David Bates
Stringer of Sheepsheads I

Stringer of Sheepsheads I

© David Bates

Stringer of Sheepsheads I
Stringer of Sheepsheads I
ArtistAmerican, born 1952
CultureAmerican
Titles
  • Stringer of Sheepsheads I
Date1992
Made inDallas, Texas, United States
MediumOil on linen
Dimensions76 × 48 in. (193 × 121.9 cm)
Credit LineMuseum purchase funded by Nona and Richard Barrett, Bettie Cartwright and Colin Kennedy, Isabel B. Wilson, The Brown Foundation, Inc., Melissa and Albert Joseph Grobmyer IV, Puffer-Sweiven, L.P., Carol Ballard, Janet and Paul Hobby, David Durham, and Edwin A. Eubanks
Object number2005.352
Not on view

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Object Type
Description

Throughout his career, David Bates has made everyday life on the Gulf of Mexico his chief subject matter. Bates brings an intimacy and naturalism to these landscapes and portraits, creating preparatory sketches on site.


In the early 1990s Bates began an extended series of paintings of the Galveston and Bolivar coastal communities, a change of focus that affected both his palette and compositional structures. Stringer of Sheepshead I typifies this shift in Bates’s work. The image is bathed is brilliant sunlight, the standing figure is closely cropped, and the composition is broken up into forceful, structural elements as the line of fish, the planks of the pier, the waves, and the clouds establish a staccato rhythm across the canvas. He endows one of this region’s most important activities—fishing—with heroic integrity. The large scale of the work, as well as Bates’s profoundly physical and sculptural handling of the paint, monumentalizes a pier fisherman and his string of freshly caught sheepshead.


ProvenanceThe artist; [Dunn and Brown Contemporary, Dallas]; purchased by MFAH, 2005.
Exhibition History“Acquisitions of the Last Five Years: Selections of Modern and Contemporary Art,” The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, July 15–October 15, 2005.

"David Bates," Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; February 9–May 11, 2014.

"25/75: A Celebration," Galveston Arts Center, June 4–July 10, 2016.
Inscriptions, Signatures and Marks
Marked on verso stretcher: "DAVID BATES / STRINGER of SheePsheaDS I / 76" x 48 91-92"
Signed and dated lower right: "Bates / 92"


Cataloguing data may change with further research.

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