Guns, Gators & Gals

Shaun Roberts’ AMSET exhibit merges High Renaissance with Texas flair

Artist Shaun Roberts takes High Renaissance and Baroque influences and techniques and applies them in his paintings and drawings, transporting the viewer to an East Texas setting that could have been painted by the workshop of Peter Paul Rubens.

“Rebels and Renegades,” an exhibition of Roberts’ paintings and drawings, is on view through June 3 at the Art Museum of Southeast Texas.

Since graduating with a BFA from Stephen F. Austin University  and an MFA in painting and drawing from the University of Washington in 2012, the 30-year-old artist has exhibited his paintings from coast to coast. In the relative short time since completing his studies, his paintings of East Texas scenes and people have shown in Alaska, California, Oregon, Washington, Kansas, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, Louisiana and Georgia. Such national exposure has brought East Texas color to audiences outside of Nacogdoches, exposing them to the guns, gators and “gals” from the south.

Roberts’ East Texas is dazzlingly beautiful in his carefully handled compositions and expressive brushwork, although his choice of subjects — ordinary, lower-class people — would not have been deemed appropriate for the 16th- and 17th-century masters he emulates.

Roberts paints and poses friends and family in East Texas bars, roads, yards and woods who are enacting typical scenes of everyday life. “George Lands a Hoss” (2017) captures a decisive moment before a gator meets its fate at the hands of a backwards cap-wearing man — much to the horror of the young woman accompanying him who holds her arms up as if to stop the inevitable beheading. Their clothing is typical of what one wears during unbearably hot weather in the woods. The young woman pairs her denim shorts with cowboy boots while her partner wears a sleeveless T-shirt. The young man’s gaze meets our own, and the machete he wields bears resemblance to Artemisia Gentileschi’s protagonist in “Judith Slaying Holofernes” (1614-20).

His paintings position East Texans in  poses reminiscent of late 16th- and early 17th-century compositions. An inebriated friend being assisted from his truck in “Entombment” (2018) mirrors Rubens’ “The Descent from the Cross” (1612-1614). Like one would witness in a Baroque painting, the structuring of Roberts’ composition delights the eye in its ability to stimulate the sensation of movement in the zig-zag of varying painted lines and angles. Additionally, Roberts’ technique emulates the masters in his application of oil. He blocks out warm and cool tones in the composition, and layer by layer meticulously unveils the subject of his large-scale paintings.

A major influence in his paintings is Caravaggio. He first discovered the Italian master during an undergraduate study abroad trip to Italy. Roberts applies the artist’s chiaroscuro technique and adopts the card scene motif — which Caravaggio uses twice — in “Card Sharps” (2015). Roberts and his friends are posed around a table playing poker. One friend portrays the bartender, who we observe through the mirror to have the winning hand tucked in her G-string. The composition employs similar use of perspective as Caravaggio — a man’s hand reaches towards his holster as he connects the dots on the cheating scheme.

Besides the models and guns, other local references color his paintings. A koozie with the name of a friend’s tattoo shop, cowboy hats, East Texas fashions and arms illustrated with tattoos are all found in “Card Sharps” but also find their way in other paintings.

“Charging Chausseur” (2016) takes its name from the genre of portraits of nobles on their horses preparing for the hunt. Instead of noble steeds and riding breeches, Roberts’ hunter is mounted on his motorcycle, wearing a leather vest with his motorcycle club affiliation patch and a John 3:16 quote patch. The “chausseur” holds his shotgun while his gaze aggressively confronts the viewer. He is parked behind a blue Ford F-150 with a “Chubby Chaser” bumper sticker. Such characters can be seen in groups with other motorcyclists wearing similar leather and patches traveling the expansive Texas highways.

“Come and Take It” (2014) shows a pistol-bearing young man in front of his gun rack, challenging the viewer. The eye contact and smirk of the subject is uncanny in its likeness to Frans Hals “Laughing Cavalier”(1624). Like the cavalier, Roberts’ subject possesses no self-doubt, which is evident in his display of firearms. His clothing, plaid button-up shirt half way unbuttoned, and a backward baseball cap are staples in Texas fashion.

The scale of Roberts’ paintings is similar to the sizes of royal portraits and large religious works painted by Rubens and Velásquez.

The exhibition includes small preliminary sketches and paintings that show the artist working through questions concerning the arrangement and poses of his subjects, and the kinds of tones he might need to use in the final painting. These sketches echo blockbuster shows for old masters like Michelangelo, Leonardo de Vinci and Raphael, in which the preparatory sketches add texture to the exhibition.

While the techniques and compositional arrangement Roberts uses in his paintings are hundreds of years old, the artist’s paintings very much express a facet of everyday life of East Texans.

AMSET is located at 500 Main St. in downtown Beaumont.

For more information, visit www.amset.org.

Caitlin Duerler, ISSUE staff writer