Issue link: http://papercitymagazine.uberflip.com/i/889107
79 Previous page, from top: Richard Stout in his home and studio, September 2017 The artist's On Course, 2015 This page, clockwise from top left: The painter's light-washed Montrose studio A young Stout in his family's chicken coop-turned-studio, Beaumont, 1953, the year he won a scholarship to the Art Institute of Chicago. The acrylic on canvas Houston, 1972, demonstrates the artist's early proficiency with abstraction. THE ARTIST DOES MORE WITH ACRYLIC THAN MOST PAINTERS EFFECT WITH OIL, BRINGING A FLUIDITY AND RICHNESS TO THE SURFACE ... sense of life's fleeting hours. Abstraction is part of the mix, but only in the way a Degas canvas is abstract, with virtuosi brushwork that amplifies the atmosphere for the viewer. Then there is a sense of the sea. Stout grew up in Beaumont, with a family cottage on the Bolivar Peninsula. His memories and experience of the southeast Texas coast are all there on the picture plane, visible in the precise depictions of the rooms of his longtime Houston home as well as the recalled dwelling of his Beaumont childhood. Bedsteads and breakfronts, bedrooms and parlors draw the viewer towards the vastness of the ocean; interior walls dissolve and merge into vaporous expanses of water and sky. The result is both surreal and dreamlike. A new book from Texas A&M University Press that documents Stout's life and journey is one of the most nuanced artistic biographies in recent memory. Sense of Home: The Art of Richard Stout, titled to match his retrospective currently on view in Beaumont, is an evocation by those who know him best. For our behind-the- scenes with Richard Stout in studio, visit papercitymag.com. "Sense of Home: The Art of Richard Stout," Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Beaumont, through December 3 (traveling in 2018 to the Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi and O'Kane Gallery, University of Houston – Downtown). "Houston's Expressionist Legacy: Richard Stout & Friends," at William Reaves | Sarah Foltz Fine Art, through November 4. CANVAS LEFT PAGE: COLLECTION RUE JUDD, HOUSTON. CANVAS RIGHT PAGE: COLLECTION SHARMILIA ANANDASABAPATHY AND ANDREW SIKORA, HOUSTON.