Sep. 3 - Oct. 30 2021

Artist: Joel McGlasson

Joel McGlasson is a 79-year-old retired architect and a re-emerging artist exploring the nature of color and its expressive forms in abstract painting. In fourth grade, Joel won a scholarship to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. At San Jacinto High School he won a Scholastic Arts National Key Award for his work in ceramics. In the late '60s and early ‘70s his work was shown in Houston’s leading galleries and in small group shows at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.

By mid-decade, however, McGlasson prioritized his family and sought work as an architect. On a cold call for an available position he was hired largely on the strength of his glass paintings shown at the Louisiana Gallery two weeks before. For the next thirty-five years, he put his art career on hold as he worked on projects for S.I. Morris Associates, Magruder Winfield, Page Architects, and 3D International. Since his retirement in 2011, Joel relaunched his painting career by working with color and abstract forms, first rotating canvasses to create layered grid patterns of dripped paint, then making literal ‘finger paintings’—geometric color studies created directly through the repeated touch of the artist’s fingertip upon the canvas. McGlasson’s first solo show in fifty years features a retrospective of his early work, a survey of paintings from the past decade, and a suite of his most recent paintings, the Engagement Series.