Slide From Big Tex Animation Project 2020 | Watercolor Pastel On paper | 11" x 8.5"

July 30, 2020

This pandemic has made people itchy for human contact and interaction, it seems, and understandably so. One way this has been playing out is in small, collaborative works between artists that do not rely on in-person contact, such as the Quarantined Artist Postcard Exchange or the USPS Art Project. But before either of these started snowballing, Dallas-based artist and long-time friend Brian Keith Jones was flying out the gate with The Little Big Tex Social Distance Coloring Book & Animation Project (it was actually part of the inspiration for me to start the postcard exchange).

A little context for the uninitiated:

Every Fall at the Texas State Fair, a 55-foot tall, animatronic cowboy greets fair visitors with a big "Howdy, folks!," periodically waving his arm and making other helpful announcements. For regular fair-goer's he is a much beloved piece of Texas kitsch, and his iconic image has filtered into art in various ways. Several of my own artist friends from the area have paid homage to him, but the gusto that Brian and his partner Brian Scott—a.k.a. art duo Chuck and George—poured into depicting him was hard to match. And in 2012, when Big Tex dramatically caught on fire due to an electrical issue right in front of the crowds, it was like some sort of transformative fire rippled through that group of creative fans. The image of burning Big Tex took on an almost mythic quality and was commemorated widely. Another long-time friend and artist Scott Winterrowd made a brilliant burning Big Tex Halloween costume that year, and Brian Keith Jones created a series of watercolor paintings that became an animation (in a perfectly-timed video which reminded me I needed to finish writing this post, Glasstire just named it their number one contemporary Texas-flavored works of art).

Way back in April, which seems like another lifetime ago and before the world caught on fire in other extremely meaningful and important ways, Brian put out a call for people to create their own animation using a PDF coloring book he created of a portrait of himself as Big Tex, which he would compile into a master animation. I heeded the call. It was my first foray into hand-painted animation, and the 16 separate painted pages it took to create the 32-second animation loop was a little more time-intensive than I anticipated but was so worth it. The entire project was a fun distraction, as well as a great low-pressure intro into old school animation if ever I choose to explore that again.

In the meantime, the U.S. seems like it is very much in flames as state violence against black, Indigenous, and people of color has forced a long over-due reckoning and has also extended to white moms, elderly men, and generally to anyone protesting the original violence. And in a way, this project has taken on another layer of meaning, at least for me. I'm not going to pretend that watching those animated loops of an iconic Texas cowboy—an image I have my own tenuous relationship with as native Texan and that could certainly be argued to be the stereotypical face of institutional racism and patriarchy in this state—burning from the inside out is not just a little bit satisfying. The metaphor is almost too perfect.

This project is on-going and is open to anyone, whatever any individual person gets out of it. When I asked Brian what he wants people to know, he replied, "I just want folks to have fun. Stay in the lines or go punk rock.  We haven't seen kittens incorporated."

To see the in-progress animation compilation, go here.

To see my contribution to the animation, go here.

To download the coloring book and instructions, go here.

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