Matthew Bourbon: Where Sameness and Difference Meet
Lee Baxter Davis: New Works

August 3–September 7, 2024
Opening reception August 3 from 5-7 pm
Artists in attendance

Matthew Bourbon artist statement

In recent years my painting practice has evolved to feel like a reliable ritual act. As a daily practice, painting has increasingly become a site where I enact something of the spirit. In my process of making, I am not interested in telling or suggesting singular stories. Instead, I am trying to imbue my paintings with a charismatic presence and a poetic acknowledgment of the ambiguity inherent in all things. While I am still thinking about our objectness entwined with all other aspects of the material world, my efforts are pointed toward finding an ordinary beauty of substance through the fundamental actions of making. In this sense my artmaking encapsulates a hope for an intimate knowing of my inner landscape as well as the sameness and difference found in others. Painting has become a place for me not to escape into narrative, but instead to face life directly. Essentially, I want the paintings to be something more than saying something.

Lee Baxter Davis artist statement

These works of mine are narrative drawings that attempt to illustrate some aspects of the duality of being. Let us call them "myth plays." Most of us are aware of these dualities since we live in a visible and invisible reality. For example, there is the body and the soul, the flesh and the spirit. There is the two-fold experience of reason and passion. My considerations are influenced by myths, philosophy and theology. The effects of auditory processing disorder cause me to process thoughts, not in words, but images. Dominated by the tyranny of the outer and inner eye, I choose poetic logic over scientific reason, though I know full well that the two must be united. Consequently, my base aesthetic tends to the romantic of more rather than the utilitarian of less, and is shorn up by formal dynamic composition. The problem is that I must find a way in which energetic composition can hold together the many shapes and images as an essence of one.

About the artists

Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, Matthew Bourbon earned separate undergraduate degrees in Studio Art and Art History from the University of California at Davis. Relocating to New York City, he took his Masters of Fine Arts degree from the School of Visual Arts in 1999. Since then, his art has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Bourbon is a Professor of Art at the University of North Texas' College of Visual Arts and Design. He is also an active art critic and has contributed to Artforum Online, Flash Art, ArtNews, New York Arts Magazine and KERA Art and Seek.

Lee Baxter Davis was born in Bryan, Texas in 1939. He enlisted in the army out of high school, afterwards attending college and graduating with a master's degree from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Lee taught fine art graphics at East Texas State University, now Texas A&M Commerce, for over thirty years. He was full professor and was chairman of printmaking, and later taught advanced drawing and figure drawing. Now retired, Davis is a deacon serving at St. William the Confessor Catholic Church in Greenville, Texas. He has been married to his college sweetheart for over 50 years. They have two adult children and ten grandchildren. He works in his studio at home. His prints and drawings have been exhibited throughout the United States and are included in many permanent collections.