By Suzanne Sprague, KERA 90.1 Reporter
Dallas, TX – Suzanne Sprague, KERA 90.1 reporter: As workers prepare the galleries at SMU's Meadows Museum for the colossal sculptures of James Surls, the artist is perched on a metal ladder, making the final touches to some of his drawings that adorn the galleries' walls. On a very large sheet of white paper, Surls is using a plain ol' magic marker to draw an array of symbols: spirals, a woman's face, and forms that could be flowers or pinwheels. He works deliberately, since he can't erase or start over.
James Surls, artist: I plan it out. I think from move to move, from line to line to line.
Sprague: But Surls is far from anxious. He works with a relaxed attitude, something he says is a hold-over from his childhood in east Texas.
Surls: I grew up as free as a bird. I really didn't grow up feeling any kind of, what you would call adverse pressure from a social or cultural perspective. There's nothing I couldn't do as a kid that I wanted to do. And I feel the same way as an adult.
Sprague: Surls says he got to be a free soul. Still, his life in Terrell and Athens and Oak Cliff was typical for a child in the late 1940s and 1950s. He liked to build things around his family's farm, hang out at the Dairy Queen, and play football.
Surls: In east Texas, that's just what you did - boy, Friday night football. Are you kidding? I'm not missing that. I'm a senior in high school. I'm 18. C'mon. That's a great time.
Sprague: But in college, football gave way to history and then to anthropology, and then to art. The counter-culture revolution was sweeping the U.S. and Europe, but Surls turned away from the avant-garde.
Surls: I would tell you the jug of wine, the piece of cheese, the hair shirt left bank existentialism - pardon my expression here, but there's a little bull**** in there somewhere. I don't want to be the rogue giant in my studio, it's me against the world.
Sprague: Instead, Surls developed a reputation as something of a naturalist. His large-scale wood sculptures are made from trees in the Piney Woods. He peels their bark off, lets them dry out, and then fastens their pieces together to form abstract shapes, sometimes like flower petals growing from a central point, in what Surls calls an organic growth pattern.
Surls: The idea of centering, that's really big. That's a big theme in my work, either - personally, I call it the search for self. What is the search for self? Well, is that not finding your center, where you stand and where you can be balanced?
Sprague: Art historians such as Ted Pillsbury say describing a James Surls sculpture inevitably trivializes it. Pillsbury has known Surls for 20 years and represents the artist through his gallery, Pillsbury and Peters, in Dallas. He suggests that Surls mixes simple materials with a complicated language of symbols to create a metaphor for the human condition.
Ted Pillsbury, managing partner, Pillsbury and Peters Fine Art: Our sense of living in an environment which is both rural on the one hand and very urban and very developed and, if you like, very alien on the other. His work is therefore the perfect median for those of us who live and prosper in urban environments but really long to go back to the woods, to go back to a much more basic form of existence.
Sprague: Pillsbury says Surls is admired internationally for his ambition and for epitomizing the development of art in this region.
Pillsbury: The notion of what is a Texas artist - you thought of James Surls because he was big and his work seemed to epitomize the strength and the raw energy and the sort of positive feelings that people have about this place.
Sprague: A few of Surls' early sculptures are on view at Pillsbury and Peters.
Pillsbury: This goes back to 1976 - "Burning Dog."
Sprague: At the time some of them were made, Surls was an instructor at Southern Methodist University. And as part of a year-long celebration of sculpture at SMU's Meadows Museum, Surls returns to the university this week to show a collection of what he's done since moving to Colorado five years ago.
Greg Warden, interim director, SMU's Meadows Museum: You can see James Surls from 50 feet away. You know it's James, even as he changes.
Sprague: Greg Warden is the interim director at the Meadows, and despite the consistency he sees in Surls' sculptures, he also says the artist has evolved since moving to the Rocky Mountains.
Warden: I think it's opened him up in a way. Things have gotten bigger. Some of the symbolism has changed. He talks about it as moving from a closed space, living in the woods near Houston, to these great vistas of Colorado with mountains and meadows.
Sprague: Surls left his home in Splendora for Colorado because, as he says, his wife decided she was moving and he was welcome to go with her if he liked. He laughs at being included in a recent biennial show of Colorado artists, because he still thinks of himself as a Texas artist. But despite his love for the Piney Woods and the mark they made on his work, Surls sees himself in a broader context.
Surls: I am very proud of being a Texas artist. But if a Texas artist is all I am, then I haven't reached my goal. I haven't gotten to where I want to go. That's not enough.
Sprague: For KERA 90.1, I'm Suzanne Sprague.
In the Meadows: "Recent Sculptures, Drawings and Prints of James Surls" opens today and runs through April 20th at SMU's Meadows Museum. The museum will also publish the first retrospective book of Surls' work later this spring. Exhibit details from KERA's arts and events calendar.
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