Sketch Artist 
Folks
Some of the hottest artist in Texas can be found in prisons, mental institutions, and on the streets. Finally embraced by the art market, these self-taught “Outsiders” create work that defines the world in their own terms.
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Last year Benavides’ mother passed away. Devastated, he moved to San Antonio, taking a one-bedroom apartment next door to his nephew. “I’m still grieving,” he says. “I have dedicated all my pieces to my mother. The more detailed the work, the more it shows how much I loved her.” When not working four nights a week as a security guard, Benavides draws. He sits through the night at his folding table, his eyes inches from the poster board he inscribes with black fine-point Pilot rolling-ball pens, creating a body of elegiac art the equal of any in its intensity and depth of feeling. His recent drawings are even denser than their predecessors, the brooding fields of “dots” or checks buckling with intricate perspective effects that seem to challenge not only the normal process of seeing but also the laws of physics. Seeping from cracks in this extradimensional universe like exotic alien life forms are ineffably delicate colored filigrees. The bursts of color (he uses red, blue, white, and green), he says, “represent an escape from myself. I am running. I am fleeing.” Asked about the source of these complex abstractions, Benavides, a devout Roman Catholic, says, “I just sit down and ask God what he wants me to see. And then I see the picture in my head. The entire thing. It repeats over and over while I’m working.”
These remarkable drawings are repositories of his hopes as well as his grief. “I’ve turned a negative [his obsessive-compulsive behavior] into a positive,” he says. Ultimately he believes that the fiercely independent style of art his mother never found appealing will allow him to fulfill a final promise he made to her. “If you do something your way, you can amount to something,” he says. “I told my mother before she died that I would amount to something.”
the belief that other artists like benavides are out there, pristine and untouched, is what drives most folk art dealers and collectors—not to mention an urgency inspired by the knowledge that a life’s work can disappear without a trace, like Berkeley’s tree falling soundlessly in the forest because no one was there to hear it.
That sense of urgency motivates Bruce and Julie Webb, husband and wife, who operate the first and the largest of the two commercial galleries devoted to contemporary folk art that have opened in Texas in the past several years (the other is Austin’s Yard Dog Folk Art). Located in a former hardware store in downtown Waxahachie, Webb Gallery resembles an overstuffed ethnographic museum dedicated to previously unknown cultures. The warehouse-size gallery accommodates pieces like Carl Nash’s towering ductwork totem and David Strickland’s farm-machinery creatures; the back rooms are crammed with otherworldly ceramic busts, drawers full of exotic drawings (including the work of Mark Cole Greene, the son of Dallas writer A. C. Greene who lives in a group home for the mentally challenged), and eerily animate carved wooden figures by artists like Dallas nonagenarian the Reverend J. L. Hunter.
The Webbs consider themselves as much art-establishment outsiders as the artists they represent. “We basically have a flea market education,” says Julie. They opened an antiques shop in 1987, a year after their marriage, cutting their teeth on car trips through the South and Midwest, where they collected the paraphernalia used in the ceremonies of once-flourishing small-town fraternal orders like the Knights of Pythias and the Odd Fellows.
During their travels the Webbs accumulated so much contemporary folk art that within a few years they realized they were in the business. They continue to spend much of their time driving the back roads in their van, searching for undiscovered artists and encouraging those they already show. But they are acutely aware of how carefully they must tread in this fragile creative ecosystem. “The first time someone comes and looks at the work and says it’s art, it changes,” says Julie. They worry that an artist like Hector Benavides will be pushed by the market into compromising his painstaking technique. But the Webbs find that Texas remains a healthier environment than the folk art hotbeds of the Deep South and Appalachia. “The folk art region in the southeast is inundated [with collectors and dealers],” says Julie. “The artists there are pushed to their limits.” The Webbs believe passionately that folk artists are a precious national resource that is being depleted faster than it is being replenished. “People think folk artists are a dime a dozen,” says Bruce. “But it’s rare to find the individual who has so much faith in their vision that they’ll keep going regardless of poverty, isolation, and lack of recognition. I think we need to celebrate these people right now.”
lack of recognition isn’t always the problem. in fact, these artists can often display a remarkable resistance to the blandishments of success. Xmeah ShaEláReEl started painting eleven years ago and has quickly become one of Texas’ most sought-after self-taught artists. His works are vividly colored, almost psychedelic composites of text and images emerging from swirls of thick acrylic paint that are glossed with polyurethane varnish and placed in glitter-covered frames. The texts range from simple scriptural citations like “Ezekiel 37!” to more secular invocations such as “Safe Sex.” The imagery frequently teems with apocalyptic demons that embody contemporary social ills; in Satan’s Sewage System the Prince of Darkness defecates into the three branches of the American government.
Despite his success, Xmeah (pronounced “Ex-may-uh”) considers himself a messenger of God, not an artist; he regards painting as a poor third to his self-distributed newsletter and audiotapes in effectively communicating God’s plan. Indeed, he believes that his success as a painter has often garbled his message. Horrified to read in the definitive Contemporary American Folk Art: A Collector’s Guide that he and his wife, Cherry, also an accomplished painter, “consider themselves shamans,” Xmeah decided that he would no longer give interviews. He also recently disconnected his telephone, instructing correspondents to rely on the “holy angels” to get in touch with him. And he announced that he was giving up painting.
Xmeah and Cherry live in Beaumont on a street of neat if well-worn small houses and shops punctuated by verdant vacant lots. Their whitewashed house, distinguished by a few colorful signs identifying it as the Church of the Children of Christ of America, is squeezed between Jim’s Tire Shop and a Frigidaire distributor.
Xmeah and Cherry are found in their small front office, composing their newsletter, “The Carrium,” on a word processor. Wearing a plaid flannel dashiki and khaki pants, Xmeah, with a transcendental air of acceptance, graciously agrees to answer some questions. (Later he remarks genially, “If He didn’t want it, you never would have gotten here.”) Xmeah has painted slogans throughout the immaculately kept house: on tabletops, the kitchen cabinets (“Respect God!”), and even the toilet seat. His paintings line the unfinished wood walls of the large front room, where a pulpit and a microphone stand have been set up. A table displays a row of Styrofoam heads—originally used as wig and hat stands—that Cherry has painted in an exuberant style similar to her husband’s.
Born David Jones in Latania, Louisiana, in 1943, Xmeah grew up with sixteen siblings and went to high school in Beaumont. Asked if he was raised in church, he answers, “No! Far from it.” Cherry, who often seconds Xmeah’s remarks with an “amen,” married him in 1984. She offers a similar confession of errant early years: born in Huntsville in 1956, attended high school in Houston, then “nothing but sin” until she met Xmeah.
After serving as a radar technician in the Air Force, Xmeah was working for the phone company in New Jersey in 1976 when he had an experience he likens to the Apostle Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. “I was sitting in my truck at lunch, thinking,” he says. “And then I wasn’t there anymore.” A man approached him, identifying himself as “Xmeah ShaEláReEl, warrior, divine angel of the Lord Jesus Christ.” And David Jones realized that the vision was the man he was intended to be. “We don’t know anything about who we are until that moment when He chooses to show us,” Xmeah says. “I never decided to do this. It was the furthest thing from my mind. I was very happy with my life. I was very happy with the telephone company.”
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