Set in Stone: Artist Don Breeden looks to city's religious icons for inspiration
BROWNSVILLE - The steeple, surrounded by a shroud of blue, rises pristinely into the white sky, a three-pronged lamp standing near the bottom.
A few feet away, another watercolor painting by Don Breeden titled "With a Broken Wing" depicts a young stone angel grasping flowers. The angel closes her eyes as she stretches one wing gloriously to the side, while the other hangs in tatters. The work is part of a show of Breeden's paintings at the Historic Brownsville Museum titled "Set In Stone: A Religious Retrospective of The Images of Brownsville."
"Broken Wing," a visual narrative of a headstone damaged by vandals at the Old City Cemetery here, is one of many paintings in Breeden's show that runs through May 9.
"I absolutely love the show," said Marisela Cortez, executive director of the museum. "We had a lot of people come through ever since Thursday. A bunch of people came from Weslaco and Edinburg to see the work. They called over the weekend."
She looked around the room filled with pictures of Our Lady of Guadalupe, white doves fluttering into the air, churches and cathedrals in both Matamoros and Brownsville with blue-gray windows peering from sand-colored brick.
"It's very magical," Cortez said with a grand smile.
The paintings of the churches show the structures surrounded by white space, releasing them from the confines of paper and convention to fly freely through the imagination like the birds leaping from the outstretched arms of St. Francis in a retablo painting. An illustration of the Immaculate Conception Cathedral shows the structure with louvered windows and surrounded by blue sky and the genteel green of summer trees.
Deep scratches imprint a signature of time into a white cross shining from an amber background - another headstone painting.
"I just want the viewer to sit there and say that maybe they ought to go visit the cemetery and see what Brownsville's got," said Breeden, 58. "Brownsville's got a great history. I think some of the headstones date back to the 1700s."
Breeden, president of Breeden/McCumber Advertising and Design, has painted most of his life. Soon after receiving his bachelor's degree from the University of Houston in 1972, he obtained employment with an advertising agency as an illustrator, doing pen and ink with watercolor. About 10 years ago, he decided to go straight watercolor.
"It takes a long time to do a pen and ink drawing, to get the same thing done, and you can't have the same effects," said Breeden, who also owns Breeden Art Gallery and Frame Shop.
"I just got where I enjoyed doing watercolor more than pen and ink," he said. "That medium just appealed to me more than pen and ink."
Historical buildings, such as Our Lady of Refuge Cathedral in Matamoros, command a strong presence in his work.
"Growing up down here, you go to Matamoros all the time, and sometimes you don't even look around at what's there," he said. "They've got a lot of significant buildings. It (Our Lady of Refuge) was just one of those that I said, ‘I've gotta do a picture of it one of these days.' "
That was about three years ago.
"I did that as a series," he said. "I've got a whole series of the churches in our area."
About a year ago, he extended his interest in history even further to the city cemetery.
"There are a tremendous amount of angels that are there that just really fascinated me," he said. "I picked up and started concentrating on a lot of angels, and once I started doing those it just transcended to all the other ones. There's one real big angel that's there right now that I haven't done because of the vandals; it's lying down. I'd like to do that one."
Breeden, who has also created several of the Charro Days posters, said that in his paintings of the cemetery he strives to remove the subject from the realm of being a headstone and transform it into a work of art.
"You can photograph a picture of the headstone and you can show the grave and everything, or you can take that image itself and see what it looks like, and represent how the light hits it and it takes on a different look and feel," he said.
He became interested in retablos - small altars with pictures of saints painted on wood, tin, or copper - about five years ago while working with a group that was holding fundraisers for Our Lady of Guadalupe Middle School.
"The first year they started off with people donating retablos as the auction items," he said. "I'd never heard of a retablo, so I started studying and learning about them and did my first one. After that I started doing them because I got interested in doing them. I've done several other ones outside of the ones I donated to that cause."
Breeden's fresh approach to old forms continues to evolve and transform people's lives as they view the pieces. One retablo in particular seems to bear a graceful countenance over the other works. In that piece, the Virgin Mary beckons downward in a moment of reflection, her shawl bathed in fluctuations of blue and creased by a panel of burnt orange, the bright and airy colors radiating through the room.
WHAT: Art show: "Set In Stone: A Religious Retrospective of The Images of Brownsville
WHERE: Historic Brownsville Museum
641 E. Madison St.
Brownsville, Texas
WHEN: April 16 - May 9
MUSEUM HOURS: Tues.-Sat. 10 a.m.-4 p.m.
Closed Sun., Mon.
ADMISSION: $2
50 cents for children ages 15 and under
FOR MORE INFORMATION: 548-1313
