Surf Texas

08/2023 — 51″ x 26.5″

Acrylic on used fence pickets

$750

SOLD

Once upon a time, Robert Tatum suggested I design an illustration around the concept of surfing on a texas beach. Cowboys on surfboards, maneuvering around off-shore oil rigs…stuff like that. What I came up with in Adobe Illustrator was pretty lackluster and unimpressive. Nothing became of my attempts, but the idea stuck around with me in my list of ideas.

One day in early 2023 as I was preparing for a show at FL!GHT Gallery, I revisited this theme and took a look at how we don’t really surf, we tube. And it isn’t just beached and off-shore rigs, but fresh water potentially polluted by fracking. I incorporated symbols of the Texas countryside and a tuber, shooting through polluted cloudy dull green water.

This piece is a bit of a departure for me as well, and an extra challenge, as the rig is such a dominate vertical feature that I decided to angle off to one side. Typically I am very symmetrical. The rig’s strong pull to one side had to be balanced through form and color to create a harmonic piece that didn’t fell like it was tipping to one side. I feel like I nailed it and it is a fun piece.

Posted by WOODCOCK

After a long exile in South Texas climbing out of a nihilistic funk, Otis Woodcock has found his way back to the open skies and quiet horizons of the American prairie. Having earned an MFA from Miami University, Ohio, he left his ancestral home in southern Indiana, spending the last three decades between Louisville, Kentucky, and San Antonio, Texas, developing his Iconoclasmatic Pop Art™ practice. On this journey, an anxious recovering Catholic and cancer survivor gradually evolved into the optimistic existentialist whose work is less interested in providing answers than in questioning certainty. Today, Woodcock lives and works where the seasonal rhythms and expansive landscapes of the Midwest serve as the backdrop for an ongoing exploration of belief systems, cultural inheritance, and the subtle poetry of ordinary things.

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Paining of a guy tubing a dirty green wave of texas water crashing through the texas countryside represented with much of what you would find there, oil drills, longhorn skulls, texas flags, and vermillion fly cathers