh” tones, velvety blacks and iridescent blues, the smooth even sheens constitute charged grounds on which our fragile precariousness is played out. In all of these works, Stout has essentially divided the composition into vertical and horizontal planes that seemingly fold inward and outward like the panel of a standing screen. In Roadhouse at Gilchrist, the water’s patterns of shadow and reflection map out a chilly, inhospitable space, its surface boiling and churning as if disturbed by a force below. In Bolivar Roads, the beams of light that stretch across the bay seemingly clarify and order a nightscape of deep teeming shadows and vast realms of darkness. The refractions and shadows are quietly hypnotic, so much that as we stand before them we literally feel ourselves traveling through the waters, letting our minds and bodies simply drift.

Roadhouse at Gilchrist 40 x 50 acrylic on canvas

These paintings all display a kind of meditative outspokenness, an artist conversing with himself on what to do next, then making that conversation his further subject and style. Increasingly, vertical lines and formal elements fuse and split into more dynamic, yet delicate linear networks

reinforced by both subtle and pulsating tonal shifts. Images are alternately acidic, juiced-up, hushed, velvety, precious like a jewel box. Indeed, the pleasure of Stout’s more recent works stems from its appropriate looseness. He knows just how much to bend a line or blend a tone so that the

from inky to diaphanous, blurring the lines, breaking and stretching them. Throughout, the brushwork is scintillating and rhythmic, dematerializing solids with freely applied swaths of silvery greens and pearly grays shot through with delicate opalescents. Conversely, Corner Café (1993-96) evokes Stout’s hybrid sensibility. With its mix of abstraction and allusion, sublimity and whimsy, Abstract Expressionist brushstrokes and cartoonish forms, the quirky interior scene evokes the deliberate impurities of Philip Guston’s later work.

Here, the glowing luminosity, modesty of scale, and witty accuracy about place and character, however, transcends the commonplace. The intimacy and ambience of the roadside diner rushes in on our senses: it is the world of a room caught in glimpses - the orange-red window blinds and delicate pink drapes; the kitchen walls of cool gray, pale yellow and peach; the baskets of bread and condiments positioned on the table top. In doing so, Stout converts the rectangle of the picture plane into a kind of theater while penetrating the essence that lies beneath and beyond the surface. Overall, the layers are as light as cloth, and the painting has a fluidity and airiness – along with a certain dusty grubbiness – that seems keyed to the Bolivar area. As master of his fabricated world, Stout breathes new existence into the most ordinary materials and detritus.

Evening in Summer 50 x 40 acrylic on canvas

composition remains both a depiction and a satisfying complex of painted marks. In Evening in Summer (1998) and Light of Providence (1994), the montage of floating structures becomes like the sea itself. The gentle washing back and forth is not the result of formal complexity, but rather an emanation from the surface, from the precision of almost evanescent areas of paint thinly laid on the canvas. The paintings convey unusually real feelings of seeing, not mere depiction. Swipes of paint, brushy strokes and gnarly clusters of line seemingly hover, at once defiantly confrontational and vulnerable. Dreamy rhythms of the water are evoked by pink and green wristy strokes, blue and red veils, in addition to an internal yellow luminescence that appears to shimmer in deep space. Stout manages to take an unabashedly beautiful lavender and mint green, or an intense burning orange and make them float, as if they were as light and ethereal as air.

Village Creek (1999), however, exudes a passionate fierceness and raw vitality. Here, Stout’s painterly dynamic suffuses the canvas with black, tarlike strokes that strike the viewer with the force of a squall. He works the feisty scrawls,

The Light of Providence 47 x 35 acrylic on canvas

Road to Utopia 30 x 40 acrylic on canvas

All of the works engender something akin to sensory whiplash. We come up close and peer at the images – searching, scrutinizing, scanning. Their address to viewers is total – as total as paintings can be – yet their special aura is an intimacy that verges on voyeurism. Taken together, Stout’s works have an immersive quality that partake of a dreamlike wandering or searching trace. He expects full participation, even demands that we imagine, fantasize, free-associate and use our eyes to explore his marks. If anything, Stout’s works are evolving into a more active collaboration between stroke and form. For Stout, a painting’s identity is multiple and changing, rather than singular and static. Accordingly, his art is defined at each point by a tension between expressiveness and structure, between delicate lyricism and compulsive insistence. In Dawn (2008) and Road to Utopia (2008), we enter realms where shifts, ruptures and fissures are part of the natural flow. Here, Stout presents his subjective impressions of the sea, with its rapidly moving waters and turbulent white foam. Both are bathed in the strange light of imagination: the churning skies are suddenly illuminated by an approaching storm that casts the scene in an unnatural pinkish-gray glare that raps hotly on the eye. Stout’s marks are substantial and porous, as well as gritty and airy. He reworks these elements as a complicated series of layerings and reversals of unexpected relationships. In Dawn, the composition takes as its starting point a clean white band that defines the horizon and accentuates the split between body and soul, earth and heaven. Rich hues of emerald green and cobalt blue move across the surface in an ever shifting interplay. Atmosphere is segmented by a wiry stroke on the water that curls in on itself and thrusts across the canvas like a nerve imbedded in muscle tissue. Toward that end, Stout creates a vaporous sphere of forms into which we can peer and beyond which are hints of the infinite. The calligraphic strokes denoting ripples and highlights in the water are interspersed with still spaces, where the translucent gray-

green currents and choppy patches infuse the picture plane with the sea’s hidden power. The layers of pigment result in a depth and luminosity of color that holds the entire surface in stasis, much like a vibrantly transparent membrane. A silvery white moon is glimpsed through fleeting rifts in the clouds.

Arising out of the forces of stability and change flowing through and past each other, it is an image that seems to be as much about a state of mind as location – twilight or early morning places where what we see is about to be transformed into something else. The instinct, however, is the same. We search for something that might be holy, or at the very least a place where we can feel the presence of an expressive force that moves us to think about our memories and blind spots, our feelings and follies.

Evident throughout Gulf Coast Communion is a generosity of spirit, a willingness to risk comprehension and failure, a desire to satisfy the artist’s curiosity and a commitment to communicate these discoveries to his viewers. All of the works link the relationship of inner self to the physical world, to the landscape with which over the years he has become most intimate. Indeed, the most powerful images have the authority of dreams that seem to have generated images and atmosphere out of their own nebulous force. At the core of Stout’s art is a profound sense of timelessness, reflective not only of the evolution of his unfaltering vision but also of the artist’s recognition of his own mortality. All of the works manifest an ecstatic wonder at nature, from which is derived a sense of spirituality independent of religious belief. Stout partakes of communion in order to leave his marks on the world’s skin. They are marks of passage, intense, highly coiled thoughts of rapture and pain, of rituals enacted and life lost, of time remembered and moments endured.

— Susie Kalil

Evening 18 x 24 oil on canvas

Exhibition Checklist Title

Medium

Size

Date

Willie Gilbert’s Boathouse Black Wave Untitled 1961 # 7 Untitled 1961 # 8 Untitled 1961 # 9 Breakers Untitled 1980 # 8 My Father’s Cry Coming Home Roadhouse at Gilchrist Bolivar Roads Evening Preparations The Silence Trouble in America-Storms in the Gulf I Trouble in America-Storms in the Gulf II Texas Skies The Kitchen Evening Night Storm On the Bay Corner Café Salt Cedars Light of Providence Janis in Corpus Evening in Summer Summer for Stefan Village Creek Frozen Point Looking North Night Fishing Morning Bolivar Dawn Road to Utopia Untitled 2009 # 5 Untitled 2009 # 7 Untitled 2009 # 8

oil/masonite oil/canvas watercolor watercolor watercolor oil/canvas acrylic/canvas mixed media/paper acrylic/canvas acrylic/canvas acrylic/canvas acyrlic/canvas acrylic/canvas acrylic/collage/paper acrylic/collage/paper acrylic/canvas acrylic/canvas oil/canvas w/c/pencil/paper w/c/pencil/paper acrylic/canvas oil/canvas acrylic/canvas acrylic/canvas acrylic/canvas acrylic/canvas acrylic/canvas acrylic/canvas acrylic/canvas acrylic/canvas acrylic/canvas acrylic/canvas acrylic/canvas acrylic/canvas mixed media mixed media mixed media

17 x 20 23 x 69 10 x 14 10 x 14 10 x 14 8 x 12 24 x 30 19.5 x 25.5 50 x 60 40 x 50 50 x 72 50 x 72 50 x 60 25 x 40 25 x 40 50 x 60 18 x 24 18 x 24 14 x 20 14 x 20 18 x 24 18 x 26 47 x 35 30 x 50 50 x 40 75 x 100 32 x 32 48 x 60 48 x 36 48 x 60 50 x 60 72 x 48 30 x 40 30 x 40 11 x 15 11 x 15 11 x 15

1950 1959 1961 1961 1961 1962 1980 1981 1982 1984 1985 1985 1985 1985 1985 1989 1990 1991 1991 1991 1993 1993 1994 1995 1998 1999 1999 2002 2002 2004 2006 2008 2008 2008 2009 2009 2009

Biographical and Career Highlights

Born Beaumont, 1934 – lives in Houston Art Academy of Cincinnati, Ohio, 1952-53 BFA School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1957 Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, New York, 1968 MFA, University of Texas at Austin, 1969 University of Houston, Instructor, 1969-74 University of Houston, Professor, 1975-95

Selected Exhibitions

1951 Beaumont Art League,Texas 1952 Cincinnati Art League,Ohio 1953 School of the Art Institute of Chicago 1955-78 Beaumont Art Museum “Tri-State Annual” (regular exhibitions) 1956 1014 Art Center, Chicago (solo) 1958-61 Beaumont Art Museum,Texas (solo) 1963-85 Meredith Long & Co., Houston (regular solo exhibitions) 1964 Kansas City Art Institute (solo) 1965 Texas Painting and Sculpture Annual,Witte Museum, San Antonio 1968-70 Contemporary American Art, sponsored by U.S. Department of Commerce, toured Australia 1973 “ Three Americans,” Texas Fine Arts Association 1974 “Abstract Painting in Houston,” Museum of Fine Arts, Houston 1975 Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (solo) 1975 “Five Painters,” Pollock Galleries, Southern Methodist University, Dallas 1977 International Art Fair, Cologne, West Germany 1980 “Eros,” Julius Hummel Kunsthandlung, Vienna 1982 “Art from Houston in Norway,” Stavenger Kunstforening, Norway 1985 “Fresh Paint:The Houston School,” The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston 1997 “Richard Stout: Paintings & Drawings,” Museum of East Texas, Lufkin (solo) 1999 “Intimate Journey,” Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Beaumont, traveled to Brevard County Museum of Art and Science, Melbourne, Florida (solo) 2007 “Texas Modern,” Martin Museum of Art, Baylor University

Selected Major Collections

Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Beaumont Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas,Austin Butler Institute of Art,Youngstown, Ohio Dallas Museum of Art Houston Lighting and Power Kuperstich Kabinet, Museum of Art, Dresden, Germany McNay Museum, San Antonio Menil Collection, Houston The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Museum of New Orleans Wadsworth Atheneum Whitney Museum of American Art (in addition to private collections)

2313 Brun Street Houston, TX 77019 713.521.7500 www.reavesart.com

Boliver 72 x 48 acrylic on canvas