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The Sunday Express-News, San Antonio, July 22, 1990 Page 7-H Eras end, begin for SAC arts program by Dan R. Goddard Express-News Arts Writer San Antonio College's visual arts program is in transition, poised for expansion with a new $1.9 million building under construction while another era is ending with the retirement of longtime chairman Mel Casas. After a 30-year career as an artist and teacher in San Antonio, Casas is moving to Italy with his wife, Grace, who will teach in the U.S. military schools in Brindisi, a port city on the heel of the country's boot, across the Adriatic Sea from Albania. National recognized as a founding force in the Chicano art movement, Casas is mainly known for his "Humanscapes," movie-size paintings incorporating Southwestern pop art and wordplay. With a major retrospective two years ago at Laguna Gloria Art Museum in Austin, Casas has long been regarded as one of the country's most influential Hispanic artists. "Mainly, I want to be able to travel and see the world before I'm too old and feeble," Casas, 60, said as he packed up his office in the Koehler Cultural Center last week. "I have no regrets. I only feel positive about my experiences in San Antonio. But I am ready to try something else, for better or worse. It's a gamble." New head Tom Willome succeeded Casas a year ago as head of the SAC Visual Arts & Technology program. Willome's one-man exhibit, featuring complex paintings dealing with television, is on display through Aug. 17 at the Koehler Center as part of the Contemporary Art Month, while Casas has a show at the Jansen-Perez Gallery downtown. Willome only has time to paint at night. During the day, he has been overseeing plans and the start of construction on a two-story, 35,000-square-foot building that will finally provide SAC's visual arts department with its own facility. It shared space with the math program for many years and is currently located in the old continuing education building on Main Avenue. The new building is at the corner of Dewey and Lewis streets, in the block cater-cornered to the Koehler Center, which will continue to house the metal arts and ceramics studios plus the second-floor exhibition gallery. While maybe not all under one roof, SAC's visual arts programs will all be within easy walking distance. Willome said this is the first money to be spent from the bond issue two years ago and was originally earmarked for renovating the continuing education building. But run-off from San Pedro Creek, dating to the flood in 1987, has undermined the structure, which is beginning to sink, cracking concrete walls. SAC decided the old building was not worth the cost of renovation and instead put the money into a new building, Willome said. The new building will have low-tech, hands-on art on the first floor, with high-tech, industrially oriented media on the second floor. Expected to be completed by May 1991, the new building probably won't be ready for students until the fall semester of 1991, Willome said. Upstairs will be two studios with 20 work-stations equipped with Macintosh computers and laser printers, which will complement the current electronic type-setting program using Compugraphics. An adjacent electronic graphics studio will have IBM equipment and a Cubicomp with computer animation capabilities comparable to Paramount Studios, Willome said. There's also a photography lab. "We've learned that many of our advertising graduates have trouble finding a job if they don't have experience with the Macintosh and desktop publishing," Willome said. With about 45 faculty members, including 15 full time and 30 part time, the department serves around 1,500 students, including 450 art majors, 250 advertising art majors and a few others in new programs such as production line pottery and electronic graphics. Downstairs, the new building will have drawing, painting and sculpture studios, plus a 200-seat lecture hall and a fully equipped audiovisual screening room. Designed by architect Michael Beaty of Rehler Vaughn Beaty & Koone Inc., the building will have a two-story atrium entrance hall that will also serve as an instructional gallery for student work. "But we plan to continue our regular exhibitions at the Koehler Center, where we mainly feature either faculty artists or professionals from the city and region to give students a feel for what's going on outside the classroom," Willome said. "We have a long-term identity with the Koehler Center and I'm happy that we won't have to give it up." Unity department Curiously, Willome's paintings on display at the Koehler Center appear to unify his department's division into hands-on fine arts programs and high-teach electronic imagery. In his "Plasticscope" series, Willome uses images appropriated from the television screen, but to create the images he employs a labor-intensive painting method involving yards of automobile tape and up a dozen layers of acrylic paints. For example, "Texas Gothic" incorporates a hazy image of the late President Johnson from the TV news, but the reception appears to be bad, broken up into vertical and horizontal broadcast bands. Emphasizing how television images are actually small bands of dots built up to form a complete picture, Willome's paintings point to the artificial nature of television, revealing the lines of static and confusion that come between us and the world we see on TV, an imperfect mirror of reality. Willome's style can be described as neo-electronic impressionism. The effect is painstakingly achieved by using the strips of automobile tape as stencils to lay down narrow bands of color; then shifting the tape over a fraction of an inch to make other slightly off-center lines. By laying down many layers of paint, Willome builds up his images out of the out-of-kilter lines and dots. Using bright acrylics on canvas, Willome combines the freedom of gesture of the abstract expressionists with pop art's eyegrabbing visual impact. "I can remember seeing one of Manet's lily pods on display in Kansas City and being awed by impressionism," said Willome, who was raised in the small town of Junction, Kan. "I began working with patterned fields and a circular screen and then I just started seeing TV images in the patterns. I just try to pull an image out of a hat and let it drive me." A SAC teacher since 1974, Willome is a graduate of the University of Idaho. Messing around with a video camera and his two young sons has inspired some of his more recent work, especially "Tree Line" with the videoized boys intermingled with a tree's age rings. He usually paints after 9 p.m., when the pair are in bed. He stencils words across his paintings for visual puns. Jesse Jackson is seen with the words "Race" and "Horse" stenciled on the picture. Although Willome calls the paint "Race Horse," he said it would have worked just as well the other way around. A meaty hand covers the lens of a TV camera in a painting called "Home Land," which triggers thoughts about the violence in South Africa. Soldiers stand ready over the body of a shooting victim in "Carnival Rendering." Disturbing questions Rich in pattern and gesture, Willome's paintings also pose disturbing questions about how television influences our lives. Bringing us violent images from around the world, TV allows us to be passive, uninvolved voyeurs who do not have to leave the safety of our living rooms. Casas said his current show of small paintings with Cesar Martinez at the Jansen-Perez Gallery will probably be the last local exhibit for some time. While he will be represented in San Antonio by Jansen-Perez, Casas is turning over most of his work to the Todd Spitts Contemporary Art Gallery in Santa Fe where he will have a show in August. Willome's paintings will remain on view through Aug. 17 at Koehler Cultural Center, 310 W. Ashby Place, 733-2394. Hours are 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays. Art Watch [[image - photograph of a painting]] PHOTO SPECIAL TO THE EXPRESS-NEWS 'Raw touch,' graphite and Prisma color on paper, typifies Tom Willome's melding of art and high-tech imagery. His one-man show at the Koehler Center poses questions about the influence of television on our lives.
