Sketch Artist 
Art
Dual in the Sun
Middle-aged El Paso sculptor Jim Magee and elderly painter Annabel Livermore have a lot in common. In fact, they’re the same person.
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At first glance, Annabel’s narrative works seem to have nothing in common with Magee’s heroic, abstract wall-mounted assemblages and triptychs made of scrap salvaged from the Juárez dump. Yet the sculptures are lyrical—their crumpled metal and sprays of rust have an emotional strength, and like Annabel’s paintings some of them have poems for titles. “Neither body of work could exist if the other didn’t,” says Ruth Fine, the curator of modern prints and drawings at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. “There’s a certain set of images and energy and ideas that had to be put in one to keep it out of the other.” In 1991 DiverseWorks Artspace in Houston and the San Antonio Museum of Art jointly mounted a major show of Magee’s work, and this past summer Dallas’ McKinney Avenue Contemporary hosted a Magee retrospective that is now on view at Arizona State University in Phoenix. Far too big for most private residences, Magee’s sculptures have found homes in museums, including the Dallas Museum of Art, the New Mexican Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, and the El Paso Museum of Art.
Perhaps Annabel is Magee’s road not taken; the placid history he invented for her is certainly far different from his own. In fact Jim Magee seems to have lived several lifetimes, Annabel’s not included. He was born in Fremont, Michigan, where he washed cars at his father’s Ford-Mercury dealership and played high school football. When his sister, Houstonian Susan Wente, reads Annabel’s poems, she recognizes people and places from their “ideal childhood”: “Annabel is tied in to Midwestern values, to the town we grew up in.” After attending a small Protestant college in Michigan, Magee hitchhiked through West Africa before entering the University of Pennsylvania law school. When he got his law degree, in 1971, he went to Paris for two years, where he became the assistant to two sculptors who encouraged him to return to the States to produce his own work. He did a brief stint as a Pinkerton guard in Boston and then moved to New York, renting a warehouse in a Staten Island junkyard. He learned welding at a trade school and supported himself with part-time work. As Adair Margo relates it, Magee was dismayed by the rough, high-stakes Manhattan art world and retreated to an abandoned underwear factory in upstate New York, where he lived alone and made sculptures. It was about this time, in 1976, that Annabel first appeared. In her catalog “interview,” Annabel says she began painting “out of despair” and that a priest nudged her out of depression by advising her “to look at God’s handiwork in order to better appreciate the wonder of the world.”
Wente says she never worried about her brother as he went from job to job and place to place. “He needed more stimulation than most,” she says. “He needed change and adventure. It has brought an incredible depth to his work.” In 1977 Magee designed the set for an opera based on Anne Sexton’s poems that traveled to California. On his way home, a detour to Mexico took him through El Paso. Magee says he’s not sure exactly what made him want to return there and settle down someday—perhaps it was the lazy pace some attribute to the lithium in the water supply or perhaps it was the dilapidated sprawl of Juárez. But first, he had heard stories of money to be made in the oil fields of Texas, so he packed up Annabel’s sketchbook and joined the tide of roughnecks who wrestled heavy machinery all night and squabbled over Odessa’s scarce beds in the early morning. Then, in 1981, he moved to El Paso for good, taking a room at the YMCA. Two years later, he bought a house and opened Mesilla Ironworks, a shop where he welded elegant candlesticks and other items for the home.
In the shop, which is the size of a small airplane hangar, Magee was able to construct his massive assemblages, and in the sun room at the back of his house, Annabel had her own studio. By the end of the decade, the two careers had begun to take flight almost in tandem, and Annabel became interested in doing something for Thomason Hospital. By fax, she explained to me that she had first visited the hospital when a “friend’s assistant” wound up in a mental ward there. Distressed by the drab institutional walls, she recalled how Matisse had once hoped to cure a sick friend by placing sheets of brightly colored paper around his bed. So, beginning in 1990, under Annabel’s aegis, a cadre of well-heeled women gathered twice a year to deliver colorful flowers to the patients. The hospital had for years intended to provide a chapel as a respite from the chaotic emergency waiting room, and Annabel’s offer to donate art for the chapel was the impetus the project needed, says Jim Booher, Thomason’s director of facilities. But it was Magee, of course, who attended meetings and helped design the space.
Booher guided the project through the hospital bureaucracy and fiercely protected Annabel’s identity. Many members of the Twenty Plus Club, a group of senior hospital employees that sponsored the project, still do not know who Annabel is. But those who did catch on, like Dora Muñoz, who was the group’s president at the time, attributed Magee’s artful dodging to modesty rather than perversity. And even administrators were loath to look a gift horse in the mouth. “When we were first introduced, it was out of respect for her privacy that I didn’t really delve into why or who,” Booher says, carefully avoiding specific details of the meeting. “I’ve never felt the need to deviate from that mode of thinking: She’s a gracious lady who has provided us with art that we would never have been able to afford.” When Henry Ornelas, Thomason’s chief operating officer, wanted to thank Annabel for her donations, Booher gently explained that she worked “through Jim.” Ornelas was surprised but accepting. “I work with very unique individuals in our profession,” he says. “You can’t stereotype people because they’re different.”
The chapel, called a meditation room, opened last year. The soothing trickle of a wall-mounted fountain, just like the one in Annabel’s garden at home, greets visitors. Her vibrant floral watercolors dot the walls like miniature stained-glass windows, and the colonial-style purple benches face a painting of a river canyon at sunset. Below it, an altar painted in metallic purple awaits the gifts of flowers, rosaries, and money often left by the families of the hospital’s mostly Catholic clients. The space is a testament not so much to Annabel the artist as to Annabel the mysterious force that seems to energize those around her. Meanwhile, deep in the belly of one of the hospital’s parking garages, where no one can observe her, she is at work on her own Southwestern Sistine Chapel, painting a vivid sky on a barrel-vaulted ceiling that will be the meditation room’s crowning touch.
Speculating on the Magee-Livermore duality, collector Richard Barrett points out that Magee is middle-aged and Annabel is elderly. “She could be a surrogate mother figure,” he says. Perhaps Annabel is a way for Magee to express certain aspects of his personality—the part that empathizes with those around him, the part that wants to create art in an accessible, narrative format, and perhaps most important, the part that wants to have a positive impact on his beloved city. What’s remarkable is not so much that she has been able to accomplish those things for Magee, but that she’s been able to inspire others as well.
“I’ve never known anyone who was willing to be altruistic on this kind of personal level, to just go out and do something like that,” says Janis Keller, who has long been an integral part of the Flower Fund. The wife of an El Paso realtor, Keller describes herself as “highly cynical, highly skeptical.” Yet when her own role in the altruism is commended, she demurs. “My part,” she says, “is that I believe in Annabel.”
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