Sense of Home: The Art of Richard Stout

Night Fishing, 2004, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 60 inches
Collection of Barry and Judy Rose, Boise, Idaho

"Sense of Home: The Art of Richard Stout" is a traveling exhibition organized by the Art Museum of Southeast Texas in Beaumont, Texas. The exhibition premiered in the Art Museum of Southeast Texas in 2017 and was subsequently exhibited at the Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi. The exhibition makes its final stop at the O'Kane Gallery, University of Houston-Downtown. The exhibition showcases one of Texas's most significant artists to emerge from the last century and includes paintings and sculptures produced since the mid-1950s.

It might be unexpected to describe Stout as a realist given the level of abstraction in his work, but every painted or sculpted form refers to something the artist has seen or remembered. Houses, roads, trees, pastures, and seas become the underlying impetus for diaphanous layers of vivid colors and varied shapes. The resultant imagery evokes multi-sensory and emotional memories through imaginative coloration that is pushed and pulled within the composition and coupled with distorted form. The offering is a more complete experience that goes beyond mere imitation of what is seen alone. Architectural lines dissolve into concurrent spaces so that experiences through time are captured simultaneously. Observed textures become translated into brushed ones suggestive of the elusiveness of imagery pulled from memory. Atmosphere becomes multi-layered and billowing, evocative of a range of moods. Stout's sensibility derives from Abstract Expressionism, a style developed by artists who understood how pure form could trigger a direct psychological and conceptual impact. Stout's imagery indicates a regional adaptations of that expressive style, locating itself in the Southeast Texas environs.

Born in Beaumont in 1934, Richard Stout is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Texas. Stout became involved with the Beaumont Museum as a young artist when he began taking formal lessons in classical drawing at age twelve. He attended summer courses at the Cincinnati Art Academy in the summer prior to his junior year of high school at the behest of relatives living in Cincinnati. The following summer, after Stout graduated high school, he attended the Art Institute of Chicago on a full scholarship, where he earned his Bachelors of Fine Arts in 1953. Stout later earned his Masters of Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. Stout worked as an instructor at the Museum School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston from 1959 to 1967. He then taught art at the University of Houston until 1996. Renowned for his work through the years, the Art League of Houston named Stout Texas Artist of the Year in 2004. Stout went on to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Center for the Advancement and Study of Early Texas Art (CASETA) in 2010. Stout's art is included in the collections of The Menil in Houston, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, The University of Texas at Austin, the Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi, and the Art Museum of Southeast Texas in Beaumont.