Arts Rescue Mission -Aid For Aging Artists
P u b l i s h e d W e e k l y, N e w s, A r t s, & S t o r i e s F r o m T e x a s
Vol. 1, Issue 6, P. 1
Dec. 15, 2025
page 1
Artist John Atlas Pirate of the South Pacific
D. M. Allison December 15, 2025
(word count 2,198)
During the ark of their career's artists follow their imagined star always at the edge of the horizon. Often that remains their Guiding Light for the duration, sometimes another celestial crosses that path and shows the way to another horizon. John Atlas, was singled out as a favorite by fine art luminaries like James Harithus, Bill Campfield, and David Brauer, but could not take the pressure of all the attention, he felt uncomfortable, and it's understandable, if you add a generally the raucous reputation the artist held in his early years it makes sense that he took his show on the road and left Houston in about 1986. Atlas worked in Austin, Texas, Seattle, Washington, periodically returned to Houston to live and work.
John's story intertwines with his art, much like our two-hour phone conversation after my studio visit. For two decades, he has lived and worked in the Elder Street Art Lofts, once St Joseph's hospital. When I saw John at a gallery opening, any old tension over me calling him "Johnny" in the early 80s was gone; we chatted, set up a visit, and I agreed to write about him. Both fascinated by tools and rooted in Houston’s 1980s art scene, we reconnected as a printmaker and cabinet maker. Our long talk on the phone after my studio visit, aided by old computers that tried our patience, led us to reflect on the challenges of technology before finally focusing on John's artistic journey and methods.
His early years in Houston, 1980 – 85 took a turn in 1986 with a yearlong adventure to the South Pacific to decompress. He returned to Houston to live and work out of his childhood home and would prepare periodically for adventure after adventure.
“As I evolved a worldview, I sought to chart the processes of perception and conception, develop a theory of knowledge, and use this to cultivate a belief system based upon my own experience. Important to this was an effort to recognize my own authentic responses to the world, indicating innate affinities. My ambition was to picture the spectrum of life and experience, and to create a language and text addressing the nature of reality and the problems of living.”
After guiding me from the parking lot and a smiling welcome as I crossed the threshold into his world, told him what a really great place he had, and found out that although John had been in this location for almost 20 years and gave one the impression of permanence and stability, I could not have guessed he would have had such a checkered history relocating at least a half dozen times from 1980 through 2005. But living at home, taking care of his dad, using the garage as a studio, was a lifestyle that gave him the economic freedom to keep his adventurous journey alive until landing at the studio he now occupies and would become his private sanctuary to recall his travels, memories, friends, and define his relationship to the world. His work, when well considered, gives us pause to take an inventory of our own.
“As I evolved a worldview, I sought to chart the processes of perception and conception, develop a theory of knowledge, and use this to cultivate a belief system based upon my own experience. Important to this was an effort to recognize my own authentic responses to the world, indicating innate affinities. My ambition was to picture the spectrum of life and experience, and to create a language and text addressing the nature of reality and the problems of living.”
After taking a brief walk around his home and studio, identifying the shop where he does his woodworking, we went straight into the main studio and two major pieces he has been working on for the last several years. So, we start this story about the actual artworks at the end of his journey, and where he is now with his work, his thoughts, and an ever-present philosophical narrative during the entire conversation. While there were narratives woven throughout his work, they were folded into one another in an origami of mental conclusions.
“At a certain point, early in my life, it became clear that all received knowledge is suspect. Equally clear was the falseness of the dominant cultural paradigm which, in the long term, is devastatingly destructive to the majority of life on the planet, including humanity. Interests in science and philosophy informed me as I sought to start over from scratch. Beginning with a minimum of provisional assumptions and raw, unmediated perception, I assembled fragments of memory, trying to distill patterns typical of the world, revealing relationships and suggesting predictability.”
Some of the best artists I know really don't have a smooth timeline, a straight path, it's often complicated, broken, and unusual. That's what makes them interesting and causes us to compare, because we can't help but see our lives within theirs and find meaning in the juncture of their unusual path and the usual. This causes us to have perspective, literally looking at things from a different point of view.
“I learned to think for myself and sought to learn how to live. This activity led me to record these images, and in the process, create an external memory encoding the narrative of my life, focusing on the experiences, ideas, and emotions which both inspire and alarm me.”
I don't think I've ever met another artist that could take me so far out on a limb that I actually feared it would break off. But John does that in the most disarming, friendly, demeanor and I couldn't help but want to hear the stories, that manifested themselves for us to ponder on the walls of his home and studio, his history, depicted in personal hieroglyph, in personal calligraphy puzzled together; Islands of memory, opinion, and judgment and his resolution and relationship to the world at large. Having said this, I was talking to a pirate.
“Dan, I was trying to tell the story of meeting a giant moray eel in the Marquesas Islands, curled up inside a coral head. Those eighteen pieces come out of that encounter. It was a creature larger than anything I’d ever known. When I first saw it, I didn’t even recognize what it was because it was so out of scale, coiled in thick, meter-wide loops inside a hollow coral formation. At first, I thought it must be some species of coral I wasn’t familiar with, but the texture was wrong.
The structure itself was like a fifty-foot-tall pagoda, hollow and pierced in places. Normally, something like that would be crowded with life, but it was completely lifeless and no fish anywhere. I swam away, and about a hundred yards off I began seeing twenty- or thirty-pound groupers in the holes along the bottom. Strangely, they didn’t flee when they saw me. I had a spear gun but wasn’t planning to use it. I poked one of the groupers, and it just looked back at me, as if to say, why are you doing that? When I poked it again, it finally swam off down the slope.
When I surfaced, Andrea, a Canadian woman from the ship swam over and asked if I’d seen a giant serpent. She pointed back toward the coral head. I swam toward it, and it was like Puff the Magic Dragon. What I could see was maybe ten feet of its neck exposed, and it could have swallowed me whole. There were still no fish around. It could have killed me without effort if it wanted to, or it would have already but instead I had the distinct sense that it was enjoying the novelty of my presence.”
We started with the largest and most imposing painting in the room, about 8 x 10 ft, and in a small space of course, that's what you're going to talk about first. The elephant Atlas was working on in the room, “Similar Forms” is no doubt satire as well as a labor of years. Over this large canvas taped around the edges were several pieces of vellum tracing paper. The drawing was elaborate on the paper over the canvas and one would estimate several hundred hours of labor (pic 3.), but after talking with the artist about his method of working out his ideas as he went, and how he developed his relationships, it was evident quite a bit more time than that. This is an artist who isn't lazy, nor shies away from commitment, and the time it takes for craftsmanship. Craftsmanship is something you find not only in his studio and living area but of course in the objects that he makes in his woodshop. "I'm making a flute" was his reply as I was leaving about what he was doing the rest of the afternoon.
As for the grand endeavor at hand, he described how he started. The drawing laid on top of the “soon-to-be finished” painted canvas had grown from a very simple initial layout of areas, segmented in pencil outlines on the paper, echoing the elements of the painting below. He had started with a stylized design of his name, and as a process worked out from there in areas of meaningful content and their relationships to one another connecting his physical compositional elements as he connected the dots in his mind and on the paper to himself, his memories, and the world at large. Not many artists need to have their work come with a set of instructions not only to try to see things their way, understand things their way, but the viewer might also need to take at least an undergraduate class in philosophy. Do you want to go to that much trouble?
Not knowing what he would find; and what would be the point? Much like his travels in the real world, he would not find his destination until completion of the entire piece. His self-discovery and lifelong journey have arrived at contentment and happiness for him though the journey continues.
“Over many years I worked to create a metaphor for the fundamental forces of nature, suggesting a continuous organizing principle which manifests at all scales. I have used concentric circles, ellipses, and spirals to indicate sources for radiating and collapsing wave fronts, intersecting to form interference patterns which produce the variety of the world and its ongoing narratives.” This is best illustrated in the large drawing covering Similar Forms, destined to be an entirely second un-mirrored half of a future diptych with possible titles of "Mockery," "Prophecy," or maybe "History" at this time.
(Click On Image To Expand To Full Screen)
His pieces are visually enjoyable and pleasing, realizing after some conversation that the man's paintings are not visual abstractions of our world seen through his eyes but quite the opposite. We come to understand that his works originate as mental abstractions, something truly new in our landscape, The seeds of his thoughts rising up into our physical world. If what the artist does is not an abstraction from what we all see in our physical world and come from someplace as ethereal and unabsorbable as the connections between memory and conclusion, then it necessarily manifests itself as something brand new. Let me try to reorganize that logic, so it doesn't sound like "art speak." He manifests on canvas in a myriad of puzzle pieces and strokes a field of ideas that spring up where nothing was there before. Ok, still art speak?
More to the point, every stroke, and mysterious character represents an individual idea and element in his painting as he works to know himself. We all have a secret self, a part of us that we hide from others as well as ourselves, something known but unspoken. By being brutally honest with himself and his relationship with others, he's asking us to also take a moment and reflect on our journeys, our honesty, and our reason for being here at all on planet earth. One can perceive his work in this manner, recognize the source, or just enjoy the outcome.
Physically the pieces are strange, and brooding, and set a tone for the overall work which manifests itself as the expression of an internal calligraphy, sometimes characters, sometimes areas, sometimes groups of strokes that could be mistaken for a visual swirl around the sky of a Starry Starry Night, but actually could be the recollection Atlas speaks of a school in the thousands, glimmering fishes from a dive in the South Pacific swirling around his relationship to friends that he once sailed with. His paintings are challenging, and an acquired taste, like a first adult beverage and rumored this sailor had plenty of in the early 1980s.
His earliest works stylistically were very simple, playful, colorful and enjoyable reminiscent of Miro, until in this day they are so condensed as to be unrecognizable by the same hand , the arc of his creative star having traveled from Houston to the South Pacific and back to get away from it all and then make sense of it all. “You got to get in to get out of it.”
After guiding me from the parking lot and a smiling welcome as I crossed the threshold into his world, I told him what a really great place he had, he's been this location for almost 20 years, from 1980 through 2005.