Exits: Broad strokes

American painter Dorothy Hood, the expansiveness of Houston, and the Rockets, who need to explode outward.

It was just after 10 a.m. and the small, temperature controlled room was ready for me.

On a wide drafting table lay tidy stacks of posters and a pair of white cotton gloves. On a small desk beside it were two wedges of foam, for placing a large format book open on, and a bankers box. There were three more boxes on a library cart parked beside the desk.

The University of Houston archivist I’d been corresponding with motioned me over to the drafting table. He slipped on the white gloves and slowly began to flip the posters over, one by one. Here, under a light patina of time, images of paintings I recognized. There, the declarative swath of red so bright it seemed to breathe; and there, multi-pigmented blues that plumbed at more depth than made sense in the constraint of two dimensions and in miniature. Exhibition posters going back to the 1960s, one even for a theatre production in Toronto she had built the sets for, but on each the name that had brought me here: Dorothy Hood.

Houston, I’d learn on that trip, is very proud of Hood. Singular painter, genre-warping artist, their own daughter, American visionary and a person you’ve likely never heard of alongside her peers of Frankenthaler, de Kooning and Rothko. Maybe because she left the States in long stretches, which would get you and your work called unpatriotic, especially if you were hanging around countries the CIA considered socialist. Likely because she was a woman. Also likely because she was from Texas, and regional hierarchy was, is, a real thing in art.

After the archivist finished flipping though the exhibition posters he moved to the banker’s box on the desk and gently lifted out an oversized black leather scrapbook, just as gently placing it open on the waiting foam wedges. He motioned at the other boxes on the cart, then the chair at the desk.

Take as much time as you need, he said, then left me to it.

There I was, Monday morning in simmering Houston spring, brought to town to watch and talk with the best of American high school athletes gathered together to play basketball, and stolen myself to campus and its library for a few clandestine hours with the personal correspondence, journals and scrapbooks of one of my favourite artists. An artist whose archived work I had gone to see at McClain Gallery a few days before with the hope they might let me loiter around a few pieces on display, and instead whose kind and equally excited curators brought me to a cool hangar of a room with hundreds of Hood’s collages and drawings in flat file cabinets, drawer after drawer opened for me, and then stall after stall of paintings pulled out for me to stand vibrating in front of or stalk around, some canvases over seven feet tall.

Both times I cried. At the work and words still so infused with life, like the hand that had just painted the signature at the bottom corner of the canvases, or signed off with love in the letters was lingering there, just hovering, and at the kindness, this communion, of strangers. Or, people made immediately familiar by our shared fandom of Hood, yes, but our familiarity with the visceral, full-body sensation that comes with loving her work.

There’s a line in the Perfume Genius song, ‘On the Floor’ that goes, “The violent current of energy/I hide it away and underneath.” I’ve felt that before, standing in front of certain people. A glint, a bend in the light and air around them, a fizz that snaps my spine straight. I also feel that looking at a Hood.

The thrum of it in the gut, the tingle as it rushes through the nerves, flushes the face, the body. The no-floor feel of looking at her paintings and losing all perception of yourself, body and breath. Plummeting headlong into colour and shape, depth of texture, sudden jagged sunbursts of startling light. Paintings that offer a portal to life, its pulsing colours of yearning and fear, triumph and love, essence wrestled to canvas. Paintings that hum.

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Lofty to put the Rockets here — oh well. That is, by name, their right.

The core of this Houston team, brooding. At least, that’s what head coach Ime Udoka made us believe. They were going to be bullies, the new Detroit Bad Boys; they weren’t going to care if we liked it.

It works until you glance down the roster, skip over anyone not named Dillon Brooks.

Steven Adams, consummate gentle giant, a man who started a worm farm in the thick and dull isolation of the pandemic because he needed to look at and look after something; who tends to be the one stopping the scuffles his teammates start by embracing the men they’ve started them with. Alperen Sengun, nicknamed Alpie (Alpie!); Jalen Green, who told me once he learned to manage his money in the G League, thrifts whenever possible, and it hurts his heart to spend three figures on any one thing. Sophomore Amen Thompson and rookie Reed Sheppard, the former a tornado finding his legs, the latter a shy but sniping bolt of wind, the sort that knocks your hat from your head, loops it around, lands it right in front of you. Fred VanVleet, unflappable, brought in as a sort of grumpy anchor to a group that, if left too restless, riles itself.

Even Brooks, this would-be boogie man of noxious energy, steps into the role like a Halloween mask. I know, because I saw him turn into a national hero at FIBA’s 2024 qualifiers then later, the Paris Olympics, his eyes watering at the long opening horns of the Canadian anthem.

What I mean is toughness shrinks. Toughness, for its only and own sake, is one-dimensional. And you could see the team come up against it as the Warriors kept expanding, regrouping, offering up another side of themselves.

A refrain that goes up at the deciding point of any playoff series: Is that all there is? The one that went up from the Rockets as Game 7 ticked down and Golden State’s lead inched up: Is this all we are?

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Barely into her twenties and after an early exit from RISD, Hood left a life in Manhattan to drive to Mexico City. She camped out on the way, eating food straight from the can, and arrived into a Mexican art scene brimming with political revolution, surrealism, and bright, outward life. Hood wrote that in Mexico she felt herself laid bare, because everything was out in the open. Open-air architecture, bare limbs, swaths of parks and green space where dense foliage overran into the neighbourhoods beside, no clear boundaries between outer and interior worlds.

She was too poor to afford art supplies. Her friends and contemporaries — Rufino Tamayo, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco — worked at fresco-scale, champions of the Mexican mural movement in wake of the Mexican Revolution. Hood was confined to drawing. She sketched strange, surrealist figures and dreamscapes, bound to tight spaces on found paper, and sent these back State-side for museums like the MoMA to include in several drawing exhibitions. The message to Hood was overt: the American art world wants you small.

Hood didn’t visit Houston’s Space Center until she settled back in the city after decades in Mexico. She was always interested in the link between science and art, art and the natural world, but vast expanse of space — teeming life in the void — became a preoccupation of theme. Both outer space, and the space to work on a much larger scale. Hood called the shift to the oversize canvases her work exploded onto “the most important thing that ever happened in my painting life”.

Looking at her later paintings I wonder what she felt of this duality — borders, artistic identity; a young woman alone in a different country (in a much different time), chock full of raw stimulus with nowhere to put it. Whether, later, she would’ve felt the compulsion to revel in all that space had she not been so sequestered by her lack of means early on. Were all those ideas, the living pools of colour so rich they turned into texture, so deep they seem to greedily gulp at the light, simmering under her skin for decades? Is that why they feel like both revelation and relief to look at, contemporary, even still? Contemporary, so much so, that there is no formalized school of art or working artist that’s ever produced anything similar?

“I am painting for a time I will never see,” Hood wrote, as if sensing the forward thrust of her work. Not only the life and movement of her paintings, but their complexity and demands on the viewer. Their alive-ness.

The wish of anyone who creates is for their work to carry forward, even if the admission — that they won’t be there — is the hardest, perhaps unspeakable thing. In Hood’s case, there was a clear-eyed understanding. A relinquishing.

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Was it such a loss, to be booted by the remnants of a dynasty?

It took seven games for the Warriors to send Houston home, back to the fecund pan of south Texas. A swamp, really, green and teeming. The first time I visited, after a summer living in the Mississippi Delta, I spent most of my time wandering the tunnels that wind below the city’s downtown. It was August, heat oozed. The second time, I wanted to see as much as I hadn’t the first, which was most of it. Stretch my legs and suck back the air.

The air: dense, rich, decomposition and something sharper — shale, substrate, halite. So much highway.

A coastal plane, gateway to the Big Thicket; a city that lazily tugs, tells you there’s somewhere to go, then shrugs as the afternoon storm rolls in once you get there. There’s a lot of time here, the region itself formed by the erosion of the Rockies over millions of years, the soil black as pitch and so surface-rich it’s one of the few regions where American rice grows. You swipe your upper lip and immediately feel the sweat, springing back.

Same for the Rockets, who are not so taciturn, so grim or so rough as they’d set out to project this season. The logic in claiming a ruse, in the NBA, we understand. Important to have a story, an identity, for how we all harp on any perceived lack. The Western Conference is painted as the surer thing, the confident one, but the best of its ranks in OKC skews just as young as the Rockets do, if a shade more sure, and are still themselves only figuring out the Finals for the first time.

Broad strokes, is what the Rockets need. No use panning close, tightening the grip and narrowing the possibilities for this team while they are just now coming off a season where they learned to burst from expectation. To project bigger. In bluster, but in effort, too.

Houston is horizon, in all directions, sucking swamp below and stars beckoning over NASA’s Mission Control. Live oaks paint any car that dare stay idle under their expansive reach in a blanket of chartreuse pollen, living spores. Live oaks line the well-trod streets to the Rothko Chapel, the Menil Collection, the cool, vaulted halls of the Cy Twombly Gallery, the Museum of Fine Arts. Shaded pilgrimage to canvas, marble, paper, screen, metal, ink, paint, video, even body. More materials than you could imagine for getting outside yourself, in the surprise of south Texas.

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Hood died in 2000. Breast cancer. The work of her last years shifted to collage, smaller scale, narrative-driven pieces ribboned through with the same themes that consistently preoccupied her — the cosmos, myth, nature, geology, the human psyche — and titled in referential riddles or with real literary flourish.

She was funny, was what I noticed reading through her correspondence and journals. Meticulous in mapping out her exhibitions and shows, with a mix of pride, awareness of the moment and humour that never turned self-effacing. Any hint of the strain she felt working away from the major themes of her American contemporaries — postwar pop art, stark minimalism, abstract expressionism that was brooding or aggressive — and the New York City nucleus of the art world, any regret that she could’ve been somebody if was absent. Hood had tried to live in New York several times, and always left to return to Mexico City or Houston, citing a mix of malaise and constraint. She knew how the art world favoured proximity, that the big galleries and their decision-makers forgot about artists who weren’t loud and right in front of them, especially if they were women. But she also knew the conditions she needed to work, and to work big.

She was a person of great bearing and compulsion, compass tuned true to an inner magnetism that pulled her all the way through life.

I think of Hood often but have been a lot lately in the boom of AI-vacuousness, the social media steamrolling of higher thought and the mocking of any aspirational drive toward it. She saw no delineation between art and the sciences, and by extension, what a person could comprehend through one toward the other. Ego or its false flag of superiority (usually waved by those in fear), which has now become so strangely analogous to academia or the desire toward cultivating intelligence and understanding, was out of the picture for her in either art of science. Perception, learning, feeling — this was the point.

“The core motivation of high art and science are similar,” Hood wrote. “Science is transcendent insofar as its discoveries unite it with the first causes and beginnings of creation in natural life. High art holds itself in a state of being which is beyond the human ego, and beyond the world of primary attractions and repulsions, in which the transcendences of the psyche are at one with pure discoveries.”

Her paintings push against the idea that viewing is a passive experience, that simply “seeing something” is what art asks of us. Their compositions are beautiful, omnipotent, unsettling in the best way. Your eyes rove, range, lose track, distort, blink to focus at a completely different point than where you left off.

They force you into yourself.

At the end of my time in the archives, a time only marked because the hours I’d stolen away from the work I was there to do were up (in fact, I had to go interview A’ja Wilson) I lay a hand on the outside of one of Hood’s journals. I didn’t really know what I was after, maybe to preserve a feeling of proximity and by extension, the communion I had within it. To the people at McClain Gallery, to the archivist at UH, the gathered materials of a life, and in a much more distant way, to Hood.

The archivist came out to say goodbye and had with him a packing tube, the sort you’d ship oversized prints in. He was smiling faintly, abashedly. They had so many extra exhibition posters, he started to explain, they’d already agreed to set some aside for me to take home. I gaped. Thanked him profusely.

Flying home days later I clung to the tube and to the expansiveness of the gesture. Try to remember this fellowship, this goodwill, this happiness, I willed myself. For a future immediate, as much as one I’ll never see.