Houston Chronicle // Molly Glentzer // 02.06.18:
Fifteen bucks an hour for eight hours a day: That was a decent, steady gig for a young artist in 1997.
Frank Stella’s studio apparently had no problem finding takers in Houston. More than two dozen up-and-comers would climb scaffolds for seven months in an East End warehouse to realize his “Euphonia” murals for the University of Houston’s Moores Opera House. Not just in it for the money, the young artists, most of whom were in their 20s, were eager to work with and learn from one of America’s most prolific art superstars.
“Euphonia” – a gem of the university’s huge public art collection – fills the high, barrel-vaulted ceiling of the hall’s lobby and curvy mezzanine walls with an exhuberant tangle of flamboyantly colored swirls and swoops that appear to be collaged. A companion chandelier hovers above the theater’s blue seats like a witty final gesture, in a sense keeping Stella ever present – and, um, puffing on his cigars: Its oval shape recalls a smoke ring, a shape that has intrigued him for decades.
Stella, now 81, returns Friday for a talk that celebrates the 20th anniversary of the $1.5 million project, which is still one of the priciest art commissions in Houston history.
MORE INFORMATION
An Evening with Frank Stella
When: 12:30 p.m. Tuesday; 7 p.m. Friday
Where: Moores Opera House, University of Houston central campus, entrance 16
Details: Free; Mike Guidry leads public art tour of “Euphonia” on Tuesday; RSVP for Friday event at uhouston.imodules.com/StellaPublicArt.
The lead-up has also been something of a reunion for the eclectic group of artists who helped. Many became friends and are still in Houston, now pillars of the art community.
Francesca Fuchs, who directs the painting program at the Glassell School of Art, was in her second year as a Glassell Core program fellow in 1997, earning minimum wage in a museum store, when she signed on. She wasn’t a huge fan of Stella’s style, but she was intrigued by his techniques and the massive scale of the “Euphonia” project.
When Stella had visited the university in Dusseldorf, Germany, where Fuchs went to grad school, “it was like God was visiting,” she said.
Tommy Fitzpatrick, now a tenured professor at Texas State University, idolized Stella when he was a young man. He joined the “Euphonia” team not long after he moved to Houston from Brooklyn, N.Y., with an MFA from Yale. He was awed by the production of it all.
“I’d never been in a situation where there was a surplus of materials,” he said. “It was an entrance into what’s possible.”
Other participants were sculptors, and some did not even consider themselves artists.
Susana Monteverde was between gigs as a museum educator, on a career path that required knowledge of art history but not a studio practice. She applied after a friend assured her that Stella’s managers would teach her everything she needed to know.
“If you’re skilled with your hands, it will work,” the friend said.
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Stella visited occasionally, arriving in a limousine. He sometimes tweaked the imagery, retreating to an office to oversee the changes on a computer before they were projected onto the walls to be repainted.
But the production was directed by his studio manager, Earl Childress. And day to day, a pair of energetic lead painters from Canada – Tamsin Plant and Cindy Scaife – oversaw the work of rendering the huge, rectangular canvases that would be applied to the opera house’s walls and ceiling.
Everyone took turns building up layers of gel to create smooth painting surfaces. Some were assigned to tape the lines of specific patterns before Plant and Scaife sprayed on the paint.
Fuchs was in charge of the swirls, a complex assignment that required understanding the sequences that would delineate the layered colors.
“You had to be quite accurate and meticulous, staying on top of the pattern,” she said. “I kept rolls of masking tape on my arms like bracelets – 2- and 3-inch widths, in yellow or beige, so you could see through them. You’d tape out a swatch, then very carefully cut out the lines with a clip-blade knife – without cutting the canvas underneath.”
Taping, cutting and gelling became second nature to her, soon slipping into her own painting process. “It’s such a useful technique, even if you just want to tape out an area around others that are brushed,” she said.
Fuchs’ own muted palate and compositions – which have been inspired by babies, friends and an array of domestic objects – are nothing like Stella’s. But she adapted the signature flatness of her work partly from “Euphonia.” It allows her to treat romantic subject matter with an unsentimental eye.
Fitzpatrick’s art was more figurative in 1997 but soon evolved into the geometric compositions he continues to develop. Both in technique and style, his work still speaks Stella’s language.
Though he was studying Gestalt theories about the human perception of paintings before “Euphonia,” the project was eye-opening, Fitzpatrick said. It informed the way he treats figure-ground relationships and negative and positive space within his compositions.
Most recently, Fitzpatrick has built plexiglass maquettes and set them up as still lifes that he re-creates as paintings. Stella also was an early proponent of that way of working – transforming ideas between mediums.
Stella began “Euphonia” with prints on paper that he tore up and reconfigured into a pair of 6-by-11-foot collages that were replicated to create the opera-house paintings.
He was far ahead of his time in other ways as well, one of the first artists to adapt 3-D computer drawing into his work.
That’s what led to the swirling compositions of “Euphonia,” said Museum of Fine Arts, Houston curator Alison de lima Greene, who will lead the public discussion with Stella on Friday. “He is always pushing spatial boundaries, with an omnivorous eye.”
She knows this first-hand. She grew up in New York around Stella, a family friend who was close to her late parents, the artist Stephen Greene and novelist Sigrid de Lima.
Stella broke into the big time in 1959 with his somber “Black Paintings,” composed of black strips separated by dim white. During the nearly 60 years since, he has continued to reinvent himself. He has produced nearly 60 series, each encompassing at least 50 abstract works.
“Euphonia” came during a maximalist period, five years after another, more elaborate architectural project. David Mirvish, the owner of Toronto’s Princess of Wales Theatre, commissioned Stella to create 10,000 square feet of murals that decorate the interior walls, the proscenium arch, the fly tower and a ceiling dome; as well as sculpted reliefs that face the dress circle, balcony and box seats; and cast aluminum decorations at both ends of each row of seats throughout the auditorium. The Princess of Wales Theatre opened in 1993.
Stella was exploring some of the same ideas three-dimensionally even before then. The massive, 1991 sculpture “Three Mile Island,” for example, is built from aluminum parts that look like they could be rubble from the nuclear site where a reactor melted down in 1979.
Susana Monteverde, who now introduces clients to contemporary art through her company, SuMo Art, believes “Euphonia” has stood the test of time – and then some.
Monteverde, Fuchs and Fitzpatrick all believe the Moores Opera House’s masterpiece looks even more contemporary now. Twenty years ago, Monteverde said, they felt like they were doing something that had already been done, too derivative of the Toronto murals.
In the industrial world, a euphonia was an early talking machine, a cumbersome 19th century object one might consider a predecessor to the 21st century’s Siri. That, too, seems prescient.
“Houston is a city that’s always about making it new,” Greene suggested. “That’s why Frank Stella, whose daily practice is about challenging himself to move forward, resonates so deeply here.”