Have you ever wanted to learn about art from some of Texas’s top artists? This year’s Texas Stories art tour series may be just what you’ve been looking for!
For the past two summers Art Spark Texas has hosted Texas Stories, our virtual art workshop centered on the history and culture of this land we now call Texas. In this year’s series we are shifting our focus from the historical past to the present, as we follow the stories of six contemporary Texas-based artists and their art projects. Our goal is to inspire you to create, while trying a new medium and hearing from a new artist each week.
Cathedral of Junk
We began our tour earlier this month at the Cathedral of Junk here in Austin, with sculptor Vince Hannemann. The Cathedral is a 3-story structure with over 60 tons of your old junk interwoven through it. Vince has been working on the project for over thirty years and was kind enough to let me tour ahead of class time and photograph his creation. While walking around he offered me some insight into his creative process:
“I didn’t have this idea, there wasn’t a grand plan, I didn’t own this house for the first 17 years I lived here. I just started with a little group of sculptures in my yard… If I’d had the idea that I’m going to build a Cathedral of Junk, that would have never happened, I don’t think. None of my grand plans ever work out that well.”
Vince goes on to stress the importance of “getting busy” and how “time is the secret sauce here.” He reiterates that the only way one builds a 3-story sculpture is through continuous discovery and a continuous pursuit. He’s keen to claim his happy accidents and demystify the artistic process down to time investment and “getting busy.”
Our edited interview with Vince can be found here.
And the Cathedral of Junk Facebook info can be found here.
Houston Art Car Experience
Next on our tour was a stop at Kim Hopson’s garage for a discussion on and a look at her Punk Rock Lucky Kitty Art Car. Kim is an imaginative social realist painter with a punk flare rock. Over the past four years she has transformed her mid-2000s Mazda into a moving form of her artistic expression. Kim was gracious enough to join our class Zoom meeting and share a bit of the history and motivations behind her art car.
I wasn’t thoughtful enough to record Kim’s interview session, but hope to have her back on in the future. In her interview we discussed the practical challenges of painting an entire car by hand, her months and months of sanding the old clear coat and paint off the car, and how she invited fellow artists to help her paint the car after she had completed all the preparatory drawings. Kim’s project took a little over a year to finish, and has undergone multiple additions, see the roof spikes and spiky metal studs on her car.
The project forced Kim to learn new paint mediums and methods, and leave her comfort zone of acrylic on canvas. It is a testament to her innovative voice and chosen medium of painting, and showcases her years’ worth of work for all to enjoy.
More information on Kim can be found at her website.
Texas SandFest
This week’s guest artist is Lucinda Wierenga, a sand sculptor from the Texas coast. It promises to be a great interview on a subject that most of us know very little about. If these previous interviews are any indicator, I would bet that Lucinda relies on similar mental tools that Vince and Kim use, “getting busy” and pushing yourself out of your comfort zone in order to grow. View the interview here.
More information and sand castle lessons from Lucinda can be found here.
The Texas Stories art tour continues for three more weeks, so grab your seat on our Zoom calls every Wednesday at 1:00 PM CDT. I encourage you to take some time for your creative mind and come to learn from some of Texas’s top artists.
Register here for the Zoom login.
–Jerry Slayton