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‘Jerry Bywaters: Lone Star Printmaker’
It doesn’t get more Texas than the art of Jerry Bywaters.
The late Paris, Texas native and longtime Dallasite pioneered the style that became known as Lone Star Regionalism. His expressive images captured the landscapes, the small towns, the architecture and the ordinary people of Texas and Southwest.
‘Jerry Bywaters: Lone Star Printmaker,’ an exhibit now at the Blanton Museum of Art, gathers 39 prints the artist made from 1935 to 1948. It also features source photographs and some archival materials that illuminate the Bywaters’s printmaking process.
A member of a group of young painters known as the Dallas Nine, in the 1930s Bywaters helped define a regional artistic identity for the Lone Star State. His interpretations of landscapes, urban spaces, small towns and local characters gained widespread popularity and helped propel Texas artists — and art about Texas — into the national limelight.
Bywaters was fond of taking trips around the state, often with his fellow artists, with sole purpose of finding real life scenes to capture in his fluid, folksy style. Always respectful of his subject matter, Bywaters nevertheless highlighted the whimsy he saw in such scenes as small West Texas towns with hastily built main streets lined by falsefront buildings as an attempt to give the place an air of dignity.
It’s gentle, but there’s a slight air of irreverence to many of Bywaters’ scenes of Texas.
Bywaters also traveled to Mexico where he met famed muralist Diego Rivera. Afterwards, not only did Bywaters incorporate Mexican themes and styles into his art (several prints in the are proof), he also was the first person to author a published review Rivera’s work in the United States.
‘Lone Star Printmaker’ shows the outcome of Bywaters efforts to produce multiple copies of his work so the Texas regionalist aesthetic could spread far and wide.
‘Jerry Bywaters: Lone Star Printmaker’ continues 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays, 1 to 5 p.m. Sundays through Nov. 8. Blanton Museum of Art, Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Congress Ave. $3-$7, free Thursdays. www.blantonmuseum.org.
Images:
Jerry Bywaters
Paint Colt, 1937
Color linoleum black, ed. 50
Jerry Bywaters Collection on Art of the Southwest, Hammons Library, SMU
Jerry Bywaters
Opera at Popular Prices, 1936
Transfer lithograph, edition 6/30
Jerry Bywaters Collection of Art of the Southwest, Hamon Arts Library at SMU,
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