I often wish we still had our Patrick Dougherty sculpture here in Waco.  For those of you who don’t know the name or the story, Dougherty is an acclaimed sculptor whose works are in museums, public parks, university campuses, and botanical gardens all over the world.  His medium is cut saplings, which he harvests from the area in which he’s working and weaves into towering, evocative, and/or whimsical shapes.  Each of his works is unique and designed to fit into the environment where it sits, indoors or out.  They’re both visually and conceptually striking.

In 2010, Cultural Arts of Waco brought Dougherty to town using a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to create a piece in Cameron Park for the park’s centennial celebration.  He chose a spot near Pecan Bottoms close to the Brazos and set to work making a sculpture that he would christen “River Vessels.”

Dougherty, an Oklahoma native who’s lived in North Carolina since childhood, has a Masters degree in hospital administration but decades ago gave himself over to making art.  Now 72, he continues to create his memorable sculptures all over the world.  This year has found him doing pieces in Montreal, South Dakota, Oregon, South Carolina, California, and Commerce, Texas.  Worldwide, one encounters his art from Sweden to South Korea.

An intriguing element of his work that distinguishes him from most artists who specialize in public art, is the collaborative process he uses, enlisting people from the community in which his art will be placed to help him at every step.  The Atlantic recently published a series examining “the possibilities and pitfalls of mentorship” and interviewed Dougherty because of this unique relationship with those who help bring his artistic concepts into reality.  The magazine described him as being “a boss, a mentor, and a humble peer” all at the same time.

I recall sitting on a picnic table and watching him work with his crew of volunteers here in Waco, and the rapport he formed with them all in just a short time was truly impressive.  They seemed as dedicated to the project as he was.  Dougherty took his role as a mentor seriously and showed a particular interest in the art students who had come out to work with him.  “You can’t give young people true advice,” he said to the Atlantic. “You just plow ahead and let them watch you do it.”  Once they start in on the process with him, he makes a point of being encouraging. “I don’t like to walk around and look at someone’s work and say, ‘I would do something else,’ or, ‘That’s never going to work.’”

Dougherty understands that because of the nature of his medium, his work doesn’t last forever.  “I really like that essentialness of having something that has to be looked at now,” he explains.  For him, the real value of his art comes in the experience of creating it with a group of people he’s only recently come to know.  The “nature of a good sculpture,” he said earlier this year in Commerce, is it “makes people feel enlivened, and they want to go look at it.”  A good sculpture is “one that causes personal associations.”

I still feel my acute disappointment when his piece here in Waco had to be removed long before it would have lived out its days.  It didn’t last long enough to become much of the focal point that good public art can be, and sadly we missed out on experiencing a lot of those personal associations that civic life, at its best, can give.

“The people who must never have power are the humorless.  To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity.” –Christopher Hitchens, 2011

My column this week looks at how several artists have used other art forms to inspire them, and the ways in which creativity can reach across what we may see as “boundaries” of the arts.  Here’s an excerpt:

At a deep level, creativity stimulates more creativity. This is hardly a revolutionary observation, as any art student who goes to a museum or musician to hear live music will testify. But at the same time it’s an interaction that’s easy to miss if the creativity happens across fields of artistic endeavor. But in the same way that for me listening to jazz can fire up my brain to tell the story of industrialization and the beginnings of urbanization in the late 19^th century, so too can music lend its energy to painters. Without implying any sort of causation in terms of what the painter is producing, music will, if not exactly guide a brush, put an artist into a particular mood from which she or he wants to work.

Read the whole thing HERE in the Waco Tribune-Herald.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, King Zulu, 1986

My column this week considers how artists sometimes find themselves in opposition to the US President and the tensions that can flare when that happens.  Read the whole thing HERE in the Waco Tribune-Herald.

One of the displays of contemporary visual art at the White House, during the “White House Festival of the Arts,” June, 1965.  Smithsonian Institution Archives.

Three years ago I found myself playing music in front of an audience for the first time in more than 20 years. This is what I wrote about the experience.

It had finally become one of those “put your money where your mouth is” moments. For years I was asked if I would bring my bass to church and play in the ensemble that provides music before and after the service, and sometimes accompanies the choir on a couple of hymns. I had repeatedly begged off, citing as reasons everything from being too busy to practice to being too rusty to play. Two Sundays ago, when I was out to lunch with the friend who is the arranger and leader of the ensemble, he asked me again. This time, for whatever reason, I wavered.

It would seem that of all the people who might step up and contribute musically if he had the ability to do so, one who writes a weekly column on the importance of the arts—not to mention constantly harangues his fellow citizens to get involved artistically in the community—should certainly do it himself. Either that or quit pestering everyone.

So I agreed and last Sunday played the bass in front of an audience for the first time in twenty years. Yes, the fingers were a little rusty, but by the end of the service I felt like I knew what I was doing. Despite the worst-case scenarios I’d imagined, none of the songs on which I played came to a crashing stop, and I kept the out-of-key notes to what to me (if not to my fellow musicians) seemed like a minimum. We’ll see next Sunday if any visitors that happened to be there last week resolved not to return because of errant bass lines.

And now I can deliver my encouragement to people to get involved in the arts without feeling like I’m not practicing what I’m preaching.

Years ago, I played in a band in Austin, making enough to pay the bills and that sort of thing. We performed regularly around town and even went on the road to Dallas, Houston, Laredo, Lubbock, and as far afield as Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Although we were playing most of our gigs in Austin, known around the country as the “live music capital of Texas,” at no point did I consciously consider myself part of any civic element. My guess is that amateur or semi-professional artists of all kinds don’t automatically think that way.

But they are. I was in Studio Gallery last week and saw paintings by two people I know. There were several pieces by Richard Skurla, a talented professional artist whose work I admire and whom I’ve known in passing almost as long as I’ve lived in Waco. There was also a striking portrait of Willie Nelson painted by a friend I know from church named Bill Austin. I had seen it in a show at Art Center Waco a year or so ago, and now it was up at Studio Gallery. I don’t know off-hand if Bill, an amateur artist, thinks of himself as part of the Waco art scene, but he clearly is as well.

Unless it’s a place like East Hampton or Santa Fe, which for years were dominated by a few huge-name painters who lived and worked in those areas, a local art scene is made up of what George Bush once called “a thousand points of light.” Artistic talent is by no means limited to a few professionals. It’s spread around far and wide. And one of the keys to a healthy arts scene is for people to get involved artistically in any way they can, and then pay closer attention to the larger arts scene of which they’re now a part.

A version of this column originally appeared on September 4, 2014 in the Waco Tribune-Herald.