Image via Complex Original
With its city population creeping towards the one million mark, Austin is chock-full of creative types who live by the mantra “Keep Austin Weird.” This unofficial slogan was coined in 2000 by the city’s community college librarian Red Wassenich and was quickly adopted by the residents who sought to differentiate themselves from their more conservative neighbors in other parts of Texas.
The city is home to famous events such as South by Southwest, the music and tech festival that attracts over a quarter of a million visitors every spring, but aside from a thriving music scene, it is home to many artists. Here we share with you some of our picks of the local talent.
Jonathan Biehl
Website: jonathanbiehl-art.com
Biehl moved from Deer Park, near Houston, to Austin in 2005 and became a member of the UP Collective—an artist-run community. He produces mixed media paintings (usually combining acrylics and charcoal) on both canvas and wood and had his first solo show in 2010. He describes his practice as “a therapeutic and playful exploration of the human psyche,” and last year he curated his first group show at the Up Collective Gallery (since closed), featuring work by Cliff Frank as well as his own. This year he plans to work on a series of ‘plein air’ paintings, explaining: “This practice allows me to reconnect with nature and helps influence my more abstract work through the use of intense color and natural light.”
Nathan Chesshir
Website: nathanchesshir.com
Originally hailing from Los Angeles, Chesshir is primarily a traditional draftsman, focusing on ink-on-paper illustrations, but with a pop-art flair. All of his work is hand-drawn and inked (though he digitally colors them if they’re intended for print). As well as having a number of commissioned work in the pipeline for private collectors, Chesshir is also due to appear in some pop-culture-themed shows at Hero Complex Gallery and Gallery 1988 this year. He has already worked with Gallery 1988, having been invited to produce a Buffy the Vampire Slayer piece for its Joss Whedon show, and as an added bonus, got to hang out with both Whedon and Seth Green for an evening—a coup for the man who confesses to being a “huge Buffy nerd in high school!”
Jason Eatherly
Website: jasone.co
Kansan graffiti artist Jason Eatherly is best known in Austin for his Queen Eli image that is dotted around the city, featuring Queen Elizabeth with a tattooed neck, wearing a spray mask. He explains: “I use this image as a symbol for what I do and a form of repetition to keep my fan base able to relate back to the same artist and I do so by means of stickers, wheat pastes, paint rollers, and spray paint.” However, he also produces paintings in an illustrative style. Recently, his work was displayed in the “Crossing Lines” exhibition at the Fort Wayne Museum of Modern Art in Indiana, and the owners of The Chive website also bought a number of his works for their new Austin headquarters. Later this year you can catch his work at exhibitions in Austin, Denver, Los Angeles, and in Norwich in the UK.
Katy Horan
Website: katyart.com
Hailing from Houston, Katy Horan produces dark and unsettling work that retains a stylistic beauty. Her art examines female roles and representation found throughout history and mythology, such as the Cinderella fairy tale. She expands on her practice: “I pull from a variety of sources, using mixed references and visual fragments to construct new versions of recurring figures and familiar narratives.” She has had artists’ residencies at the Vermont Studio Center in both 2009 and 2012 and was a finalist in this year’s Hunting Art Prize, which is open to artists in Texas. However, she plans to take some time off from exhibiting this year in order to work on a book as well as some illustration projects.
Mike “Truth” Johnston
Website: mikejohnstonartist.com
Mike Johnston, better known as “Truth,” lived around the globe—Europe, the Middle East, and Asia—before settling in Austin. As well as producing murals and street art, he creates bold illustrative paintings with strong lines and colors. This graphic style led to him being invited to design the 2014 Austin City Limits poster, as well as being commissioned by Paramount to paint a four-story Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles mural and by Pow! Wow! (the Hawaiian-based creative network) to paint a mural during SXSW. This year he has shows coming up at Austin Art Garage and Gallery 1988 in L.A., and he will also be painting a mural on the walls of Habitat for Humanity’s headquarters.
Devin Lawson
Website: devinlawson.com
Born and bred in Austin, Devin Lawson is a man of many talents. He paints pop culture pin-ups as well as dabbling in screen printing, and is currently in talks with Texas burlesque troupes and pin-up girls with a view to paint a classic pin-up calendar. “My goal is to feature Austin’s local talent, as well as women of all body types, in a classic ’50s style,” he explains. When not making art, Lawson works for Bee Cave Games—an Austin-based video game company—as well as helping to manage SketchBomb Austin, where artists of all abilities meet up on a monthly basis to sketch. He has also produced animation work for the TV show Dexter, as well as the video game American McGee’s Alice. And it you pay a visit to Austin’s mead establishment Meridian Hive, now you’ll know who designed its branding!
Matt Mikulla
Website: mattmikulla.com
Although born in Indianapolis, photographer Matt Mikulla spent most of his formative years in Columbus, Ohio, before opening his own personal retail art studio and gallery space in downtown Nashville in 2007, leading to the development of the city’s first ‘Saturday Gallery Crawl.’ In 2010, he upped the stakes for Austin and is now focused on his fine art photography of landscapes as well as unusual items that catch his eye when he’s out and about exploring. He is working on several photographic projects this year—one of which he hopes to turn into a book—but that’s all hush-hush at the moment.
Sean Ripple
Website: seanripple.net
Though born in Austin, Sean Ripple was raised in San Antonio before returning to his birth city in 1998. The conceptual artist has worked on a number of unusual projects. For Hyperlocal Sundial, he placed a piece of new artwork in the shadow of a street sign on West 7th Street in Austin every Tuesday for an entire year, while Rear Window was composed of photographs obtained through a JavaScript exploit embedded into a YouTube trailer for Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, which sent a still shot of the viewer to the hacker’s remote location. He has recently created a cipher key using books from the library of his alma matter, which will inform his planned exhibition with fellow graduate Rebecca Marino for the fall.
Sophie Roach
Website: sophieroach.com
Another Austin native, Sophie Roach is an illustrator who has exhibited in galleries all around the U.S. Her work is colorful and incredibly detailed: “I created a unique visual language using familiar shapes, patterns and my intuition,” she explains. Converse has long championed her work, commissioning her to produce artwork for its Rubber Tracks Live events, including the backdrop for its SXSW stage, and she has recently completed three large drawings for the company’s new headquarters in Boston. This summer she will have an exhibition in Austin in collaboration with Complex and Fiat.
Beth Consetta Rubel
Website: bethconsettarubel.com
Beth Consetta Rubel is a visual artist from Austin who focuses on subject matters relative to cultural identity, bringing attention to historical ideas and events that society often chooses to ignore. She uses layers of chalk pastel, acrylic, gouache, fabric, and found objects to construct her evocative portraits. She was given an honorable mention in this year’s juried exhibition at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. This year she was selected to curate the first year of Austin's African American Cultural Heritage District Art Gallery and was also one of 10 artists chosen to be filmed for sociologist S. Craig Watkins’ documentary Doing Innovation (which is currently in production). She is currently concentrating on building a collective of African-American artists to do outdoor murals and live painting events.