Autumn in Mae is an Art of Austin artist!
Introducing Mae!
AoA – How long have you been in Austin and how did you find your way here?
Mae – Born and bread. My parents came to Austin in the 70s. My mother moved from Kansas City, Kansas and used to rent out a house in Westlake for $25 a week. Shes a bra- burning hippy born in the 50s to parents who were both in the war and raised during the Depression. My dad was from a small Dow-Jones town outside of Houston called Angleton, Texas and lived off Guadalupe in an old stage coach house behind what is now Kerby Lane while he was attending UT Austin. My mother worked for UT, and thus they met, and accidentally made me post vasectomy. I grew up in the North West Hills of Walnut Creek Crossing. In the 70s bis was off the main street of Duval/Burnet that ran through town before Mopac. Throughout college i lived off Riverside and Oltorf and attended ACC Riverside, Northridge, and UT Austin. My Twenties were spent in the Zilker Park area. The longer I’ve stayed here, the more reasons I find to stay. And the more times I leave, the greater my Love for Texas and Austin and the South grows ever exponentially.
AoA – When did you realize that you were an artist?
Mae – I always had the propensity for creating, painting, drawing, building, poetry and music. With the inspiration from people like my uncle, who was a painter before he went into the Vietnam War and a Victorian Restoration Specialist Post-War and my fathers friend, an art teacher named Mrs. Andrews, art became my past-time as a child, hobby as an adolescent, and career choice as a teen.
In middle school they re-drew the district lines and i was sent to Burnet Middle. I was the minority. Due to the lack of student engagement, they tended to bribe the students with free time if we did our in class work. Most simply refused to do anything. Thus, I would finish early and head to Mr. Ochoa’s art room. There he attempted to help the students who were prone to graffiti as an extracurricular and show them a formal process for lettering, tagging, graffiti, and the arts as a whole. It was there i painted a lighthouse and re-rendered my name in the logo of Coca-Cola as my 6th grade art paper mache project.
In my late 20s i decided to apply to UT Austin, and for some reason they let me in. My first semester I attended a random survey art history 301 designed to flunk students and widdle the 800 person class to 200 by the send of the semester and convince most to major in communication instead. It was there, in the pages of 300 years old books full of the birth of social value civic necessity that I was engulfed in the 17th and 18th century romantics vision and encroachments and birth of philosophical values of beauty, the contemplation of consciousness and the expectations of art. I was so inspired by the belief system of creators like William Morris and his business management in the 18th century, I opened my first Sole Proprietorship DBA Sovereign Frequencies; an interdisciplinary and multidimensional artisan company focusing on glass, metal, fine, photographic, craft, and urban art as a birthday present to myself, and society as a whole.
AoA – Where do you derive inspiration from?
Mae – As a child I was motivated by my Uncle Bill, who made gigantic dark abstract oil paintings that have changed and morphed over time. More recently, I was lucky enough to attend The University of Texas at Austin. I transferred with too many hours. They have an in house rule that every student must attend at least 60 hours on campus. Because of this rule, I have an excess of 20 hours i needed to fill. Thus came my lucky brush with Professor Charlesworths’ Psycho-geography class. It was between that and the history of jazz, which just happened to be too early, and I simply needed ONE MORE CLASS TO GRADUATE. Plus, the title was too intriguing I simply had to know. To be clear, my series did not start while attending the class. This class was in the Art History section of the curriculum required a few 20 page papers about Ruskin, his court case against Whistler, and the first Flaneur, Thomas De Quincey. A few painful group projects later, I graduated and the fog of Academic oppression began to lift.
AoA – Can you speak to your art training?
Mae – From Guatemalan friendship bracelets to Guatemalan cold hammered reposee, my art has evolved over 30 years. In Highschool I was lucky enough to attend L.C. Anderson High wherein I was given the privilege of taking numerous art classes, photography, black and white negative printing, printmaking, air brush, and ceramics. Due to my lack of Physical Education Classes I was forced to a attend a work study program wherein I has to get a job in trade for the class credit. I figured if I couldnt be an artist I could at least work somewhere that I was close to art. I chose to work for Blue Moon Glassworks where i learned how to do stained glass – leaded and copper foil as well as PMC silver sculpture, glass fusing, slumping and lampworking. It was there i met Erin Brown from Austin Art Glass and began Hot Glass Blowing. Soon after I attended a few workshops and began a year long apprenticeship with San Antonio Glassworks under Jason Lawson. The next semester I worked for Acclaim Screen Printing. It was there I learned photoshop, Image Setter, Illustrator, small business accounting, Screen Printing, Burning, Basting, and digital separations.
I quickly learned living other people’s dreams takes a long time and doesnt pay well.
That in mind, because i believe in Murphys law, I created plans for success ranging from A-F: A being Art and F being Fucking poor ass bitch. Triple threat doesn’t even begin to describe my work belt.
I began Austin Community College planning to transfer to another university for art. Before I could transfer out I fell in love with METAL!!! I managed to gather:
- Certification Art Metals
- Certification Metal Sculpture
- National Certification Code Welding 4g
- National Certification NDT ASNT-TC-1A
- Associate Code Welding Inspector D1.1
- Associates in Applied Science of Welding Technology
AoA – What your work is concerned with?
Mae – Thanks to my class with Professor Charlesworth, my most recent studies have been concentrated in Psycho-geographies with an emphasis on Visual ethnography. Although it took over a year after all those papers and late night readings of middle and old eanglish, my art to begin moving towards this idea of our technological evolution based on our constraints to survive. The most recent series focus on industrialization versus the concept of civilization and evolution: our post-modern rubicon. Since the age of industrialization our environment has begun to shape and be shaped by the marketplace and the consumer. Our landscapes echoed the efficiency and evolution of the assembly line of capitalism as the 19th and 20th centuries turned. When we think of sunsets, our minds edit out the buildings and the telephone lines, but they were there. As we choose to industrialize and technologically “advance,” our society continues to devolve with every machine made widget created. We don’t think about the electric lines, phone lines, the stop lights and stop signs. But they have become the norm. I refuse to edit them out, and have found a certain aestheticism amongst the power lines that evoke an internal struggle between the evolving self and the defined corporeal citizen of the nation state.
The juxtaposition of academic tradition and new age urban techniques invokes a secondary dialogue as well as a new form of G.E. Moore’s aestheticism conjoined with the principles of William Morris and the mass production of Warhol. The goal is to plant a seed by communicating one of the more frightening realizations as an anthropologist and an artist with this series: we are devolving, and our brains are telling us but we are not listening.
AoA – What is your preferred medium?
Mae – I haven’t met a medium I dont like messing up, telling what to do, breaking, beating, smushing, tearing plucking and learning how to mess up and make all those magical mistakes that create the beauty that is art anf the real beauty: the process. . That being said, I would say my fundamental training is in photo-realism with air brush and prisma color wherein I prefer a mixed media process. Depending on WHAT I want to create changes WHAT I will use. Also, the medium I use affects the outcome of my process. I also prefer spray paint and soft pastel combination for an impressionist landscape. I enjoy my fused glass to be neo-contemporary however my hot class is contemporary and my metal is minimalist abstract.
AoA – Can you talk a little about your creative processes?
Mae – Fuck off its a secret . j/k. Maybe each process meets a part of myself that needs attending.
AoA – Do you have any feelings towards digital versus traditional mediums?
Mae – “Theres a war going on outside, nobody’s safe from.”
Had i not learned to print negatives and photos, and gained a general sense of pleasure from the sound of the needle hitting a record, im not sure i would have such a strong stance towards analog in a digital world. Although i know that we have no choice but to use digital technology in our day to day life, I would prefer not to let the cogs continue to train us to unlearn how to do simple tasks. The devolution of man is real and comes in the form of corporate merge and teenage trends towards narwal-corns.
AoA – Who are some artists that you look to?
Mae – CJ Hendry– one day ill be ocd enough to prisma color hyper realism like cj
Monet -I love to watch to the light and repaint and paint all damn day too.
Manet – dont tell me when to finish, i will tear your social values apart in one brush stroke biiiitch,
Whistler – go ahead, take me to court an tell me my shit aint ART biiiiiiitch
Tiny cactus – wtf amazing digital reconstruction
Hav House – amazing landscape collage
Magrite – surrealism eat your heart out- also we both love to ‘paint in the round” who knew it was a thing?
Eakins – I tend to over study a subject like him. I call it “eakins the fuck outta it”
Turner – Id love to landscape like that- one day ill move to oils
Gericault – Missed the messege? Dont worry, I will let the title topple your government alone.
AoA – If you could own 1 piece from a living artist, who would it be?
Mae – CJ Hendry
AoA – Big question. What do you feel the role of art is in the world?
Mae – The betterment of society rests in the minds of its citizens and the understanding of the psychogeographic effects of society on the individual.
”By far the most valuable things, which we can know or imagine, are certain states of consciousness, which may roughly be described as the pleasures of human [interaction] and the enjoyment of [beauty],” (G.E. Moore).
AoA – What else do you enjoy besides making art?
Mae – Although I feel like EVERYTHING is a creation and thus art, I also play the guitar. Once I realized that my art was constrained by capitalism i realized i needed yet another unrestiricted outlet in which to express my aggression, pain, sorrow and angst, and general anxiety. I started playing when I was 21, as a gift to myself.
I also enjoy creating physcial spaces. I began living alone at a young age and sought to control my environment. Thus I found Feng shui. Since the age of 15 I have been practicing the art of energizing, re-energizing, cleansing, organizing, and balazing spaces. I apply this practice to design and started a REmodeling and REinvigorating spaces company called Juniper Oaks. Although the projects have been underway for a long time, the LLC was established this year and has 4 properties to speak of. This company specializes in returning architecture and structures to their former glory by updating and backdating styles, fixtures, and accents.
AoA – Where can we find your work? Do you have any shows planned for the future?
Mae – My work is availble locally at:
AoA – Any final advice for all the artists reading out there?
Mae – You decide the trends. You show the sheep what to like: they will fight back but its in their nature. Only compromise as much as your willing, but compromise enough to play the game well otherwise you’ll have to compromise on someone else’s terms. You have to play the game to win. Capitalism is a whore who will sell you sand in a desert and charge extra for water. It will be the death of us all and is the system that continues to devolve humanity; disallowing its constraints to evolve.
Connect with Mae!