David Granberry at the Dallas Morning News writes about David Bates, whose recent paintings presented at Dunn and Brown Contemporary depict the victims of Hurricane Katrina. The majority of the paintings consist solely of human faces, and remind me of haunting Max Beckmann figures combined with Marsden Hartley landscapes. The individuals portrayed appear overcome with grief for their jobs, their homes, and especially their city. Granberry reports: “Tall and lean, the dark-haired Mr. Bates wears bookish glasses and a neatly cropped Van Dyke that make him look younger than he is and a lot like the college professor he never became. This is a new kind of show for him, one undertaken, he says, from a sense of feeling driven, as though he had to do this. He’s surprised and pleased by the reactions. ‘People never came up to me in the past and thanked me,’ he says with a laugh, ‘for painting a magnolia.'” Read more.
“David Bates: The Storm,” Dunn and Brown Contemporary, Dallas, TX. Through April 12.
I’d long thought of Hartley and Bates, but never Beckmann. I like it!