While putting together his fifth annual Holiday Art Extravaganza, John Carlisle Moore knew there was one artist that he had to include: Zelmer Phillips, Moore’s longtime friend, Hip Pocket Theatre collaborator, and visual artist who died this year at the relatively young age of 68.
“One morning he put a loaf of sourdough bread in the oven, sat down at the kitchen table, and then he was gone,” Moore, 62, said with unsentimental fondness. “The last time we acted together at Hip Pocket, we were the leads in The Mysterious Island of Dr. Moreau. We’d mess up the lines and kick each other’s asses about it afterward.”
The exhibit of underground art will be up at Arts Fifth Avenue through Christmas Day. In addition to Phillips, Moore will show paintings and other pieces by F. David Gibson and his own multimedia works.
Phillips is probably best known to Cowtown audiences through his roles at Hip Pocket, but he was also an accomplished visual artist, specializing in silk-screen prints. He received a lot of praise but never really crossed into the mainstream.
“I didn’t want the show to be a memorial for him but a retrospective,” Moore said. “I went to his house, and, along with his lovely wife, we searched through his art.”
For the extravaganza, Moore put together a small collection of Phillips’ best remaining prints, including colorful images of some of Phillips’ favorite Fort Worth street corners. One gem is a 1986 rendering of the Hemphill-West Magnolia intersection with images of the old Jazz Café and Paris Coffee Shop reflected in a windowpane.
Another showstopper is his striking ’60s-era image of Ohno Kazuo. The Japanese co-founder of the avant garde dance form known as butoh looks possessed. Phillips had collaborated on the piece with photographer Ira Cohen, a poet and world traveler who published some of the works of William S. Burroughs. Phillips met Cohen and Burroughs in the mid-1980s, when the latter was in Fort Worth for a solo performance at the Caravan of Dreams. Phillips often created silk-screen concert posters for acts that performed at the legendary, long-defunct downtown venue.
Gibson is also a longtime friend of Moore’s, since their days at Paschal High School. Gibson, a graduate of the prestigious Kansas City Art Institute, is primarily known as a landscaper painter with a technically accomplished, even thrilling, eye for detail. Asked by Moore to submit new work, Gibson has served up some landscapes, smaller abstract expressionist-style pictures, and a large-scale piece that Moore described as “a wooden architectural construction.”
Some of Gibson’s work, Moore said, is classically beautiful. And some of it is “so cheesy you could spread it on a cracker.”
But if you’re not experimenting, Moore said, you’re not growing: “That’s one thing we appreciate about each other as artists. We tend to go off on tangents and take them as far as they can go, sometimes further than they should go.”
Most of Moore’s offerings this year will be digital versions of photographs he’s snapped on various travels over the last 20 years, including a historic Austin motel, an eccentric and well-patronized liquor store in Clayton, N.M., and the painted basement floor of the old Zin Dr Pepper Plant in Strawn, Texas. Moore sends these images through a popular $2.99 app called Waterlogue that turns photographs into convincingly detailed fake watercolor paintings. He then hand-manipulates the digital watercolors with additional shapes and hues via Prismacolor pencils.
Moore began working with digitally manipulated Instagram shots a few years ago and insists that such new technologies are gradually becoming a medium unto themselves. The fact that longtime Texas Christian University photography professor and artist Dick Lane has embraced digital image-making thrills Moore: “It’s taken some time for these staunch traditionalist photographers to accept the virtues of new technology, but it’s an ongoing trend that I’m very happy about.”
Moore, who’s also known as a raconteur, started his extravaganzas to focus on the experimentations of established North Texas artists and to display work by some of the outsider artists he feels don’t get much recognition.
A more Moore-like answer, however, would be that he does it simply “to sell some art.”
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Holiday Art Extravaganza
Thru Dec 20 at Arts Fifth Avenue, 1628 5th Av, FW. Free. 817-923-9500.
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