Standing Vase with Five Flowers | Proposed Site: Green Valley Road
James Surls (b. 1935, east Texas)
Standing Vase with Five Flowers, 2005
Bronze, 15- x 7- x 7-feet
Edition 3 of 6
James Surls received his BS from Sam Houston State College and his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. He lived for many years in Texas and worked for two decades in Splendora, Texas, where he also established the Lawndale Alternative Space, an artist’s colony to encourage other artists.
Surls’s name may be less known but his resume is every bit as extensive as those of Jim Dine and Jenny Holzer; he is something of an “icon” in Texas art.
He makes sculpture from wood (with details often burned in), steel or bronze that primarily reflect his unique sensibility to nature and that are based on shapes and symbols often made to take on human or other life form. Surls explores dualities and paradoxes in his work: themes of male and female, optimism and foreboding, rationality and intuition, within very self-expressive work.
His work has a great sense of animation, quirkiness and a sense of the “west.” It is somewhat hard to imagine this work being produced in many other places.