Join art advisor Jennifer Klos for a conversation and virtual studio visits with artists. Inspired by nature, both artists capture the flora and fauna of Texas in different ways, reflecting landscape as a recognizable subject matter but with a unique approach to the pictorial space. Art collectors and art historians have looked to landscape as an important theme since the late sixteenth century, and today, twenty-first century landscape painting is thriving.

Works featured:
Jules Buck Jones, Conduit Gallery
Billy Hassell, William Campbell Contemporary Art

Austin artist Jules Buck Jones draws, with an acute confidence, graphic fantastical images of hybridized animal forms. Influenced by ecological and biological concerns, Jones creates imagery of bizarre, fantastic happenings in nature, using the past, present and future as backdrops, mythology, fact, and fiction as fodder, and the animal kingdom as the vehicle. Jules Buck Jones earned his Masters of Fine Arts from Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA in 2005 and an MFA in Painting at the University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX in 2008. He is a founding member of the collective, non-profit, MASS Gallery and the art / science collective Animal Facts Club, both located in Austin TX. Jones has been accepted and invited to art residencies in Maine, New York, Tennessee, Vermont, the Florida Everglades and Barcelona. Jones currently teaches painting and drawing at Texas State University in San Marcos. He recently received the Makers Muse Award from New Mexico’s Kindle Project.

Billy Hassell reinvents the American landscape with his colorful interpretations of the Southwest. Recognized for his bold use of shape and imaginative renditions of plants and animals, this Texas native has made a career of painting the flora and fauna indigenous to this region of the country. Alive with color and infused with both humor and a passion for the outdoors, Hassell's work has received acclaim throughout the United States. His paintings are included in the permanent collections of the Menil Collection and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and the Dallas Museum of Art, not to mention numerous corporate and private collections. Hassell was recently included in the inaugural exhibition of the Gallery of Contemporary and American Indian Art in Tucson. Hassell received his BF A at the University of Notre Dame in 1978 and continued at the University of Massachusetts, where he received his MFA in 1982.