Jeri Salter traverses the landscape of art and life
By Elizabeth L. Delaney
This story was featured in the June 2020 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art June 2020 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.
TEXAS ARTIST Jeri Salter can often be found traveling down long, deserted roads, considering the scenery around her, photographing vignettes that spark her imagination, and, every once in a while, parking her car on the shoulder and sketching. Salter makes these outings alone, accompanied only by her thoughts, her creative drive, and the need to explore and record the color, light, texture, and sheer presence of the vast Texas landscape. Recording and interpreting her surroundings in two dimensions is a way of marking her journey, both literal and figurative.
“Through every stage of my life, art has always been there for me,” says the artist. “For whatever reason, each stage has had very distinctive qualities—almost like different lives.” At various points, Salter has wielded crayons, pencils, brushes, and pastels. She may not have always recognized that she was an artist, but it was always true.
Salter grew up near Richmond, VA, where the rolling, tree-covered terrain is a far cry from the flat, open Texas landscape that would captivate her as an adult. She enjoyed spending time outside and often went camping with her parents and sister. Spending summers at her grandparents’ farm, where she was free to explore the woods and fields, also nurtured her affection for nature. “Oh, how I loved those days,” she says. “I was in heaven.” Her grandmother also took the two sisters to visit museums, where they could experience nature transformed into great works of art.
It was a time of burgeoning creativity as well. Salter wanted to make art from an early age and was inspired to depict the landscape immediately. She recounts a memory from a camping trip with family and friends: “I remember very vividly doing a crayon drawing of a sunset on the water while other kids did cartoon characters and such—a rather odd thing for a 10-year-old to do.” In retrospect, it was exactly the thing she needed, and in fact, the thing she was meant to do.
Though her formal early art education ended after junior-high school, Salter continued drawing and painting on her own. She moved to Texas when she was 18, spending time in Houston and then in McAllen—a city located near the southern tip of the state along the Rio Grande—where she first encountered the state’s vast, empty spaces. Living in the middle of 20 acres of what she calls “flat nothingness,” she quickly became enamored with walking through the open terrain with her dog, absorbing the sublime austerity of her surroundings. “I would get this feeling of lightness,” she says. “The space was intoxicating to me. I loved that feeling of being out in the middle of nowhere.”
Soon Salter began taking art classes again, supplementing her own art-making efforts with sporadic instruction. After settling in the Austin area with her husband and their two boys in 1994, she began a more earnest pursuit of life as an artist, attending additional workshops and joining a critique group. “This was a very pivotal point for me,” she says of discovering the collegial group of fellow creative souls, which still meets today. “I met other serious artists who have become lifelong friends. The exercise of a monthly critique has been invaluable, both in giving and receiving advice. It’s been a really good thing for me.”
Salter’s career—and confidence—began to blossom when she began showing her work in local Austin galleries and at festivals and art markets, helping her to establish connections with patrons and colleagues alike. She met longtime Houston gallery owner William Reaves at one such event, an encounter that would prove transformative in several ways. Reaves invited Salter to participate in one of his shows and eventually added her to his stable of gallery artists at William Reaves Fine Art, which has since become Foltz Fine Art. “He was a big influence on me,” Salter says. “He believed in me and the work I did. I was very encouraged by him.”
SALTER IS A pastel painter through and through. Although she started out working in oils, and names oil painters as some of her art heroes, she is able to realize her creative aspirations most effectively in pastel. She discovered her passion for the medium after her neighbor, a fellow artist and member of her critique group, introduced her to them. “Pastel really spoke to me,” she says simply.
Among the many benefits of pastels that Salter appreciates is their immediacy—the instant availability of a color and the ability to pick up a stick and paint without needing all the accessories that come with oils. Pastels allow the artist to create abundant layers of color without drying time, and to analyze and edit marks in real time. Ultimately, she feels like pastels let her experiment more with color, technique, and surface attributes.
While Salter paints en plein air on occasion, the landscape artist says she works best in her studio, where she has time and space to deliberately plan and execute each composition. The many photographs she takes while traversing the countryside serve as reference materials, and she often combines elements of several similar shots into one cohesive scene.
When she first discovered pastels, Salter worked on paper, but later she gradually switched to Gator Board as her support. The board holds up to the layering and surface work inherent in pastel painting and provides an interesting texture that Salter often incorporates into her pieces. She also works the drips left by mineral spirits in her underpaintings into the finished compositions.
Of her subject matter, Salter says, “I am very attracted to landscape painting—always have been.” Though she grew up in a cozy landscape filled with lush plants and trees, she feels most at home under the big, open sky stretching across Texas and the Southwest. “It’s strange that a girl from the suburbs of Richmond would wind up loving the complete opposite of the landscapes she grew up in, but there is this pull that calls to me. The mountain ranges with the sun coming up or going down, lighting them for such a brief time with a spectacle that changes from moment to moment. I love trying to capture that and freeze those moments.”
In addition to immense, unspoiled landscapes, Salter is also drawn to old, dilapidated buildings and winding, empty roads. These features—in the land but not of the land—embody a history of human presence. They signify time elapsing into an uncertain future. She describes the scenes that speak to her: “Winding dirt roads with big skies above and broken-down buildings. Trains winding through the plains with their calligraphy of teenagers from other towns. All these things create a sense of longing in me, something I can’t express any other way than with art. It’s that feeling of taking off to unknown parts to discover something that you can’t name.”
ALWAYS PAINTING with a purpose, Salter feels comfortable working with a specific theme or project. “It puts your mind in a groove, and you know you can be anywhere in that groove,” she says. She appreciates the focus that provides and finds freedom to explore and experiment within the prescribed parameters.
One such project came about in 2015, when Reaves encouraged Salter to travel to the same sites that had been painted by renowned Texas landscape artist Frank Reaugh (1860-1945) in the early 20th century. Leaping into what she considered a daunting challenge, Salter painted the scenes in her own style, through her lens, and learned amazing things about life and art along the way, she says. The project resulted in a solo show at Reaves’ gallery. “This was an amazing artistic journey for me,” Salter remarks about the project, which continues to influence her work today.
These days Salter is working on another significant project, this time for the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the state parks system in 2023. Thirty artists were selected to participate, and each was assigned two parks to paint; Salter’s are Palo Duro Canyon State Park and Caprock Canyons State Park, both located in the Panhandle. The collection of finished paintings will appear in a book published by Texas A&M University Press and in a traveling exhibition at the Bullock Museum in Austin, the Witte Museum in San Antonio, and the Houston Museum of Natural Science.
Salter’s love of the land will surely come through in these new works, as it does in all of her placid yet vibrant paintings of unpopulated vistas and remnants of man-made constructions left in the landscape. “I’m hoping that people get that sense of pulling you in and making you feel like you’re on a journey,” Salter says of her work. Ultimately she strives to make art that engages the senses and the emotions of her viewers.
Thinking back on the early days of her career, Salter muses, “I had a hard time imagining that I could be an artist who would be in galleries and museums. That seemed too much to hope for.” But time, wisdom, and an immutable desire to create have led her down the sometimes elusive road to becoming an artist—a road she may have followed tentatively at first but one she now travels happily and successfully.
representation
Foltz Fine Art, Houston, TX; RS Hanna Gallery, Fredericksburg, TX.
This story was featured in the June 2020 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art June 2020 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.
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