Nice feature story on my favorite sculptor, who is 94 years old and still making art. Not the giant Presidential head kind of art, sadly, but art nonetheless.
At 94, [David] Adickes takes measured, shuffling steps. But his output remains astonishing as he continues to add to an enormous — both in scope and volume — amount of work.
“I still do something every day,” he says, with a little shrug. “I don’t know what else I’d do.”
Adickes may be the most visible artist in this region. His supersized Sam Houston looms off Interstate 45 in his hometown of Huntsville; his “Virtuoso” cellist remains an eye-catching piece in the downtown Theater District; and then there are those heads that resemble a cross between American history class and Easter Island. His bright and surreal “Three Colorful Friendly Trees” is part of the True North 2021 installation along the Heights Esplanade. And more recently he contributed works ranging from 1965 to 2021 as part of “Rooted Renewal,” a new dual exhibit with Marthann Masterson at the Bisong Art Gallery.
Among the pieces in “Rooted Renewal” — its title, in part, a reference to a resetting post-pandemic — is a painting Adickes sold ages ago to Elvis Presley. The exhibition also includes the last unsold work from his mid-1970s Spring Trees series. And a new work, “Put a Bird On It,” finds Adickes experimenting with a technique he’s temporarily calling “3D acrylic,” which involves acrylic paint over cast stone on canvas.
“I studied in Paris, and I traveled around the world,” Adickes says of the path that led him to the works in the show. “But I was born in Huntsville, which is where my mother was at the time. I suppose I wanted to be near her as a baby; otherwise, it would’ve been New York. But it was her call.”
Adickes’ jokes are much drier than Houston.
I don’t have a point to make, I just love a story about the guy whose work has brought me so much joy. Go read it for yourself.