One of Texas’ most prominent artists, Surls is well known for his sculptures that he creates from wood, steel and bronze and are made to resemble natural forms that mimic his upbringing in East Texas. Surls’ sculptures are crafted by burning, carving, and shaping the wood himself in powerfully expressive and mysterious forms. The artist says that he develops an idea he wants to express, he goes into the forest and finds a piece of wood that suggests that concept, and then he shapes the wood and branches accordingly. Infinitely inspired by the East Texas landscape, Surls proclaims, “A person’s art has to come from a place. You get comfortable in your terrain and you use that, you draw from it, conjure from it. I conjure from the earth, the woods. Even the violent part of it. My stuff is all earth stuff. Sun and rain and wind and grass and birds and trees.”

While living and working in Splendora, Texas from 1977-1997, Surls founded the Lawndale Alternative Arts Space at the University of Houston in the late 1970s. Lawndale was a thriving artist community where he taught and encouraged students, while producing his own large body of work. The influential Houston curator Jim Harithas declares, “The energy coming from the art school at the University of Houston that resulted in Lawndale Art and Performance Center was enormous…He was the critical figure of that period. How often do you have a sculptor with national importance in the community? It was like having Jackson Pollock working in your neighborhood. Surls had the kind of energy that kept people going.” The Wortham Theatre on the University of Houston campus displays one of Surls’ wooden sculptures titled Flower Woman (1977). It is on permanent public view. This print contains many of the same attributes as the sculpture and forms a fine companion piece. Flowers is a large linocut print on natural colored paper containing Surls’ signature swirls and eye-dots. The image’s swirls work to pull us inwards towards the wondrous workings of the natural world. Many of the artist’s prints (and drawings) are constructed in stark black and white, and while there have been temporary deviations into shocking reds, Surls maintains a devotional adherence to a simple black and white tonal palette that evokes the austerity of New York Modernism. Many of his prints tend to incorporate the swirls and cyclones of Flowers that invoke a cosmic energy with their many eyes, prisms, plants, body parts, dots, and circular forms that deliver an entire universe on a two dimensional plane. 

James Surls was born in Terrell, Texas. He graduated from Sam Houston State Teachers College in 1966 and from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1968. He taught at Southern Methodist University in Dallas from 1968–1976, and then moved to Splendora, Texas with his wife, the artist Charmaine Locke. They lived in Splendora, with their children, for over twenty years, creating many artworks on a remarkable compound that contained the artist’s studio. Surls won the Texas Artist of the Year Award (1991) and a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship (1979). His works are included in the collections of the Centro Cultural Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others. Surls currently resides in Carbondale, Colorado where he has lived since 1997.