By Valton Tyler
Located in Dallas, TX
In The New York Times Arts in America column, Edward M. Gomez writes of Valton Tyler, "visionary seems the right word for describing his vivid, unusual and technically refined paintings, prints and drawings, whose style defies convenient labels. Abstract, surreal, cartoonish, sci-fi fantastic, metaphysical, apocalyptic-Baroque - all of these fit but also fall short of fully describing his art." (The Living Arts, June 13, 2000, p. B2)
Valton Tyler was born in 1944 in Texas, where "the industrial world of oil refineries made a long-lasting impression on Valton as a very young child living in Texas City." (Reynolds, p. 25) After leaving Texas City, Valton made his way to Dallas, where he briefly enrolled at the Dallas Art Institute, but found it to be too social and commercial for his taste. After Valton's work was introduced to Donald Vogel (founder of Valley House Gallery), "Vogel arranged for Tyler to use the printmaking facilities in the art department of the Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where the young artist essentially taught himself several demanding printmaking techniques. 'It was remarkable,' Vogel says. 'Not only did he learn complicated etching methods, but he was able to express himself powerfully in whatever medium he explored.' Vogel became the publisher of Tyler's prints. Among them, the artist made editions of some 50 different images whose sometimes stringy abstract forms and more solid, architecturally arresting elements became the precursors of his later, mature style." (Gomez, Raw Vision #35, p. 36)
"Front Elevation of Section 17" is plate number 34, and is reproduced in "The First Fifty Prints: Valton Tyler" with text by Rebecca Reynolds, published for Valley House Gallery by Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, Texas, 1972.
In "The First Fifty Prints," Reynolds writes, “this plate can be seen as a culmination of the artist’s earlier uses of aquatint and as a new direction the artist will take in his compositions. In early plates such as ‘Joy,’ Plate No. 12, and ‘Do Not Touch,’ Plate No. 20, the artist has presented his designs to our unaccustomed eyes, either formally, by placing them on sculpture pedestals, or more abstractly, using smaller soft ground silhouettes. In later examples such as ‘One Little Stage,’ Plate No. 24, or ‘Heritage,’ Plate No. 25, we were brought closer to a direct interaction with the forms as they began to fill the plates with increasing sculptural and monumental qualities. It was still possible to maintain a more passive point of view because of the stage format of the compositions. In ‘Avenue 11,’ Plate No. 26, as we have seen, the artist unveils the true authority of his designs by placing them in our environment to compete with our reality of a familiar cityscape and to make us question our ideas of aesthetics and logic. In ‘Front Elevation’ we enter into and are confronted with these structures in their own massive landscape...
Category
1970s Surrealist Prints and Multiples
MaterialsRag Paper, Etching, Aquatint
