By Eleanor Skelton
People often process difficult circumstances through art. The COVID-19 pandemic and 2020’s vibe that the world we knew is over is filtering through our collective consciousness into the art world.
These are the main themes that surface in a new show at The Art Studio, coming this fall.
“Recalibration of Realities” will display Craig Odle and Travis Walthall’s work as TASI’s Main Gallery Exhibition in October, with a free opening reception on Oct. 2 from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m.
Odle describes himself as a self-taught lowbrow artist whose ideas come from everyday life.
“Anything that comes to mind for me–whether it’s music, movies, puns, alliterations,” he said. “Any figure of speech that just pops out at me when I hear it. Sometimes it’s dreams. But it just depends, whatever is striking me at the moment.
“I tend to describe it as a free-flowing of my consciousness, a language that I’ve learned to speak as I flex my creative muscle.”
Odle said his and Walthall’s work falls mostly into new contemporary or contemporary surrealism that flows between different types of conceptual images.
“I wouldn’t say that there are recurring themes,” he said. “You’re gonna see food and things having to deal with modern culture, but I don’t actually think that is too unusual. If you look back at art through the ages, it reflects what’s going on at that time–the era, the surroundings, the technologies used at that time. I would say my work absolutely reflects the sort of world that we live in today.
If Odle’s work does have a recurring theme, it is that all of his pieces come from concepts that came up in his head, he said.
“I do whatever I feel I need to do to get the point across,” he said.
These two artists have been collaborating on this show for a few years, after meeting through TASIMJAE a few years ago, but the show was rescheduled three times due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Odle said.
“We really hit it off,” he said. “Ever since then, we’ve been talking about showing together. Since both of our work is about bending the constructs of reality, it’s very dream-like. It definitely has surreal tones to it for sure.”
Travis Walthall recently graduated with an MFA in painting from Stephen F. Austin University. He said some work from his program will be on display for the first time.
“It’s been pretty difficult to schedule something with the whole hurdle of everything attached to COVID lately,” Walthall said.
Their work shares similarities with striking differences, Walthall said.
“The show coming up is going to have a tremendous amount of different imagery,” he said. “I think it’s really cool because Craig and I have such different backgrounds when it comes to artwork and producing artwork. There’s also so many similarities as well.”
Even the show’s title was a collaboration between the two, Odle said.
“When we got to recalibrations of realities, I voted on that one because it reminded me of a schizoid space journey,” he said. “To me, it was like you’re readjusting your reality, you’re making adjustments to what is your perception of what’s really around you, with a tagline of ‘Am I really in space?’ Scatterbrained, neurotic thinking. Where am I really right now?”
Two of the pieces Odle has in the show are painted on tabletops and hang on the wall just like any other canvas, he said. He painted one tabletop with layers of varnish and notes about concepts and phone numbers of people he needed to call while painting.
“There’s layers and layers and layers of different things going on this table, but there’s also an astronaut looking through a fish-eyed lens as the visor on his helmet, almost like a burger glowing in the top right hand corner, people falling, a hand reaching out,” Odle said. “There’s all sorts of stuff going on in that painting, but really it goes back to […] it’s a language that I’ve learned how to speak with just the materials that I’ve given. What will work, what flows for me, what do I think fits in this space.”
Walthall’s pieces include everything from smaller ink drawings to pop-art acrylic paintings to traditional oil paintings, he said.
“I’m really excited to have a vast variety of imagery as far as subject matter, but also just a really cool variety of different colors popping out, different styles,” he said. “The exhibition’s going to have a lot of push and pull, and hopefully everybody will have some type of painting or image that they can connect to.”
Odle said he learned the value of collaborating with other local artists when he was renting a house about six years ago, right after moving back to Southeast Texas. He had about 70 pieces after working for a few months, but he was not sure how to show his work.
“I was really busy, and I was thinking, how am I going to show this. I thought, well, nobody knows I’m working here, nobody’s going to come to my show if I just show this myself,” he said.
His first show was in the rental house with six other artists, with his work in the living room and other work in bedrooms and the kitchen, he said.
“What I realized was that there is a certain synergy when artists come together,” he said. “Travis is going to bring in people that I’m not going to bring in.
“It can be more of an experience when it’s multiple people at the same time. If the right artists are together, it can create something really special. We both agreed we wanted to create an experience in Southeast Texas, for the community. We didn’t just want a stuffy art show.”
Some of Odle’s best ideas come to him while long-distance running, often through alliteration and figures-of-speech, he said. Another one of his recent pieces was based on a song.
“Honestly a lot of ideas come to me while I’m doing that, especially during the summer heat for whatever reason,” he said. “I’ve just learned how to pay attention to the off-the-wall thoughts when they come to me.
“I’m a single dad, and I have an eight year old daughter. Since teaching a small child the English language, I didn’t think before I ever realized that if you take a lot of the things that we say totally literally, it paints a completely different picture than what we know it to be.”
“Oil on Wood” is an example of this, he said.
“I was browsing art on Instagram, and I looked at the medium the painter used, oil on wood,” he said. “Immediately, the mental image that I got was olive oil on a tree stump. Obviously, that’s not what the painter meant at all, he meant oil paint on a wood panel. I turned that into a painting.”
Another one of his pieces was inspired when his daughter asked him if sea animals have beverages.
“We had a laugh about it because their beverage is water, they live in their beverage,” he said. “The painting I ended up doing was a beach backdrop, and then a large Coke bottle being poured into the ocean and a dolphin. Anything can be inspirational for a piece.”
Odle said he pushes himself to create art out of ideas that do not sound like art.
“I’ve done multiple exercises where somebody told me something, and it didn’t sound like something that I could do,” he said. “I basically just took it as a challenge […] to force myself to create a painting out of something that I didn’t think was possible.
“The more you work the creative muscle, the stronger it gets. The easier it is to create. You have to be working it out all the time to be able to use it efficiently.”
Walthall uses the human figure in a surreal way, he said.
“Sometimes it will be a human figure that sort of morphs into an animal, a body [with an] animalistic head,” he said. “Sometimes it will be a human figure that morphs into an ice cream cone. So it works on different levels. Some work is more conceptual, some of the other pieces are just more funny and sort of poppy, lowbrow.”
One of Walthall’s pieces in this show, a large-scale 4-foot by 6-foot oil painting, comes directly from the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It’s in totally green monochromatic color palettes,” he said. “It shows this suited figure coming out of one doorway wearing PPE, holding out something like a swiffer with this gas mask on. This sort of haze rolls into the foreground. You can see little green forms like on a smaller scale. There’s little virus forms floating around, but there’s also little avocado halves and kiwi halves in the foreground.
“The green is sort of radioactive green, like a green you would see painted on the side of a nuclear canister. It comments on the current mood or feelings of the pandemic where a lot of people are spending a lot of time inside.”
Wearing a mask is on everyone’s mind right now, Walthall said. While some immunocompromised people wore masks on public transportation in the past, now it’s a larger part of the population.
“[It’s about] the idea of having to wear a facemask or people going as far as wearing actual gas masks and full body protective equipment,” he said. “You have this weird sort of social-political relationship involved with maybe getting criticism or backlash whether you’re wearing a mask or whether you’re not wearing a mask.”
Together, their work challenges perceptions and gives the viewer plenty to take in, Odle said.
“Both of our styles together are definitely going to be an awesome show,” he said. “Some of my work is more controversial and can definitely rub somebody the wrong way.”
Walthall said the variety of scale and color throughout the collection is what sets the tone for the viewers’ experience.
“There’s this overarching strangeness that I think will definitely echo and ripple throughout the body of work,” he said. “It’s definitely best to enjoy it in person, you get to see these pieces and their different size relationship and color intensities.”
Odle said a close friend once told him that effective art makes you feel something, and it does not matter whether it’s good or bad, it just evokes feeling.
“I totally agree with that,” he said. “We’ll both have someone come up to us, and they’ll say, ‘I think this is what this painting really means.’ I think that the viewer wants us to tell them how we came up with it, but it’s not as important to me that I let someone know exactly how I came up with a concept.
“It’s more important to me to let the viewer have an experience with it themselves, because who am I to say that my piece is supposed to make you feel this way. I like the idea better that someone comes to it, it makes them think, it makes them feel a certain way, maybe they like it, maybe they hate it, but they had an experience, but that’s the biggest compliment to me.”
The Art Studio’s normal gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from noon to 5 p.m. For more information, visit artstudio.org or follow TASI on Facebook or Instagram.
Travis Walthall’s work can be seen online here. https://www.facebook.com/pg/theartstudioinc/photos/?ref=page_internal&tab=album&album_id=10157923826496901
Craig Odle’s work can been seen online here. https://www.facebook.com/pg/theartstudioinc/photos/?ref=page_internal&tab=album&album_id=10157917379426901