continued from page 4
tens of thousands of years. ‘Primitive’
people used to record snippets of their
lives on walls in caves using techniques
that experts think may have originated
in Africa before waves of migrations off
the continent began.
Figurative art is generally believed to
have started around 35,000 to 40,000
years ago. Some say this marked a cog-
nitive turn for humankind: The ability
to think symbolically allowed humans
to let one thing stand for another, i.e.
visual representations in drawing and
sculpture. This connects the modern-
day human – in the loosest of ways – to
our ancestors in that we still use sym-
bolism to similarly interpret life today.
The most famous ones are overseas in
places like Indonesia and France, but
even West Texas has some primitive
art in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands, as
well as other places.
No matter the moniker, if they with-
stand the climate and the onslaught of
time, these paintings give us insight into
the psyche of the times in which they
were done. We ponder the mysteries of
handprints and especially animals – did
they eat them, friend them, use them as
a connection to the spirit world? Have
we come such a small way in the evolu-
tionary process that we still want to
paint on walls?
I met Read to talk about his painting
history on a smoky morning in May as
he worked on the Rangra Theatre
mural in Alpine. As mammatus clouds
poured in, Read took his phone out to
snap a picture of the firmament –
Mother Nature using hues of gray to
create rolling textures on her sky can-
vas – captured on a modern day tool of
the contemporary artist.
Read grew up around art. His
father, Sleepy Read, worked in a sheet
metal shop full-time and a movie house
part-time, but in his free time painted
abstracts and modern art as well as
rural Texas landscapes. Read tagged
along with his father when Sleepy ran
the projector at the Pines Theater in
Lufkin, Texas. While Papa Read paint-
ed between reel changes and projector
cock-ups, young Read sat outside the
door – “It was too hot to sit in the room
with dad” – and reveled in watching
cartoons and movies. This instilled a
love of picture and color early on.
As Read matured, he did a stint as a
drawing and painting major at the
University of North Texas in Denton,
just north of the Dallas/Fort Worth
metroplex. Although he didn’t pursue
his degree to the finish, this introduced
him to his lifetime love of the mural art
form and his dislike of being too repeti-
tious. “I get bored to death, just paint-
ing the same thing over and over,”
Read said. Even then, he wanted to
keep things from getting stale. During
his time at UNT, the class had live
models come and sit for the students.
“It was the same old hippie ballerina
for about two years, occasionally inter-
spersed with a couple other girls,”
Read said. The budding artists, weary
of the recurring model, one day ven-
tured outside the schoolbox and
brought in someone off the street. The
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students chipped in for a bottle of wine
to pay the model, and that day painted
something fresh – a live, nude wino.
In the 70s Read was hired to paint
custom vans, training for three weeks
on the system and paint style. Read
said the vans were mostly generic, none
of the doobie-smoking dragons or grim
reapers riding unicorns and sporting
machine guns that we fondly remem-
ber of 70s Shaggin’ Wagons. He did,
however, paint a plaza scene of the
Alamo as it looked in the 1880s on a
couple of vans. Read said the impor-
tant stuff (like the Alamo) was usually
on the driver’s side, so he probably did
a mission scene on the passenger side.
He may call his van-painting days
generic, but they were unique enough
to recognize as his own: seven or eight
years later, Read said he saw one of his
painted vans over in Juarez.
Read moved up the paint ladder to
buses, namely Nashville tour buses,
eventually adding Hank Williams, Jr.’s
bus to his portfolio.
As Read grew tired of canvases with
wheels, he also started becoming aller-
gic to the clear coat used for the finish.
He started coming out to Alpine in
1981 and liked it so much he kept
returning, eventually living in
Terlingua and Fort Davis for a while.
While in Terlingua, he worked at a
store for Bill Ivey and painted maps
and signs and pictures on the side, most
notably a sign for the Gage Hotel in
Marathon.
Read scored his first commercial
wall gig in the stockyards of Fort Worth
in the early 90s, and his mural career
blossomed from there. He moved to
Cleburne, on the outskirts of Fort
Worth, and the rest, as they say, is his-
tory. History done in acrylics on a large
scale for whomever is willing to pay his
price.
Murals depicting the history of a
place or time period are Read’s thing
now, he said. “I’m a history buff and I
like to spark the interest in others.”
This makes it fun for him to do the
research for the rendering of a mural.
“I study up on the history to represent
what needs to be done without getting
too technical,” he said.
Luckily for us masses, who depend
upon others to document our place in
the annals of the late modern period,
Read is versatile enough to do more
than just longhorns and western scenes.
He did a circa 1930s art deco movie
house theme at the Rangra Theatre in
Alpine. He’s gone blind doing hill
country bluebonnet scenes. In San
Angelo, Read documented a song – a
one-hit wonder – in paint. The
Cavaliers were an Air Force “boy
group” out of San Angelo, and their
teen-tragedy song “Last Kiss” spent six
months at number one on the Hit
Parade List in 1964. Read painted the
band as they were at the height of their
fame on the building the song was
recorded in.
Five or six years ago, another
painter referred Read to a “contest” in
central Texas at an African trophy
room. The expansive room contained
continued on page 26
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