Blog – Page 4 – James Hough Studio

Glorious Turn maquette, 2008, by James Hough

Glorious Turn maquette, 2008, acrylic on wood

Banking Glory and Glorious Turn, 2008, by James Hough

Banking Glory and Glorious Turn, 2008, acrylic on wood

Beheaded Lover, 2007, by James Hough

Beheaded Lover, 2007, acrylic on plexiglass

Beheaded Lover and How Is My Baby So Far Away, 2007, by James Hough

Beheaded Lover and How Is My Baby So Far Away, 2007, acrylic on wood

Group Exhibition Event in Dallas

406 South Haskell Avenue Dallas, TX 75226 Sunday, March 11, 2012 6pm to 12am My friend James Whitmire invited me to participate in this one-night art and music event in downtown Dallas. I will be showing prints of some of the drawings I’ve made of my neighbors standing in front of their homes, as well… Continue reading

My buddy sent me a scan of the pastel sketch I made of him last October in Celina, TX

This drawing is an example of the scores of pastel portrait sketches I made in Celina, TX, during their centennial celebration on October 15, 2011. My idea was to use the Radiohead payment schedule–pay what you want–which worked okay until the swarms of unsupervised kids caught on and started paying me in pennies. Nevertheless, those… Continue reading

I got ahead of myself, so here is another illustration that probably will not be in the picture book

Words in the Air

Sometimes I like to talk out loud when nobody is there. My brother calls it craziness, my mother calls it prayer, my father calls it poetry, and all of these are fair; but I just like to watch the shapes my words make in the air.

Two of my paintings hung, with delicacy and taste, in the kids’ bathroom

Here is the first of my sample drawings for the children’s picture book I’m writing and illustrating

3 Reasons Why You Should Blog Sporadically and Infrequently

Blogging as a form of e-correspondence is being surpassed by Tweeting, Facebook updating, and things I haven’t heard of yet; it seems to be going the way of the hand-written letter. But do not despair, bloggers! Now is the time not only for persistence but for a more strategic approach to blogging, and one way… Continue reading

A few holiday commissions that turned out nicely

A set of paintings I made for my new little niece

Our gingerbread house lives among the sculptures, where impulsive fingers cannot reach

Run Big Monkey flees from the light

Skull Platter never gets a break from the Christmas tree

Sunk, 2011, by James Hough

I’ve made some preemptive resolutions for the coming year, one of which is to use words less often. The world is full of them already. That said, sometimes I like to talk about where a new work comes from. So here goes. Sunk was called Disinterested Witness for a while, but after about a week… Continue reading

Teaching

photo by Jessica Nelson, 2011

Painting, November 12, 2011

The red and lavender palette and tissue-paper-looking paint call up images of muscle, cartilage, brain, all of the softer parts that make our insides work. The colors also remind me of kings and queens in their plush, royal cloaks and gold crowns. These colors are some of my favorite to work with, when I can… Continue reading

My Next-Door Neighbor and Me

On the day before the BUMP event I was making preparations in the driveway, and my next-door neighbor came by with his smartphone, ready for some photography. My hope was that we were doing the photo opp for a neighborly ink drawing, but instead he laughed and said something to the effect of, “Why would… Continue reading

The Camelot Community Neighborhood Party

Last Saturday the Camelot project bore its first real social fruit. Until then, my neighbor-meeting and -drawing campaign has served three purposes of dubious communal value: It has given me an opportunity to test and toughen my nerve by cold-knocking on strangers’ doors. It has provided (so far) six subjects for ink drawings. It has… Continue reading

Camelot Door-to-Door Results

Whew. I’ve finished the most difficult part of the Camelot project. It took just over 3 weeks for me to hand-deliver my newsletter about trying to meet all my neighbors and draw portraits of them as gifts. I usually left the house at 4:30pm on weekdays, with a few weekends in there to try to… Continue reading

Neighbors, October 25, 2011

I’m happy to say that I’ve been doing a few more neighbor drawings. I had started to think that I wasn’t going to reach 10, much less my original goal of an easy 100. If people show up this weekend for the neighborhood party, there’s a chance that others will volunteer to receive a nice… Continue reading

Up Next: the Camelot Neighborhood Party

The Rangers just lost a close Game 1 of the World Series, so here I am to compensate for my disappointment with the loss and my disgust with my own time-wasting by contributing to Jim Public’s web presence. Chances are you’re familiar with the kind of schedule-craziness that forces you to drop everything and do… Continue reading

BUMP in Celina

Saturday, October 15, 2011 was my inaugural DIY one-day solo art exhibition, and it was a Texas-sized mixed bag. I’ve had two good nights of sleep since then, and I’m still trying to fit all the strange little pieces of the day into a coherent impression; but, the pieces aren’t coming together. I’ve been an… Continue reading

Poster Post

I spent yesterday evening getting acquainted with the campuses of some of the larger universities in the Dallas area. I can tell you that between 5pm and 9pm, the art departments of SMU, UT Dallas, Collin College (Plano Campus), and UNT are all a-bustle. The smells of linseed oil, burning steel, wet clay were strong;… Continue reading

BUMP, October 15, 1:30 to 11pm, Celina, Texas

I’m so excited to announce my first DIY art exhibition BUMP, which will take place this weekend on the porch of City Hall in Celina, TX, a small suburb not yet gobbled up by the DFW juggernaut, about 10 miles north of Frisco. Using a crack combination of scrap wood, black spray paint, paving stones,… Continue reading

Neighbor, October 9, 2011

When I met this neighbor around a month ago, I had just started the door-to-door phase of Camelot in earnest. Her friendliness and surprising lack of alarm at my pitch was refreshing. On the second day of walking and knocking the neighborhood, I was working an area several blocks from her home when I saw… Continue reading

Cottonwood Art Festival

It’s important not to rant on one’s blog. Still, sometimes it’s the stuff that’s wrong with the world that whips you up into a right state. I’ve mentioned before that some gallery nights in Dallas are disappointing, that most of what hangs on walls and perches on pedestals is not good art. But it’s helpful… Continue reading

What You Looking At, 2011

This painting had a bit of a long and tortured beginning, as with a lot of my paintings. I made this 25″ square panel 4 or 5 years ago, and the first painting it became was an oil of a logo I designed for a brand I invented called Koby Teith. The brand’s image, as… Continue reading

I Think I’ve Been Had

Early in the door-knocking phase of the Camelot project–I have only a few dozen homes left to greet!–I met a neighbor who, whether intentionally or not, got the better of me. Even before he answered the door, I knew I was dealing with a character. Minutes earlier, I had been chatting with a friendly retiree… Continue reading

Welcome

The door-knocking, neighbor-meeting campaign continues. I’ve been going out each day between 4:30 and 5:30, which is a time that works well for me since it falls before our supper time, and, therefore, I hope, before most everyone else’s supper time, too. I’ve been to 138 homes, which puts me past the halfway point in… Continue reading

A Nice Day for Door-to-Dooring

Friday afternoon I grabbed a stack of “A Quest for Camelot” newsletters and walked over to the front of our neighborhood, to the house I pass most often as we drive in and out of here. I was a little excited, mostly anxious, about knocking on all these strange doors. I was jumping into the… Continue reading

Highlights from the New Studies

A common thread in my artwork seems to be an urge to use every color in every piece I make. This goes back a long time, and if you look at thumbnail images of all the work I’ve put on this site, you can see that trend at work. If you were to take a… Continue reading

Study 8, September 2011, by James Hough

Study 7, September 2011, by James Hough

Study 6, September 2011, by James Hough

Study 5, September 2011, by James Hough

Study 4, September 2011, by James Hough

Study 3, September 2011, by James Hough

Study 2, September 2011, by James Hough

Study 1, September 2011, by James Hough

8 New Studies, and How They Get Here

Vernon Fisher told us undergraduates at UNT that an artist is a problem-maker. We go into the studio with an intention to make something, and in the process of making that thing, we encounter problems that we have to solve to get us where we want to be. Really, we create the problems, confront them,… Continue reading

A Quest for Camelot: September Newsletter

The Camelot project is a work in progress, and I’ve already had fun watching it shift and develop in real time since its inception this past summer. Having knocked on one or two dozen doors, not entirely as prepared or tailored as I had intended to be, I’ve decided that a monthly newsletter may be… Continue reading

New Studies Coming In

Can I just tell you how much I look forward to having a camera that doesn’t distort the edges of my rectangular artwork? It’s like my paintings have rung your doorbell and you look through the peep-hole to see a warped, circular version of an otherwise rectilinear piece of art. Someday, this nice-sized lens of… Continue reading

Run Big Monkey, at Home

I think I said this before, but Run Big Monkey hangs on the one large wall we have in the house. There is in fact a newer painting that is 1″ longer than Monkey in each dimension, making it the current largest Jim Public piece; but, as I finished the larger painting after Monkey had… Continue reading

Neighbors, September 6, 2011

A Proclamation

I love being a dad. It’s the most rewarding job I’ll ever have. I love my kids. (That’s a photo of them, on the morning after a gorgeous cold front came in, having decided that when the weather gets cool, the cool pretend to be homeless.) That’s the proclamation (minus the parentheses). And it may… Continue reading

Momentousness

Here I lounge, 45 minutes from our house in Garland, just down the road from the preschool where JPS is at this moment attending his first day as a student in a classroom. He has been absolutely stoked about the coming of this day. Since this time last year, when he had to endure sending… Continue reading

Run Big Monkey, 2010

As I was painting and sanding in turn, trying to build up a good-looking surface on this painting, I eventually started to see the image of a baboon running across the top of the canvas. Normally I don’t go seeking imagery in abstract artwork, especially my own; usually it’s impressions, visual and emotional, that I’m… Continue reading