monetary gift established the funds to create a physical museum in downtown San Antonio that would house such a conceptual the western art endeavor, ultimately located in the historically significant former San Antonio Central Library built in 1930. “The Briscoe Museum has evolved along with the Night of the Artists.” Previously staged at various venues and locations throughout the decade-long run, last year’s Night of the Artists (2012)
a true Texas flair to the Briscoe Museum’s Night of the Artists. Cavin is a landscape purist, dedicated to the capturing of light, atmosphere and sub-stratospheric heavens bounded by impressionistic traditionalism, while Keathley’s evocative sensibilities are hammered home with lively landscapes and nostalgic pictorial epiphanies of Native American cultural identity. An artist guided by a time-honored aesthetic principle and mentored by great
Exposed groundcover creates quasi-dirt path trails that seem to dissolve into the background. Tiered horizontal parallels of flora generate diminishing outcroppings, leading the eye straight to point “A” – aka the center point on the horizon line. Placing this geographical line of demarcation line directly midpoint of the picture plane, the configuration plays favorites to neither the land nor the sky, balancing the importance of the artist’s view. The silhou-
“Night of the Artists has turned into the largest contemporary western art show in Texas.” Detail of The Briscoe Museum, courtesy of The Briscoe Museum
finally saw its home venue christening on the picturesque grounds of the Briscoe’s Museum’s Jack Guenther Pavilion, part of the one- and one-quarter acres of land comprising two buildings and the new expansive McNutt Courtyard and Sculpture Garden located on the historic San Antonio River Walk. “There is something unique to this year’s Night of the Artists,” Karr says. A new approach has reshaped this signature San Antonio exhibition into a fun and festive art sale with a competitive application process for the artists. “Night of Artists has turned into the largest contemporary western art show in Texas, with 65 artists featured in this year’s exhibition,” Karr says. Even through such rigorous processes, two of the spotlighted artists in the Briscoe exhibition are officially represented by local San Antonio galleries. Cliff Cavin and Mark Keathley have been fixtures in the San Antonio art scene for collectively more than 30 years – Cavin at the Boerne J.R. Mooney Gallery and Keathley at J.R. Mooney Galleries of Fine Art-San Antonio. Although they have two different styles and aesthetics, Cavin and Keathley bring
painters like Warren Hunter, George Hughey, William Reese and Wilson Hurley, Cavin finds comfort and freedom in traditional impressionistic landscape painting and a new exploratory longhorn cattle portrait series. Focusing his attentions on the vast openness of the South Texas region and the ever-expanding deserts of New Mexico, Cavin’s intuitive choreographed artistic calculations in his scenic and visual color soirées create stylized paintings that capture the ambiance of subtle environmental illuminations. In “Clouds over Nambe,” a large 36” x 48” landscape in Night of the Artists, Cavin portrays a cerulean skyline, full of crepuscular light, enraptured with billows of atmospheric haze, lingering on the dying days of summer sentimentality. The autumn blossoming of the chamisa, with its golden bloom, accents this stellar impressionistic landscape painting of Nambe, N.M., back-dropped by the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Winding stretches of desert sand obscured by dense patches of typical New Mexico vegetation invite the viewer into a bathed foreground of aureate shrubbery.
etted mountain range transforms into a strip of neutral value and tone, easing the transition between the earthly divisions. As derived from more than three decades of careful study, Cavin knows an object in the distance will shift toward blue because it does not reflect as much light. He revs down his color palette by taking cues from the masters like Leonardo da Vinci, who noticed that as a landscape recedes from the viewer, its colors and tones alter (aerial perspective or atmospheric perspective). Well played, Cavin – well played, indeed! It’s a textbook landing of hue-rrific proportions for such majestic geographical icons. Nevertheless, Cavin ventures on and reverses the previously used conventional color theory, tuning into another conjecture, and depicts clouds growing darker and warmer instead of cooler, dipping in with subtle scarlet blends in the otherwise blanched firmament. Contrasting Cavin, Keathley’s painterly essence is found in his quasi-hyper realism. Capturing water ripples, muscle contours, textures and various other details, Keathley proves that contemporary western art is making significant contribumarch//april 2013 NHOME /
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