Teresa Elliott | Sweet Spot

Texas painter Teresa Elliott finds the perfect combination of animals and portraiture

By Gussie Fauntleroy

Teresa Elliott, Long Way Home, oil, 22 x 22.

Teresa Elliott, Long Way Home, oil, 22 x 22.

This story was featured in the January 2015 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art January 2015 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story!

If Teresa Elliott had been a sports fan, she might not have been so surprised when her art career caught fire after she began creating oil portraits of Texas longhorn cattle. She had no idea that the longhorn is the mascot for the University of Texas at Austin’s sports teams, nor that the iconic bovine image is a kind of cultural phenomenon in the Lone Star State. All she knew was that she had fallen in love with the animals’ gorgeous colors and gentle faces, and with the shapes and shadows of their long, curving horns in the afternoon sun. After coming across several longhorns in a small pasture in suburban Fort Worth, Elliott returned with her sketch pad and camera. The paintings that resulted were simply for her own pleasure, her own walls. Then one day a friend suggested she see whether a gallery would be interested. “People really like those paintings,” he said.

And they did. Elliott approached a Santa Fe gallery and soon was selling her striking, often large-scale paintings of longhorns not only to Texans, but to collectors around the country. Frequently depicted up close, in vivid sunset light against a backdrop of dramatic clouds and sky, the images are more like portraits of pensive individuals than animal art. Which makes sense, since Elliott’s earliest form of artistic expression was portraiture. In fact, the human figure has recently found its way back into her work. A few years ago she began a series of paintings revolving around the luxurious childhood pleasure of wet clay on a hot, sunny day. Her first such piece, DELIVERANCE, features three blissfully tired children relaxing after playing in a muddy pool. In 2012 the painting won a major prize from the America China Oil Painting Artists League, and the following year it was exhibited at the World Art Museum in Beijing. It also earned a top award at the 2012 Art Renewal Center International Salon. Since then Elliott’s work has continued attracting collectors and garnering national and international awards.

Teresa Elliott, Gathering, oil, 24 x 30.

Teresa Elliott, Gathering, oil, 24 x 30.

Sitting in the light-filled studio next to her foothills home just south of Alpine, TX, 80 miles north of Big Bend National Park and the Mexican border, the painter ponders her early attraction to art. Pepper, her Boston terrier mix, is at her feet. On the walls are prints by Odd Nerdrum and other artists whose work she finds especially inspiring these days. The daughter of a salesman whose job took the family to Oklahoma City, St. Louis, and Kansas City, Elliott remembers being a “typical kid in the suburbs with access to TV and Walt Disney” and no exposure to galleries, museums, or original art at home. But she loved to draw, and when she entered kindergarten she discovered she was unusually good at it. A few years later her parents bought a children’s encyclopedia set, which included a special volume on art. The future artist couldn’t get enough of staring at those pages, to the point that images by Vincent van Gogh and El Greco became permanently etched in her mind.

High school art instruction was a less satisfying affair. Elliott recalls being “a little rebellious in that class,” more inclined to draw funny cartoons than flowers. Her art teacher was not amused. But as soon as Teresa graduated, she turned serious, determined to become the first member of her family, on either side, to attend college. To earn tuition money she headed to Six Flags Over Mid-America in St. Louis for a summer job. Walking through the amusement park to apply for work that first day, she noticed an open-air building with an attraction called Quick Draw, where artists sat at easels creating pastel sketches of park visitors. “That’s what I want to do! That’s where I want to work!” she thought. She was hired. All day long, six days a week, all summer, she rendered likenesses of faces, quickly becoming so good that the line for her portraits snaked out beyond the Quick Draw area. “That was really the experience that accelerated my drawing skills. Drawing people’s faces—what could be harder? But that direct experience of drawing from life is the way to learn,” she says. “It lit the fuse and got me on the right track.” It also produced enough money to allow her to enter the University of Kansas that fall, where she earned a bachelor of fine arts in design and fine art.

Teresa Elliott, The Javelina Clays, oil, 36 x 22.

Teresa Elliott, The Javelina Clays, oil, 36 x 22.

With fond memories of childhood vacations on her grandfather’s farm northwest of Fort Worth, Elliott moved to Texas after graduation. She spent 25 years in Dallas with a thriving career as a freelance fashion illustrator for local retailers. Yet she never lost her love of fine art, and in the late 1990s she signed up for a short introductory oil-painting class at Southern Methodist University. Building on this basic instruction, she taught herself to use oils. Her first paintings were large-scale landscapes inspired by the work of New York artist April Gornik. Elliott’s landscapes were for her own enjoyment—she had no intention of selling them. Then came the day when she happened upon longhorns in the unlikely location of a small pasture in the Fort Worth suburbs.

The timing was perfect. Elliott’s fine-art career quickly ascended just as demand for hand illustration in the retail fashion business was heading downhill. Excited about her gallery representation, the artist and her husband bought a house south of Santa Fe. They had barely settled in when Elliott got an email from the gallery director saying she was leaving that venue and opening her own art space. Elliott followed her to the new gallery, whose focus was more figurative. It was another example of perfection in disguise. For a special show around the theme of decadence, Elliott shuffled through ideas and a collection of her own photos until one jumped out at her. She had taken it years earlier, when her daughter was about 10. “I was taking pictures of her and her two cousins in a gully full of water and mud in Texas,” she remembers. “They were not good photos, but they were unique—a moment of relaxation and fun—and at the time I thought: Someday I’m going to use these.”

The international acclaim garnered by DELIVERANCE encouraged Elliott to further explore the wet-clay series and other figurative work. THE JAVELINA CLAYS was based on a photo she took of her grown daughter on a visit to the badlands in far southwest Texas. In ancient, eroded land formations, rainwater gathers in natural basins that contain an extremely fine bentonite known as javelina clay. When mixed with water it forms a slick, velvety mud. “In these pools there were several inches of crystal-clear water on top of sediment, and when you get in, it mixes together like an Almond Joy commercial. You can’t resist getting in and merging with the mud,” Elliott says. And her daughter couldn’t resist making muddy handprints on the surrounding rocks. “There was a pristine white rock and I thought: Don’t do that. Don’t mess it up! But actually her instincts are pretty good,” the artist admits, smiling.

Teresa Elliott, Chizm, oil, 36 x 48.

Teresa Elliott, Chizm, oil, 36 x 48.

While adding figurative work to her repertoire, Elliott has not lost her attraction to longhorns. Sketching and taking photos provides a good excuse to hang out in pastures with the docile bovines, an activity she finds peacefully enjoyable, not to mention visually engaging. “Longhorn breeders take pride in the colors, patterns, and conformation of the body. A lot of them are bred just for the love of the animal,” she explains. “The more I take pictures of them, the more I’m thinking as I do about composition, the light, and how it falls on the body. I’ve done a lot of backlit paintings, but lately I also like it when the light comes straight down from on top.” One such image is HIGH NOON [see page 26], which captures the instant when a steer turns his large, handsome head to one side. The dynamic lines of his horns and body are echoed in the movement of billowing clouds in a turquoise sky. The painting, which is part of the National Western Stock Show’s permanent collection, was selected as the poster image for this month’s Coors Western Art Exhibit and Sale, where Elliott is the featured artist.

These days the painter works in a range of sizes, from miniature to a recent piece that measures 4 by 7 feet. About half of her paintings are focused on longhorns and half portray the human figure. While the two subjects have not yet converged, that may be coming, she says. Another approach that intrigues her is to incorporate more suggested narrative, if only in subtle ways. “I want to find that sweet spot where it’s not just a portrait, but something that’s going to hold the viewer’s attention,” she muses. “To do that, it has to interest me first.”

representation
InSight Gallery, Fredericksburg, TX; Astoria Fine Art, Jackson, WY; 
Richard J. Demato Fine Arts Gallery, 
Sag Harbor, NY.

Featured in the January 2015 issue of Southwest Art magazine–click below to purchase:
Southwest Art January 2015 print issue or digital download Or subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss a story!

Featured in the January 2015 issue of Southwest Art magazine–click below to purchase:
Southwest Art January 2015 print issue or digital download Or subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss a story!

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