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The Cleaning Table
Artist
David Bates
(Born 1952, United States)
Date1990
MediumOil on canvas
DimensionsFramed: 86 x 65 3/4 x 3 1/4 in. (218.44 x 167.01 x 8.26 cm)
Credit LineCollection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Gift of The Barrett Collection, Dallas, TX
Object number2014.1
Status
Not on viewCopyright© 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 attention to the sensibility of place with his muscular applications of oil paint, Bates translates his experiences of the regions he loves into works of art that transcend regional boundaries.
Captivated by the Gulf Coast since the childhood vacations he took there with his family each summer, Bates grew more familiar with the character of the place, allowing its sights, smells, textures, weather, and inhabitants to infuse his paintings. The Cleaning Table, 1990, a scene of rugged, self-sufficient workers unified with their natural surroundings, is characteristic of the artist’s work. Its surface of energetic impasto brushstrokes and heavy contours conveys the tactility of the act of cleaning fish and the quality of light on an overcast day on the coast.
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 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. He renders the 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.
Captivated by the Gulf Coast since the childhood vacations he took there with his family each summer, Bates grew more familiar with the character of the place, allowing its sights, smells, textures, weather, and inhabitants to infuse his paintings. The Cleaning Table, 1990, a scene of rugged, self-sufficient workers unified with their natural surroundings, is characteristic of the artist’s work. Its surface of energetic impasto brushstrokes and heavy contours conveys the tactility of the act of cleaning fish and the quality of light on an overcast day on the coast.
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 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. He renders the 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.