Alice Leese - West Texas, career origins, park residencies and finding your voice

Hello out there. George Irwin from Western Gallery here on the Horizons by Western Gallery podcast. Today I am going to be visiting with impermanent collection artist Alice Lise, and Alice is a wonderful artist. She has a really distinct style in her work, especially her studio work. It has some really cool elements to it. And then additionally, we're showing a lot of her quick draw 2-hour pieces in the gallery right now, which are also really distinct. She has a great way of getting her feelings and what she's experiencing with the land and through some photos down on the canvas really quick. These pieces just are very vibrant and feel really active and, and really awesome. So check those out on Western Gallery if you haven't yet. And I'm just gonna see if I can get Alice on here and visit her in her studio out west. She is in West Texas. In Andrews County, right where the Panhandle comes down and heads out west on the border of Texas and New Mexico. She's a rancher out there and raises— I don't know if she raises horses anymore, but I guess probably some of them. But they do Herefords and Angus, I think. Let's see, I think I see her on here now.

Hey, Alice! Hi, George!

How are you doing?

Good. Doing well. How are you?

Pretty good. Good to see you.

Yeah, it's good to see you.

I gave like a little introduction. You're out in West Texas and you ranch and you raise cattle. And then in the meantime you paint.

Right. That's about it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And you've been, you've been at it for a little bit. I'm kind of curious. I know you got your BFA out there in outline. Is that right?

Well, I got, I got it at ACU in Ambly.

Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah.

My BFA. Yeah.

And then you have, do you have a master's degree from?

And then I lacked just a few hours on my master's at Sol Ross in Alpine.

That's what I was thinking about. Okay.

Yeah. Well, and that's a, that's a wonderful art department. In fact, it started as an art colony way back in the '20s and the Dallas Nine used to go out there, Big Bend, and paint. And especially when the railroad came through, they, they could get out there and start there from Alpine and go painting. So I think Jerry Bywaters set up a school out there. And then there's some, there's some other really famous regionalist painters that would go out there and paint all the time. Alexander Hogue, Otis Dozier, just really great, great artists. Cool.

So obviously you've been You were studying art then in the, in the '80s. Is that when you started to kind of take it seriously?

Well, yeah, I think when I went to school, that, that was like the first time I realized, you know, people actually do this. And you know, it is possible that you could do it too. And, and you're, you're halfway decent at it. So you might as well learn, get a lot of art history, you know what I'm saying? You know what people have already done, so you don't have to repeat that. And then, you know, I really got into the regionalism maybe in the last, well, I say that, but I think my work's always been regionalist.

Well, you've been, I'm sure, pretty heavily influenced by, by where you are.

Yeah. It's all about place. It's all about the land and landscape and where, where are you? I think if you're going to be in a landscape and paint it, You really need to know it. You need to spend some time in it. So yeah, any landscape I'm painting, it's not from like a photograph, you know, that you looked up. It's because I've spent time there learning, seeing the wildlife, seeing the people, seeing how they interact with the landscape, seeing what all goes on there and just absorbing. Yeah.

Cool. Well, I wanna kind of footnote that and come back to that, but I'm kind of, I'm just, I, I guess I've never really talked to you about getting into your career. And do you mind if we talk about that a little bit more?

Let's, yeah, I, I kind of got off on a, on a chase, chased a rabbit there.

That's all right. I, I wanna talk about that some more too, and we'll get there in a little bit. So you were, you grew up on the, on the YT Ranch, right?

Right.

And was it just sort of like, You just knew you were always going to be doing that?

No, I never, I never wanted to come back here because it is the Chihuahuan Desert. It is hot and dry. I love the people, love the ranch, but I thought, you know, I'll go to school and with art, I'll go live somewhere else and paint there. But, you know, I figured out real quick that there's such an attachment to the land when you go away that you want to come back. So ended up back here and, you know, really enjoyed the time I spent in school, but it, it was, I wanted, wanted to come back, you know? Yeah. And we came back and raised our girls here and yep, this ranch has been in my family for over 100 years and I'm the 4th generation and we work alongside the 5th and 6th.

So.

It's a, it's a family ranch.

That's so cool.

And yeah, it is really neat and we're really blessed to get to work with family all the time.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Oh, cool.

Well, so then did you start, when you came back from Abilene, did you just start painting there on the ranch?

I spent about 7 years total in Abilene and 3 of those years were at the, I rented studio space at the Artist League of Texas. And that was, that was a really formative time, I think, because we had just gotten married and didn't have any kids. So spent most of my time there at the studio painting. And I have a studio here now on the ranch and it, and the one in Abilene wasn't near as nice as the one here. There was no air conditioning or heating. And one day a cat got in the building, you know, there were mice and So the cat was really a good addition to catch the mice.

So you painted for a little bit in Abilene, and then you came back to the YC and just, were you showing work while you were painting in Abilene?

Oh yes. Entered a lot of national juried shows and got into quite a few of them because that's what Uh, my professors told me, you know, you need to enter shows and get your work out there. And at the time I was doing some watercolor, some acrylic painting, and then also some silkscreen prints using a process called hand reduction silkscreen printing.

Okay.

And so that's where you block out the screen with stop out and then print layers of color and get to the final image. And those images still, I really like them. They just have a sort of a graphic quality to them. So painted some there. And then came back here and decided really, you know, I wanna paint quite a bit. But then we had two girls and you know, that takes up a lot of time. So kind of put everything on hold. And then when they went to, when they started school, both of them, I rented studio space in Andrews because was driving them back and forth to school, which is a 60-mile round trip. So I just wanted, you know, I could go there and stay all day and paint and then pick them up and come home.

Oh, that's great. That's a good deal. So I was also talking about, I think before, before you got on here too, how your work has a pretty distinct style, especially I think your studio work has like a really kind of like almost like a stylized almost psychedelic kind of look to it. It's honest. But then, yeah. And then in your quick— I've been calling them quick draw. I don't know if that's right or not, but like the quick, quicker paintings that we're showing right now, those have a nice feel to them as well. But I was curious, is there a time when you felt like, oh, I think I know what I'm doing a little bit, and I kind of feel like this is my style of painting?

I would say Probably 10 or 15 years ago, I started really trying to get a lot of movement in my work. And so looked at artists that really achieved that and a lot of rhythmic flow, like Thomas Hartmitten or Grant Wood, or let's see who else. Of course, Van Gogh, but anyway, trying to get that movement. And then I think In the landscape, it started in the clouds, just trying to see how far can you push this and it still look like a landscape. Because I think that anyone can go out and, and paint a really nice landscape that looks just like the landscape.

Mm-hmm.

And I can do that, but I think that you have a bigger, maybe vocabulary with with putting in a little surrealism or different, you know, ramping up your colors or toning them down, or I just, you know, if you can, any little extra that you can get in there to get your message across, then I think that it, it's better. And the style, you know, people have asked me about the style and and I really, all I really know about the way it developed was I painted a lot.

Yeah.

And just in the process of painting thousands of paintings, then you do develop a style.

Yeah. And that's, I hear that the way young artists find their voice is, you know, just by, just through working enough. And, and then it comes through once you've done it enough where it becomes starts to become its own thing. And I mean, that's true probably in most forms of art. I know, you know, when I was writing songs in Nashville, when I got there, they were like, and I don't, I mean, I'd already been a musician and songwriter for a decade at that point. And they're like, well, you're not gonna write a good song until you've written, you know, 100 or more since you've been—

Right. Dolly Parton's written like over 5,000 songs.

Oh, I'm sure.

Yeah. And she's a very good songwriter.

Yeah. Oh yeah. She's one of the best. Yeah.

Yeah. So yeah, if you can do enough paintings, you know, one or two of them are bound to be good. Mm-hmm. Right?

Right in the middle of the songs. That's another way to look at it too.

It's like sometimes in drawing, I had a drawing professor tell me, Alice, you know, you make a lot of marks and one of them's bound to be the right one.

Yeah. Well, I mean, that's the way that, yeah, with photography too, a lot of times, I mean, probably even more so now with digital, but back in the day, shoot at least a roll, maybe 2 or 3 of film, and then you get 1 or 2 images that would work for you. But all that repetition and all the problem solving you do in each piece, you store it away and it becomes part of your, like you said, vocabulary and your voice, I guess.

Right. Right. And, and then also looking at other artists, you know, every time we went on vacation with the girls, We were at an art museum. Everywhere we went, we would look up an art museum. Oh, cool. And they hated it at the time. Well, I don't know if hate might be a strong word, but they disliked it.

Sure.

But, but they both told me now that they, they're glad that we did that. And they said, thank you.

Oh, good.

Yeah.

I mean, that's the same. That's my story too, is my parents used to take me You know, into museums and galleries and I'd always go find the pop artists and kind of like some more modern stuff. But at some point I started to appreciate a lot of, you know, a lot of the Western and Southwestern artists that were prime examples of their time. And now look what I'm doing. So I'd have to tell you also.

There you go. There you go. Look at you.

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, that's cool.

I love your style with all the movement and your pieces. That's a great way to describe it.

It's regionalism with a twist.

There you go. It's, it's, it's regionalism, but yeah, it's got, it's got a little, little extra to it. So that's good. So before, when you were talking about going back to the footnote of being in a place and experiencing it and allowing that to become Either, I guess, I don't know, like your inspiration, however you allow that to infuse your work. Obviously you've done that a lot where you live on the ranch there, but you've also done a few different residencies in like the one in Hawaii and—

Right.

And then the one like Fort Union, I guess.

Yeah. Fort Union. Yeah.

Can you tell me what those experiences were like?

Those were through the National Parks Arts Foundation. And there's another deadline for that coming up in August, and they're wanting an artist to go to Death Valley. So if there's anybody out there that thinks they might wanna apply, look them up. You go to submittable.com and, and apply there. But those are in conjunction with the national parks. And the national parks were formed because artists went west and painted what they saw.

Mm-hmm.

And brought it back east. And the people in the East thought, wow, we need to protect these areas that they're painting. Because there was a little bit of photography, but they'd never seen those places. So yeah, the parks have always had artists in them and they're part of the, they're just part of the history of the parks. So you can apply for residencies and I think almost every park in the US has a residency, but there's only a few that the National Parks Arts Foundation has residencies for, and, and one of them is Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park, and that's on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi. And then there's another one at Fort Union National Monument, and that's near Las Vegas, New Mexico. Also, I'm packing up to go to Dry Tortugas National Park. Now it's in the North Atlantic, close to the Gulf of Mexico, west of Key West, about 70 miles. And Rob and I will be on an island for a month, probably by ourselves. There's a lighthouse and a lighthouse keeper's cottage where we'll be staying. There's a radio that they say sometimes works. There's no water. There's a desalinization plant. There's a solar array for electricity. And so it'll be completely off-grid. Wow. And you have to apply to these things. So you write a proposal. In my proposal, I want to do 60 plein air paintings.

Wow.

And so packing up the panels for those and all the paint, it's getting a little heavy. So we're going to go weigh the suitcases on the cattle scales and make sure, you know, the airlines will still ship, you know, all my paintings.

Yeah, man. But, uh, that seems pretty ambitious.

Yes. And I'm hoping that I get that many done and also take photo references. And I'll take a watercolor kit and do little watercolors, but you know, weather and conditions may not allow that. Mm-hmm. But I'm gonna go and try to do that and just, you know, see if it's possible. I think immersed, immersing in a place. I don't wanna paint the Dry Tortugas from a photograph. I wanna go there. Mm-hmm. And see what it's like, cuz you need I need to communicate to you that it's hot, that it's humid, that, that the landscape is beautiful, that, that you can see where the sky meets the water and the different colors of blue. And sure. Every place where they did a residency, you get to stay for a month and they usually provide some housing, a stipend, and, and you get to be in artist advocate for the parks. That's great. And usually they'll let you do a program, about an hour-long program or something, and then come back. And I have a show lined up at Sol Ross for the works from Dry Tortugas and at the Sibley Center in Odessa and possibly at my alma mater, ACU.

Fantastic. That's exciting. I look forward to seeing those.

Yeah, I think it's gonna be neat.

Yeah, definitely. Aside from kind of the parameters of the residency, I'm curious about how you approach it. And it sounds like to me, if you wanna do 60 plein air paintings, you're gonna get off the boat and start painting. Uh, or do you, or do you sit with it for a little bit and then go?

There will probably be a few days scouting, you know, walking around. It's an island of 50 acres, so. It'll be easy to walk.

Oh, that's awesome.

And you'll be right there. So not much of a commute to work, right?

So no.

But yeah, you kind of need, I'll probably start out with a little sketchbook and walk around, do some watercolor sketches, take some photos, and then I'm taking 11 by 14 and 9 by 12 oil panels. And then I'll start with those. And just see how far I get. And then using all those resources. So like my plein air paintings, usually they're not finished paintings. And you know, if I want them to be a finished painting, usually they come back to the studio and get a little bit of a touch-up. Sometimes I'll finish them in the, in the field. If, you know, if you're like in a competition or something and they say it has to be all painted plein air, And that's what I'll do. But out there in the sun, and maybe the wind's blowing, you can't always see real well. And then when you bring them inside, you can see what actually needs to be done to them.

The reflection off the sand and everything being so bright, it'd be tough.

Yeah. But then we'll go from those sketches and plein air paintings and photographs, use all those resources, and I'll take notes also. And then go to big paintings and they can be, I've got some stretcher frames in the, in the studio right now that are 5 foot by 11. So that's gonna be fun.

That's what I'm saying. You know, when I sent out the email and I told the story about where you first, you called me with a question about that first New Wester talent show. That's like a 630-foot painting.

Yeah, 6 foot by 30, and there were 3 of them, 3 panels. So it was, well, it was a 6 foot by 10, right?

Yeah. So times 3.

Yeah. And I could only set up 2 of them on one side of the studio and the third one had to be on the other side. And so I would have to switch them around, you know, to get 2 together, but those went to the show with them in the Noel Art Museum in Odessa, purchased those for their collection.

I'm glad because I look forward to seeing that sometime in person as well.

Yeah. I hope you come to Odessa sometime and I'll take you to go see them.

Oh, definitely.

Awesome.

Um, well, so talking about big canvases in the studio, would you mind showing us around the studio a little bit? Yeah. We don't have to do the little, you know, it's a studio tour.

Just the studio tour. And I'll hold you up and maybe you can see everything. Here's a big canvas up here on top. And that's one of my earlier paintings, the cow series. Oh, I know this piece. It's cool. Those cows are, um, I think it's called Cows in the Oil Field. There's oil field pipe and everything. Here's the West Texas Starry Night.

Yeah.

So I wanna show you, of course, there's a lot of work in here. Yeah.

Yeah. So a lot of these on the walls are the ones that we've got up right now.

Uh-huh.

Um, got your Heritage and some of the Landscape up there too.

Yeah. And then here's a painting of the— oh yeah. I'm trying to see if I'm getting this in the frame.

I like that one. That was either in Texas Windland or New Western Town. I don't remember which.

Yeah, I don't, I don't remember.

For those to be looking at this. On that one. You can kind of see a lot of that movement in the land on that.

Here's one I really like. And I would say this is one of my favorites. I do some graphites like this. And graphite, you know, it's, it could go large, but I like these that are really small.

Yeah.

And the, this is just a mundane subject, you know, it's the Sandhills and this is the view I saw. Riding on the school bus going to Kermit.

A whole lot of school every day.

A lot of people driving by real fast and they don't see how pretty it actually is. You know, it's the Chihuahuan Desert and they think, let's get out of here. It's hot and dusty. And, but I think it's—

Precious.

I think it's really nice. And it's got Little Quail hidden in it. And this is the gas plant at Kermit, which is not there anymore.

Did you say Little Quail? Is that, was that the name of a horse?

Quail.

Oh, quail. Okay. Yeah. I couldn't really see what that was. Okay. Quail.

Yeah. Quail in there. Little quail footprints. So that's one of those pieces that you have to get up real close to see, but here's a painting from outside Alpine. Here's, uh, oh yeah. Another, another. This is over at Fort Davis. Yeah. And then this next one is Alpine. I love that. Wow.

Okay. So this is, you do have a pretty good, good size space in there where you can do some big work.

Yeah. Lots of big work. These are going to Trappings of Texas. All right. Right here. Nice. And then the figure and then another of Burro Mesa. And then up here on the, on the top, some more of Big Bend, a nocturne. This is, but nocturn is our ranch.

That's cool. That's really cool. I see one from your Fort Union over there on the right, I think.

Yeah, that's from the Fort Union residency.

Yeah. Nice.

You know, that's the largest adobe ruin and they, it's about to fall down and they spend 6 months of the year propping it back up. It's a lot of work to keep it, keep it going. Yeah, and then up here on top, tell me if you can see that.

That'll—

wow, yeah, that's the Kilauea Crater and the Halema'uma'u Crater, which has filled up with lava that's now cooled. You know, it doesn't look like this anymore since I was there, but it's like a— that's like a 3-panel series.

That's one of the cool things, you know, I talk about sometime with artists is that just one of the purposes that painting landscape subjects serves is documentation, you know?

Oh, so true.

Such a detailed study of a spot that really catches that moment.

Yeah. I think sometimes you're contributing to the historical record, you know, it's not gonna look like that in 10, 20 years. So, you know, it I like to paint the landscape the way it looks now. You know, I'm not really interested in painting historical views. So these are all the, these, these are like mostly the quick studies.

Got that crazy beetle.

Yeah, that's a rainbow dung beetle. Okay. And they're really pretty.

Mm-hmm.

They serve a very useful purpose. They kind of an indicator of rangeland health when you have a lot of those. So. I've got quite a few here. We've got quite a few. So that's the studio. Oh, you didn't see, there's a lot of Hawaii work back here. We could walk around here forever. So you just gonna be cutting me off.

Oh no, let's hurry up.

I'm sorry.

Let me see it.

Here's some work from Hawaii on the top row up here. Nice. It's so, it's so green there. It was nice to go and get to use all my greens.

Yeah, you probably been saving those up for years and years. Oh yeah.

I had like tons of them. So, and getting to go to Dry Tortugas, I'll get to use a lot of my blues.

Cool.

Looking forward to it. All right.

I think you were outside your studio last time we talked.

Oh yeah. We can go out here. This is where we watch bird TV. Turn on a sprinkler and the birds are so, they're so hot and thirsty. They'll all come up.

They just, they come flying in.

Yeah. Yeah. Cool.

Well, Alice, I've really enjoyed getting to work with you in putting your work in the Impermanent Collection with Western Gallery and getting it out into the world a little bit. And I just, I'm so excited to see what happens with the Dry Tortugas and what happens next. And, um, I guess, I guess before we go, I just wanted to rewind a little bit that the Starry Night painting over there to your right is in the, in the Western Gallery show. And then a bunch of the, your cactus piece sold. So that's gone. And everybody wanted that as soon as that went up on Instagram.

And that's just something I've done a couple of other cactus and people wanted them right away too. So yeah. Well, popular. Yeah.

And then there's the two, the kind of the two kind of groups of paintings that are up there. You've got the the landscapes, Western landscapes that are New Mexico and Big Bend. Right. Mostly Big Bend and Alpine area maybe.

Yeah. Carrie and I got to paint down there together. So that was a really fun time. And I've enjoyed working with you, getting to meet other artists, you know, living out here on the ranch. Sometimes I think I'm working in a vacuum, but it's been really helpful to me to know you and get the work out there and get to meet all the other artists you've put us in contact with.

Oh, fantastic. Thank you. I'm— yeah, that's, that's my pleasure. I love it when y'all connect in the real world and do stuff like that. That's really cool.

Yeah.

And then the other series is the Heritage Series, which are mostly from photographs, I think. And then you probably have some internal understanding of what the subject is, cause it's all around the ranch there too.

Right. Yeah. Mostly from photographs. Some of them, I'll just sketch something out. And usually after 2 or 3 sketches, I'll get it, you know, a sketch that I like and I can work from the sketch. Cool. A lot of old photographs that my grandmother left. She took photographs quite a bit and so did my great-grandmother. So I've used those as references quite a bit.

Well, I won't keep you too much longer here because I know you probably need to get back to the cattle.

Oh, they're pretty self-sufficient.

You guys, you guys yesterday wrapped up all right? What were you, what were y'all doing?

Yes. Yeah, we were, we were branding.

More branding.

Yeah. All right.

Do you guys get more rain out there? You have some grass again?

Well, we did. As soon as my husband and I sold all our cows and then it started raining.

That's what I was thinking. I remembered you had to sell them off.

Yeah. So it did. It's rained a lot north of here and east of here, but we're still just a little bit dry, but it's not too bad.

Yeah.

I can't complain.

Well, that's good. All right, Alice. Well, keep on painting and thank you. And good luck with the Dry Tortugas National Park out in, I guess that's Florida.

Yes.

Technically. And then, and then we'll try and, uh, get your work in front of some more, some more eyeballs in the meantime.

All right. That's great. Thank you, George.

Thanks so much for showing us around. Good to talk to you.

You too. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye. Horizons is produced by Western Gallery for the love of Western art and artists of all genres. If you're enjoying the show, please leave a review on iTunes or share an episode with a friend. If you have comments, suggestions, or for sponsorship opportunities, please email me directly at info@western.gallery or direct message @westerngallery on Instagram. Thanks again and tune in next time.