People gathered their thoughts on his Facebook page, on which the last status he posted was “Art Time!” Many, many people expressed shock and outrage, confusion and disbelief that first evening, then the next day came more sorrow and nostalgia and memory, and after that the reflections and photos and respectful, compartmentalized good tidings for the afterlife, a position which must be much more painful to maintain faith in than it looks.
After the service, St. Philip’s students, administrators, and faculty headed back to work or class, others in the crowd headed into the parking lot. Artists Beto Gonzales and Vincent Valdez paused on their way out and discussed increasing their output, how to do what they do better, and spoke about how they thought more deeply now about legacy, the evidence of history and perspective that Shephard left behind. How do you build that?
Teaching art at St Philip’s made Shephard ever more aware of the politics affecting the East Side; his art was informed by African-American civil-rights history, and he still bore witness to racism, brutality, and self-hatred, the Great Society seemingly at a standstill around St Philip’s. He was deeply troubled by losing young men and women to deployment in Iraq or Afghanistan. He maintained hope, was an Obama convention delegate in ’08, held his Christian faith deeply and quietly, never evangelizing or seeming to judge.
Yet he wondered, agonized over, played with the why of it all. Did the oppression come from without, or within, or both? And he put all that investigative, unflinching passion, as well as his deep knowledge of art history, into his work.
For his last drawing show, at the Southwest School of Art & Craft, Shephard showed a self-portrait, in which he’s shadowed by Death. He recorded a “voice tour” you could listen to on headphones while you looked at his work. Listening to it a few days ago was some strong medicine. The easygoing voice full of West Texas openness, the informed artspeak that comes across just a tiny bit self-conscious (very rare) and not at all pretentious. About the drawing of himself with death, Regis said:
“The first piece is called ‘Death and the Endless Possibility,’ a self-study. And they all deal with my recent life-and-death experience. In terms of uh, I had, uh, I developed a serious heart condition. So it was a bit unsettling, frightening, humbling at the same time, and it really forced me to re-think, uh, some priorities or values in life. … So this is the first piece that I did, and for a long time I’ve been working with ink, and with that as a medium, experimenting with the language of the comic-book genre, also trying to incorporate classical compositions; the composition in all the pieces that you see is based on paintings by Caravaggio. But this piece itself is again content-wise, you know, is reflecting recent events in my life. And then as far as working with the brush, trying to incorporate the language system of comic book, the heavy use of line, but also I wanted to be very expressive, keep everything flat and close to the surface, as with most things I do.”
Not many artists — not many men — try to be very expressive while keeping everything flat and close to the surface. It’s as if he’s saying that it’s all there — he’s all there — all of his deep personal complexity on every surface he ever made. This makes it no easier to bear missing Regis Shephard, but much easier to find him.
This article was written by a friend of Regis Shepard name Sarah Fische. To see the article in its entirety click here.
