Note: the following is part of Glasstire’s series of short videos, Five-Minute Tours, for which commercial galleries, museums, nonprofits and artist-run spaces across the state of Texas send us video walk-throughs of their current exhibitions. Let’s get your show in front of an audience.
See other Five-Minute Tours here.
Randy Twaddle: Back to the Garden at Moody Gallery, Houston. Dates: September 9 – October 21, 2023.
Via the gallery:
Moody Gallery is pleased to present Back to the Garden, an exhibition of recent drawings by Randy Twaddle. This is Twaddle’s 11th solo exhibition at the Gallery, and first in seven years.
Twaddle writes about Back to the Garden — “Three years ago I moved from a loft apartment in Houston’s midtown to a house on forty acres outside Hempstead, Texas to run The John Fairey Garden, an internationally recognized cultural landscape created by artist and plant explorer, John Gaston Fairy.
The Garden and nursery take up roughly fifteen acres of the property, the rest is a mix of meadows and woods through which a spring-fed creek meanders. The move reintroduced me to an environment with which I am familiar; growing up in rural Missouri I spent countless hours outdoors, fishing, rock hunting, and exploring the woods, creeks, and rivers near my home.
My understanding of beauty was formed against that backdrop. For the first twenty years of my life I had little opportunity to apply it. Then, on the first day of class during my sophomore year in college, a professor said, “I will teach you jewelry making techniques and their relationship to balance in nature.”
Forty six years later, I consider it good fortune to spend most of my days in the wonderland that nurtured my worldview; this time not as an innocent child but as a sixty-six year old man making an effort to embrace the fact I’m much closer to my end than my beginning.
Toward the end of my mother’s hospice care, skin draped the bones of her fingers like a negligee. Its murky translucence enthralled me with a pull conventional beauty seldom possesses.
While alive and healthy, a plant’s leaves are virtually identical; death then bestows upon each an idiosyncratic elegance.
I think of these drawings as a petition whispered to the universe that a peculiar elegance might someday preside over my own transformation.”
