September 9 - October 21, 2023
From the Moody 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.”
Randy Twaddle, born in 1957 in Elmo, Missouri, is currently the Executive Director of The John Fairey Garden Conservation Foundation in Hempstead, Texas. He co-founded and founded the branding and communications firms, ttweak, and Small Town, respectively. Twaddle has maintained a multi-disciplinary visual art practice for forty years including drawings, paintings, prints, sculpture, textile design, rug design, graphic design, and musical and spoken performance. He has exhibited throughout Texas and the nation since the early 1980’s. He has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Cultural Arts Council of Houston Harris County Artist Award, an Award in the Visual Arts, and an Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough Award from the Dallas Museum of Art. His work is in the permanent collection of the Dallas Museum of Art, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Brooklyn Museum, Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard University, Yale University, and other institutions, as well as numerous corporate and private collections.”
Reception: September 9, 2023 | 12–5 pm
2815 Colquitt Street
Houston, 77098 TX
(713) 526-9911
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