Arts Rescue Mission -Aid For Aging Artists

Conversations (with Walter Benjamin) at Moody Gallery, April 11 – May 23, 2026

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Pat Colville (born 1931, New Orleans, Louisiana) has lived and worked in Houston for decades, though her career stretches far beyond the city. Over more than sixty years, she has maintained a steady and evolving presence in American abstraction, one that bridges early postwar regional modernism with a contemporary sensibility that never quite settles.

She studied at the University of Houston in the early 1950s and later completed her MFA at the University of Oklahoma, formalizing a practice that had already been underway for years. By the 1970s, her work had entered major museum collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the New Orleans Museum of Art. Exhibitions followed in New York, London, Tokyo, and Toronto, placing her within a broader international conversation.

A significant period of her life unfolded in New York during the 1980s and 1990s, where she exhibited regularly and taught at institutions such as The Cooper Union, Sarah Lawrence College, and Bennington College. Alongside this, she received recognition that confirmed what many already understood: that her work was not only consistent, but deeply considered, shaped over time rather than chasing it.

In Houston, her long relationship with Moody Gallery has provided a kind of continuity that is increasingly rare. Decade after decade, the work has returned here, not as repetition, but as continuation.
And so, the room filled as we gathered to hear Pat Colville speak. "DOES ANYBODY DRIVE A GREEN TOYOTA?" Does anybody drive a green Toyota? In the garden room at Moody Gallery evidently not, a cry in the wilderness called out, no one looked to one another to find out if it was one of their friends, and they just continued on loudly interested in their shoe wear. I was seated in this sea of social interaction in one of two club chairs reserved for old men with broken backs and turned to see from the corner of my eye Betty Moody ever vigilant not only watching over her gallery but genuinely concerned for her patrons. Someone's car was about to be towed. 

Armed with a quart size water bottle In one hand and a rolled up paper I assumed to be an exhibition list in the other earnestly whacking the bottle, no glass, no spoon, no Ting-Ting-Ting for attention or a toast, to cut through the crowd chatter and get attention. After all, where were our manners? We are in Betty’s house -- literally. That's when, with an urgency and decibel usually reserved for land mine potential "HEY" just blew right out of my mouth, and momentary quiet, and  " …….does anyone have a green Toyota, It's about to get towed." For a few seconds everyone did look around, evidently not, and then it was right back to shoes, shoes, shoes, while the guest of honor artist Pat Colville was waiting to give an entertaining, humorous, and enlightening talk about her work, and how she got started in New York. 

Shoes, shoes, shoes, peas and carrots, peas and carrots, the decibels rose again and continued in this movie set of a prelude. Standing room only in a room with a glass wall. Let's face it, I'm guilty too, we go to the events we think are important, we think they're important because the gallery has that reputation, and we know that the people that go to these events will be there, and “we” will be interesting for “us,” and somewhere in the crowd  we do know about art. "I hate art openings I can never see the art." Well, my dear, that's because everyone else in the room that you're interested in has their funny hat in the way. Some actually do go back later and sit with the art.

It was time for the talk. Again, Betty, "I would like to introduce Pat Colville .... I would like to introduce Pat, our artist.... " Shoes, shoes, --- peas and carrots, peas and carrots, "SHUT UP," a second wily Houston favorite David Aylesworth fired off his mouth cannon to silence the room once again. I looked over and he was just grinning from ear to ear. David is a standard of the industry, having fun, realizing, but breaking norms when necessary. I was not alone and sometimes yelling at an opening is allowed. Time to time all of us forget about our green Toyota

Finally, Betty got her chance, "I would like to introduce our artist, Pat Colville. I've known her forever, I loved visiting her in New York way back when. She's won every award in fine art circles and is recognized internationally." I'm paraphrasing of course but it was a short introduction and Pat started right in. Eventually, after a second, more forceful interruption from across the room, the chatter subsided enough for an introduction. And just like that, the reason we were all there resettled in her chair and focused.

Colville began without ceremony, which felt right. She spoke about her history in a way that didn’t linger on it. New York came up, those years of working, teaching, showing, moving through a scene that was, at times, both exhilarating and dismissive. Painters, she reminded us, were not always in favor. There were periods, particularly in the 1980s, when painting itself was treated as something outdated, something already resolved. And yet, she stayed with it. What struck me most was not the résumé, but the way she described working.

At one point, she talked about a series of drawings that began under constraint, black and white, specific dimensions, parameters set by a project that required reproduction and translation into another form. Instead of resisting those limitations, she embraced them. “You have boundaries,” she said, in essence. “And you develop within them.” From there, something shifted.

She described being in a studio, getting ready to move, cleaning a bookshelf, pulling out an old book she hadn’t thought about in years. It was fragile, falling apart, almost disintegrating in her hands and once on the floor her cats finished it off in a solitary quiet on the dusty floor she was about to leave behind.  The pages ended up scattered across the floor, caught in that early morning light that only lasts a few minutes before the day asserts itself. 

There was silence for her in that moment. Not dramatic silence, just the kind that happens when something ordinary becomes briefly, unexpectedly present. That moment, pages on the floor, light moving across them became the beginning of the work we were looking at, as well as a remembrance of her work  as an artist, a painter and her colleagues being diminished and disregarded by a book and one man's opinion. Walter Benjamin, a name I had never come across, an idea I had never really sat with. The basic idea, stripped of its academic weight, is simple enough: a work of art has a presence, something tied to its physical existence, its history, its being in one place at one time. Reproduction, photography, printing, endless duplication, changes that relationship. 

“Painting is dead.”  Echoed back down the decades to me in the moment from Gene Jackson’s  art history class at Sam Houston State shaking me awake for a moment like professor Jackson had to do after the 

lights went down and the slide show began, I'd pulled my head up momentarily, why would “painting be dead” somehow in the 1970’s? 
What I didn’t know (and went home to find out) There was a point in her talk, almost an aside, where she mentioned an idea that, at the time, I didn’t fully catch. Something about reproduction, about the way images circulate, about what gets lost when something is copied again and again. I let it pass. But later, it came back. That’s the part I live for now, the moment when something you didn’t fully understand in the room follows you home and refuses to let go. Gene Jackson is looking down and proud.

No, painting is not dead, artists like Colville have and still fight hard for it. Standing in that room, looking at Colville’s work, it was clear that whatever that “presence” is, it’s still there. And more than that, it’s being actively negotiated.

From there, she spoke about painting as a kind of conversation. Not metaphorically, but practically. You put something down. The surface responds. You adjust. It resists. You move again. Over time, something develops, not imposed, but negotiated. “When the painting finishes,” she suggested, “it’s not that you’ve won. It’s that both of you have.”
That stayed with me.

What she described in her studio, the back-and-forth, the adjustments, the decisions made in real time, that’s not something you can fully capture in a photograph. You can approximate it. You can document it. But the experience of it, the accumulation of decisions, the hesitation, the correction, that lives somewhere else. A painting is alive with the recorded journey of the artist's hand across the surface.

I didn’t walk into the gallery thinking about any of that. But I walked out with it. 

Colville’s work has been written about, discussed, and revisited over the years by critics and curators who have tried to locate it within a broader context. What comes through consistently is not just a commitment to abstraction, but an ongoing willingness to let that abstraction evolve through process.

Her work has absorbed influences, architecture, landscape, geometry, not as references to be quoted, but as structures to be worked through. Forms shift. Systems develop. What begins as one kind of order becomes something else over time.

And that seems to be the point. Not resolution, exactly, but continuation. The paintings themselves require more time than an opening allows. They ask for a different kind of attention, the kind that doesn’t compete with conversation or shoes or the possibility that your car might be towed. That comes later. Because at some point, we all have to go back and actually look.

And, from time to time, remember where we parked.

What begins to emerge in the current exhibition is a language of fragments, geometry, memory, and restraint. The paintings do not announce themselves loudly. They hover. They lean inward. Pale grays, weathered blues, chalky whites, soft industrial blacks, and sudden flashes of coral, ochre, citron yellow, or oxidized red drift across the surfaces like pieces of a conversation overheard through walls. Shapes float, interrupt, overlap, and recede. Some resemble architectural plans abandoned mid-construction. Others feel like scraps of fabric, broken fencing, cracked sidewalks after summer drought, or shadows cast through blinds at four in the afternoon.

There are passages that look rubbed down by time itself, surfaces brushed thin until the grain beneath begins to show through like old plaster exposed under peeling paint. Certain marks resemble crosshatching on worn drafting paper, while others feel almost biological, cellular structures spreading slowly across the panel like frost patterns on glass or dried riverbeds seen from the air. Black linear forms punctuate the compositions with the authority of punctuation marks, scaffoldings, or utility poles cutting through open sky. They divide space the way thoughts divide memory.

In works such as Converse and Plot, the compositions feel simultaneously engineered and improvised, as though a city blueprint had collided with scraps from a studio floor. One shape presses against another cautiously, almost politely, while transparent grids and ghosted textures drift underneath like buried conversations. The paintings often appear suspended between construction and erosion. Things are being assembled while, at the same time, quietly falling apart.

Elsewhere, softer organic forms arrive unexpectedly. Rounded cloud-like passages float beside severe geometry. Thin coral arcs wander across pale grounds like pieces of electrical wire or quick notations drawn absentmindedly during a phone call. Some forms resemble fragments of wallpaper patterns from the 1950s; others feel like shadows from modernist buildings stretching across concrete. At moments the work carries the atmosphere of mid-century design, Japanese printmaking, architectural rendering, textile patterns, and urban mapping all at once without settling permanently into any of them.

And then there is the surface itself. Colville’s paintings are filled with evidence of touch. Dry brushing, scraping, layering, translucent veils, rubbed passages, abrupt hard edges, delicate interruptions. The paintings feel worked through rather than merely composed. Nothing appears accidental, yet nothing feels rigidly controlled either. The balance is human. You can sense revisions, second thoughts, discoveries. The paintings breathe because they allow uncertainty to remain visible.

What becomes increasingly clear standing in front of these works is that Colville is less interested in abstraction as style than abstraction as experience. These paintings are not puzzles to be solved. They are accumulations. Conversations between memory and structure, between instinct and order, between what is planned and what quietly arrives uninvited. The forms seem to remember architecture, weather, bookshelves, shadows, maps, fragments of language, and the slow passing of time itself.

And perhaps that is why the work lingers after leaving the gallery. Not because it insists upon meaning, but because it continues unfolding in the mind afterward. A shape returns unexpectedly hours later. A color combination resurfaces while driving home. A thin black line suddenly recalls a telephone wire crossing a winter sky. The paintings keep speaking softly long after the room itself has emptied.

Pat Colville’s work does not demand attention in the theatrical way contemporary culture often rewards. It asks for something quieter and far more difficult: sustained looking. The kind of looking that happens after the crowd disperses, after the conversations end, after the shoes and social choreography fade into the background. The kind of looking where painting is still very much alive.

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Colville also revealed something important during the talk that helps unlock the work itself. Beneath the apparent freedom of the paintings is methodology, almost a private system of inquiry shaped partly by her scientific curiosity, at least that’s what I got out of her talk.  She's playing with systems. The paintings are not random arrangements of elegant forms drifting across gray space. They are decisions tested against assumptions.

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