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Man with Snake
Artist
David Bates
(Born 1952, United States)
Date1995
MediumPainted wood
DimensionsOverall: 88 x 49 3/4 x 14 1/2 in. (223.52 x 126.37 x 36.83 cm)
Credit LineCollection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Museum purchase, Sid W. Richardson Foundation Endowment Fund
Object number1996.13
Status
Not on viewInscribednone
Copyright© David Bates
Category
Label TextSince the 1970s, Dallas-born artist David Bates has fused his deep knowledge of folk art, European art history, and modernist painting to his specific love of the Southeast United States, particularly the Texas Gulf Coast and the Grassy Lake area of Arkansas. Coupling his careful attention to the sensibility of place with his intensely observed forms and muscular applications of oil paint, Bates translates his experiences of the regions he loves into works of art that transcend regional boundaries.
Bates’s images are based in direct experience and sketches made on site, but the artist works up his final compositions from memory and imagination back in his Dallas studio. His distilled mode of representation reflects his keen awareness of the lineage of painting—he cites Paul Cézanne, Marsden Hartley, Henri Matisse, Jean-François Millet, and Vincent van Gogh among his artistic heroes. Like these predecessors, Bates renews the traditional genres of portraiture, landscape, and still life with the material of his own daily life. Bates renders his subjects from his beloved coast and lakes—fishermen and bait-shop workers, herons and snakes, swamp trees and magnolias—with an empathy and seriousness seldom devoted to them.
The Modern’s collection includes numerous works by Bates that display the breadth of his techniques in sculpture, painting, printmaking, and relief. The painted wood relief Man with Snake, 1995, from the artist’s Grassy Lake series, extends the thick material application of the paintings into a three-dimensional object reminiscent of Cubist assemblage. Although bordering on the abstract, with its rudimentary, cutout wood shapes and spare color, the subject of Man with Snake is still central, its concentrated form suggesting an open-ended narrative full of mystic resonance.
Bates’s images are based in direct experience and sketches made on site, but the artist works up his final compositions from memory and imagination back in his Dallas studio. His distilled mode of representation reflects his keen awareness of the lineage of painting—he cites Paul Cézanne, Marsden Hartley, Henri Matisse, Jean-François Millet, and Vincent van Gogh among his artistic heroes. Like these predecessors, Bates renews the traditional genres of portraiture, landscape, and still life with the material of his own daily life. Bates renders his subjects from his beloved coast and lakes—fishermen and bait-shop workers, herons and snakes, swamp trees and magnolias—with an empathy and seriousness seldom devoted to them.
The Modern’s collection includes numerous works by Bates that display the breadth of his techniques in sculpture, painting, printmaking, and relief. The painted wood relief Man with Snake, 1995, from the artist’s Grassy Lake series, extends the thick material application of the paintings into a three-dimensional object reminiscent of Cubist assemblage. Although bordering on the abstract, with its rudimentary, cutout wood shapes and spare color, the subject of Man with Snake is still central, its concentrated form suggesting an open-ended narrative full of mystic resonance.