Pauly Tamez's Hill Country Paintings

Pauly Tamez at Boerne Visitors Center

***disclosure: Exhibition has now closed***

Written by Gabriel Diego Delgado

I wanted to start this off this article with an unexpected literary prose of poetic justice. Not the braided weave, Controoolllll, baby at 50, Generation X Poetic Justice but the justice that is fair, that is partly the inferred righteousness of a passion so real, so true, that it cannot be unhinged by negative influence (a.k.a. this critic’s often opinionated cynicism).

You see, there is a sense of innocence in the diligence; of hits among misses —a respect for trying, evolving, maturing, and yes…the risking.

Art can be done for many reasons; for selfish coveted-ness, for expression, therapy, exploration, and the list goes on and on. However, once the paintings are on the wall…that moment of acknowledgement, we are forever permitted to say… “Alright, now the art is in the public sector —my space, our space, ‘out there’ for all to see; it is free to be securitized, critiqued, evaluated, loved, dismissed and ignored.” And that my friend, is where we are now in this essay!

Boerne Visitors Center at 1407 S Main St, Boerne, TX has been hosting a monthly exhibit of local artists on and off for the last few years. For the month of January 2017, they spotlighted the artwork of Boerne artist, Pauly Tamez. A traditional landscape painter, Tamez had ten paintings on display, showcasing his love for the Texas scenery.

Tamez, is a self-taught impressionistic landscape artist who credits the late Texas artist, Bill Zaner, as one of his mentors. His traditional landscape paintings start as plein air sketches, transforming into studio executed oil and watercolor paintings. 

However, before we start to investigate the artwork itself, I must step…not back, per say…but sideways… to glance at the familiar from another angle; departing from one of scholarly aptitude to one of openness.

Yes, I feel like I must remove my outstretched index finger away from my moustache and dissolve my double whiskered aristocratic air of artistic snobbery to absorb the humble aura of this hill country artist as he displays his art; a “newly recognized passion”.

I have written in the past of outsider art and of the na?ve artist. And, here is where I must pick up that conversation once again, but through another filter… of the loaded word — “RAW”. Before we continue, I must acknowledge that ‘raw’ in the sense of art history is shelved within this established context of the genre of outsider. But, what if, for a moment, we distinguish a new ‘raw’. This raw comes from the same deep- down ‘unschooled’ theological premise of the outsider, but is attaining a new level. One where the individual is evolving from his own education through doing; practicing through what he knows, of what he sees…trying just to capture the simplicities of the environment. Mistake upon mistake, failure upon failure that creeps on positively through repetition and assiduousness. The artist knows the desired effects, and classical genre in which they strive, a stark contrast to the mentally unstable mindset of clinical exploration of the latter.

There is a ‘rawness’ in Tamez’s work that I first took as indifferent blasé. I had a typical kind of …walk past it without acknowledging it, you know the stride of, oh I have seen this hill country nonchalant-ness before and I don’t care attitude. On further reflection, I ended up full 180° and began to understand it more in-depth for what it was. I was looking at Tamez’s paintings from a critic’s narrow vision of anti-peripheral evaluations, a glance down the nose of my bumped Spaniard snout. The critic epiphany was that I could only compare the paintings to themselves, the ten in that room, at that space in time. Sure, there were some that were downright bad, some not that great, some were muddied, some were better than others, and some showed promise. But, in the mix of that room were some stars, illuminations of everything done right, like the glowing briefcase in Jules lap; we are not quite sure what it is, just that it somehow works.  

These paintings at the Boerne Visitor’s Center are not to be compared to those of his mentor, Bill Zaner, or other impressionistic landscape painters that might be Tamez’s peers, but they are gems to the artist’s own artistic portfolio. And, it is these few select paintings that make this show a success. If those three were shown by themselves under no context without the others, they would not represent this idle comparison or equate the same critical evaluations. It’s like the supporting cast to the lead role, the five other guys to Justin Timberlake or Daryll and Daryll to Larry. We need the paintings in the show, all the paintings; the bad ones, the not so bad ones, and the good ones to push out the great ones.

The first to catch my attention was “Where the Creeks Converge”. This 16” x 20” oil on canvas landscape captures a Monet-esque waterscape where the Cibolo and Menger Creeks converge. Diagonal strata of river rocks run parallel to each other, guiding your eye to the larger boulders on the opposite shoreline that act as anchors to the composition. An angled arrangement of stones lead us up and out of the picture-plane, bookended on either side by the green vegetation of the Texas landscape. Although the application of paint to the greenery is in some cases haphazard, the execution of the waterscape and its reflections, movement, and environment are spot one. We hear the bubbling brook with Tamez as he stands ankle deep in the cool river water, sketching this unusual composition.

“Santa Elena Morning”, a 30” x 40” landscape painting of the canyon walls at Big Bend National Park is the second painting that deserves recognition in op-ed context. Two converging walls meet in the middle of the composition, like some forced one point perspective classroom assignment. However, there is much more. Rudimentary lines of sedimentary layers are accented by heavy handed application on the right canyon wall only to be complimented by the thick application of monotone browns on the left canyon wall. The sky in the triangle shaped middle cut out if a single shade of blue. But what keeps this painting together is the light, the atmosphere, the impressionistic time of day that Tamez captured in his humble attempt to capture God’s magnificent glory. The right fa?ade is highly illuminated, a painterly achievement by understanding the bask-ness of the rising sun on the rock wall. The reflection in the pool of water in the foreground reflects the cerulean beauty above it. And yet the reflection of the canyon wall in this shallow pool of water is perfect.

The last to make me stop and contemplate his artistic deliverance was “View from Santa Elena Canyon -Morning”, a 9” x 12” rendition of the rising sun somewhere in Big Bend. There is a bit of elementary application with the paint to illustrate the landscape, the undeveloped jut of rock that dominates the left side of the composition and the swaths of muddied green messes make up the middle-ground. But, we must look past that to the true beauty of this painting, to the background. The c-shaped river bend guides us through the land to arrive at the entry of where this painting really begins. The ‘purple mountain majesties’ evoke a sense of faded 70’s patriotism. The quick color theory of complementing colors with the purple and yellow give great dramatic effect to the ridged skyline.  His wisps of clouds and atmospheric light capture that moment forever. I feel that Tamez had to navigate through the development of this painting, making mistakes along the way to deliver the end game…the mountains, which act as an exclamation point at the end of his sentence.

In closing, I know it takes nerve to display art for public consumption. Some artists will never do it. However, Tamez shows us his faults, missteps and self-guided discoveries along his road to the creation of art.