s i x 0 6 » Press

the art of love …

six06 — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 08:03:17 +0000

come join us …

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Now playing: XTC – Summer’s Cauldron
via FoxyTunes

Spanglish Chick Interview …

six06 — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 01:34:48 +0000

check out this interview on the new Spanglish Chick Blog

thanks, lisa, it was fun
[but i should really learn to spellcheck]

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Now playing: Bert Jansch – Alice’s Wonderland
via FoxyTunes

assemblage pieces …

six06 — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 08:17:34 +0000

i am October’s Designer Guest at AlphaStamps! they sent me some of their products and asked that i create something[s] for them i am now offering these three assemblage pieces in my etsy shop!

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Now playing: Bert Jansch – Courting Blues
via FoxyTunes

Old Dogs …

six06 — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 19:59:26 +0000

here is the final workup for the book cover of Donna Moore’s book, “Old Dogs” that i had the immense pleasure of working on. Thank you, David [of Busted Flush Press], for the great opportunity. can’t wait to get a copy

press …

six06 — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 04:46:47 +0000

i’m in the deer park broadcaster today

click for larger pdf file.
or here for weblink

photo is by OneEyedPhotoWorx

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Now playing: The Essence All Star – Los Dos Lorettas
via FoxyTunes

arte y vida …

six06 — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 03:19:30 +0000

i’m featured over at Arte Y Vida Chicago. check it out.

Casa Ramirez honors local artist, Lizbeth Ortiz …

six06 — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 19:04:26 +0000

… today between 4 and 7:

check out the write up in the houston chronicle a couple weeks ago.

i’ll be there, then i have to head over to meca and pick up my pieces. the professor of chicano studies at the university of houston is interested in a couple of them, i’ll be meeting with him next week.

it’s gorgeous out today.
why am i stuck here inside.

press …

six06 — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 04:01:14 +0000

ah, martin devore sent me this article that was in the deer park progress last week.

neat!

thanks, martin!

six06 newsletter :: october 2008

six06 — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 22:26:20 +0000

so what happens when you go a long time without updating? you have a lot to say. where to begin?

press :

i was interviewed by Kosaku Norioka of the Deer Park Progress / Pasadena Citizen in july.

consignment :

together with a wonderful book store in the heights, Heights Books Libros , you can now find some of my work on consignment. [here are photos , new work to be changed out this week]. it’s been a very successful union. thank you, blanca, for the opportunity to work with you. coincidentally, she carries “Demon In The Mirror ” by S. Joaquin Rivera, for whom my artwork graces the covers.

past events :

here are galleries of photos i have taken for past exhibits and events [please note that i'm usually BEHIND the camera, rather than in FRONT of it, heh]:

carnival, may 2008

life and passion of frida kahlo, meca july 2008

ripley house, july 2008

independence show, elder street gallery july 2008

the latin grammys are coming to houston :

earlier this year, i entered a contest where the winner’s artwork would be used to promote the 2008 latin grammys which are being held here in houston. we were given less than two weeks to come up with something, but i [like my contemporaries] waited till the 11th hour to actually create something. my work was not chosen, but my dear friend lizbeth ortiz’s piece was, and i’m so very proud of her. the official announcement was made in los angeles, now the fun begins. i can’t think of a more wonderful and dedicated talent who deserved this more. congratulations, lizbeth.

there were 14 participants in all, and as a consolation, they are holding a private reception and exhibit in our honor at the Museum of Natural Science in the Cullen Hall of Gems later this month.

new medium … again :

it’s not that i get bored, it’s just that i’m very curious … which is why i’ve always got my hands into different things. i recently purchased a book, Secret of Rusty Things by Michael DeMeng , and was struck with divine inspiration to try my hand at this “reclaimed art”.

i’ve made several “shrines”, which you can find here . i’ve had such an amazing response to them that a couple of them can be seen later this month at two different exhibits in california.

so what’s on the horizon?

here is a list of things coming up in october. i hope you can attend one or all of these. it’s always nice to see a familiar face at these things, it takes the edge off [being that i'm painfully nervous when thrust in the spotlight].

upcoming events :

O C T O B E R

Alexis Kidd Medical Benefit : saturday, october 4 [more info] dan electro’s, houston texas
Ancient Ofrenda : october 18-24 [more info] arizona state university, tempe arizona
Dia de los Muertos : october 3 – november 2 [more info] ten women gallery, venice california
Noche de los Muerto : october 1-18 [more info] muddy waters, santa barbara california
Women on Women : october 11-18 [more info] elder street gallery, houston texas
Hispanic Heritage Celebration : october 10 [more info] m.e.c.a., houston texas
9th Annual Latin Grammys Exhibition : october 30 [closed reception] cullen hall of gems, houston texas
The Bridge, Survivors of Domestic Violence Vigil : october [more info] pasadena city hall, pasadena texas
Dia de los Muertos : october 20 – november 8 [more info] lawndale art center, houston texas

N O V E M B E R

Via Colori : november 22-23 [more info] sam houston park, houston texas
Dia de Comunidad de Target : november 22 [more info ] t.b.h., houston, texas

a closing word :

in case anyone was wondering, we survived ike. our house is located in the area that was being threatened with the storm surge, but luckily, the water only came up two inches [as evidenced by the debris left on our concrete slab which our house sits on.] i suspect tornado-like things touched down, as only a block away was inexplicable destruction. to say we were lucky is an understatement. my brother and his family had us over during the worst of it, but we were well prepared. still trying to get our lives back in order. if there’s nothing i hate more is having a wrench thrown into my schedule. this put me behind two weeks and that’s just unacceptable this time of year for me. heh

i hope those of you in the area made it through just as well. and for everyone else out there, stay safe. thank you for tuning in.

peace.

-julie zarate

just a reminder, visit my etsy shop, where i offer a great many handmade items, including original paintings.

www.six06.com

more press …

six06 — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 20:31:01 +0000

The Houston Chronicle [Pasadena / Baytown Edition] has a write up about this weekend’s Independence Exhibit.

and the Pasadena Citizen blurb : PDF

terribly unproductive …

six06 — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 20:26:08 +0000

unless you count virtual productivity.

been out of pocket for a good portion of the extended weekend.

i received two BEAUTIFUL handmade pendants from my good pal, summer. i’m a sucker for tentacles [no pun intended] and her take on this artform was just marvelous [sorry for the lateness, Coatlique is on its way ... i hope you like it as much as i loved the pendants !!]

discovered the “Users” ability on the mac recently. i almost fell out of my chair when the screen turned into a cube and turned on its side. ha! i’m a dork and am easily amused.

had lunch with mr. gaitan on thursday. thanks, nick!

missed mrs. donovan’s call that day for an invite to come paint at her place. for some reason, my phone has been spitting out messages that are days old. i mean, what’s the point of having a cell phone if you don’t get the message until days [and in rare cases, weeks] later. :\

on the fourth, we drove two miles down the road to watch the fireworks. it took us 30 minutes to get back home.

saturday, julian and i went to heights libros-books to drop off some work i’ll have on consignment there. we spent some time talking with blanca, the owner, who was very inspirational. it’s so nice to hear about these self-made stories. what’s special to me about the place and her story is that she’s bringing something rare to the community … a bilingual book store. the only other two have been around for over twenty years, but are set in their ways and not very “up with the times”. blanca offers such a wide variety of works and goes one better by offering to seek out the work herself if it’s not in stock. plus, i love that she opens the doors and has local artists works on display. she also imports crafts from mexico and has her and her brother’s photography gracing the walls. it’s a bit of a catch all place there, but all the things are wonders.

more photos of our visit here

it’s nice to see her doing so well, being that it’s only been three months since she opened. support small businesses and stop in.

Heights Book-Libros
502 E. 20th St. STE D
Houston, TX 77008
Phone: (713)869-9966
E-Mail: heightsbooks@yahoo.com

we took a side trip down this street:

and had lunch at Teotihuacan on Airline. to which julian remarked “the harder it is to pronounce the name of the restaurant, the better the food.” i have to agree. it was quite delicious.

later we met with sonia and jeremy and had a nice get together. so good to see those two. he looks so different than the last time i saw him back in november. it’s the beard and curly locks, which i’m a sucker for. [sorry! can't help it, he's a cutie!]

the rest of the weekend was laid back and low. i got the Sims 2 up and running again. i’m not crazy about character development, but i do enjoy building things. it’s the closest i can get to being an architect without all the schooling.

today i drop off my piece for the Independence show this coming saturday. thanks to a very special someone who sent me this PDF file of the recent article.

Front Page, Jump Page.

motives ….

six06 — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 18:27:48 +0000

there was an ulterior motive behind my recent transformation:

i was contacted by Kosaku Narioka of the Deer Park Progress to interview me. he asked to see my studio and ask me some questions. i was very impressed at the amount of research he did prior to his arrival, as many of his questions had to do with stuff i’d posted on my website and in my blog. after about an hour, i believe he had all he needed to work something up. [in retrospect, i don't even remember what i talked about, not until i read the article and it all came back to me]. i have a tendency to zone out during these things and just go into auto-pilot. at any rate, it’s a neat article and i’m so happy he didn’t use the photos we took that day of me in the “studio” because i looked like crap [having turned in at about 4 a.m. the night before, and working a full day at work]

thank you, mr. narioka and deer park progress.

the article.

. . .

i just went to the store and bought several papers, one i’ll keep for the scrapbook i keep meaning to make.

a scan of the paper article:

demon in the mirror

six06 — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 19:19:30 +0000

is now being carried in Heights Books – LIbros!

visit broken sword publications

somewhere, sometime, a mutual admiration

six06 — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 21:23:58 +0000

God, Texas and Tom Waits

Tom Waits may not come from around here, but a good chunk of his favorite music does

By John Nova Lomax

Published on June 19, 2008 [HOUSTON PRESS]

Although he was raised in and around Los Angeles and San Diego, few musicians have as much love for the music of the Lone Star State as Tom Waits. It’s in his blood; his father Jesse Frank Waits was from the northeast Texas town of Sulphur Springs.

Michael O’Brien

Houston’s long and crooked streets hold a lot of charm for Tom Waits.

Subject(s):

Tom Waits, singer/songwriters, Texas music

This Tex-o-philia is apparent after even a cursory reading of the multitude of interviews anthologized online at the Tom Waits library, www.tomwaitslibrary.com, especially in the “Childhood” and “Influences” categories. To paraphrase Lyle Lovett, he may not be from Texas but he loves Texas anyway.Not blindly, however. This Houston show will be only his second in Texas since 1999, when the vicious beating of one of his friends by bouncers at Austin’s La Zona Rosa caused Waits to declare a permanent boycott of the state. He seems to have amended that to a boycott of Austin only, as in addition to Sunday’s sold-out Houston show, El Paso(!) and Dallas are also on the Glitter and Doom Tour. But not Austin. Hah.

At any rate, here are a few of the things Tom Waits digs about the Lone Star State.

Sulphur Springs, Texas Hometown of Tom’s father, Jesse Frank Waits. Named after the James brothers, the elder Waits moved to California and went by Frank because it did not have the rustic Dust Bowl connotation of Jesse. Frank Waits worked a series of jobs including orange picker and Spanish teacher and left his family when Tom was about ten, because, as Tom once explained, he wanted to hang out in dark bars sipping Glenlivet. The younger Waits said this abandonment left him with a void that caused him to hang out with many of his friends’ fathers, through whom he picked up his enduring affection for older music. Before he left, however, Frank filled Waits with a love of Mexican music, which crops up from time to time, as on his Los Lobos collaboration “Kitate.”

“Abilene” and “El Paso” Two Texas towns spawned tunes that were among Waits’s favorite songs as a child. “When I heard ‘Abilene’ on the radio it really moved me. And then I heard, you know: ‘Abilene, Abilene, prettiest town I ever have seen. Women there don’t treat you mean. [In] Abilene…” I just thought that was the greatest lyric you know ‘Women there don’t treat you mean.’”

Elsewhere, Waits has spoken of his affection for Marty Robbins’s “El Paso,” which he recalls learning first in Spanish, because of his Spanish teacher father’s love of Mexican radio. (He has also said that his family lived in El Paso briefly, though whether he based his decision to play in El Paso on his former residence there or because of the song is anybody’s guess.)

But in speaking of his admiration for and the formative effects of songs like “El Paso,” “Abilene” and also “Detroit City,” Waits once told Terry Gross on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air the following: “I liked songs with the names of towns in them, and I liked songs with weather in them and something to eat (laughs). So I feel like there’s a certain anatomical aspect to a song that I respond to. I think: ‘Oh yeah, I can go into that world. There’s something to eat, there’s the name of a street, there’s a saloon, okay.’ So probably that’s why I put things like that in my songs.”

You can hear that approach in action on “Fannin Street,” Waits’s hard-luck tale about a formerly seedy and colorful and now utterly sterile downtown Houston thoroughfare. **

Lightnin’ Hopkins Waits once said that seeing the Third Ward bluesman perform in California was a pivotal moment in his life. As he put it to Australian newspaper The Age six years ago: “I saw Lightning Hopkins when I was about 15, and he was doing, I don’t know, ‘Black Snake Moan’ or something, and I just thought, ‘Wow, this is something I could do.’ I don’t mean I could play guitar like him, I just mean that this could be a possible career opportunity for me. Perhaps I could train at home and keep my present job.”

Larry McMurtry The Archer City-bred former Houstonian was often cited as a favorite in Waits’s 1970s interviews, although over the course of a few years, Waits’s praise went from unqualified to qualified.

Leadbelly Texas/Louisiana songster with whom Waits feels a mystical connection. Leadbelly died the day after Waits was born, and Waits likes to say that the two of them “passed in the hall.”

In 2005, the London Observer asked Waits to list his top 20 recordings of all time. Waits over-obliged with 28, one of which was Leadbelly’s Last Sessions. “Leadbelly was a river, was a tree. His 12-string guitar rang like a piano in a church basement. The Rosetta stone for much of what was to follow, he died in ‘49. Excellent to listen to when driving across Texas. Contains all that is necessary to sustain life, a true force of nature.”

Waits has also recorded Leadbelly’s “Goodnight Irene.”

John A. and Alan Lomax I wouldn’t force this if it weren’t a salient fact, but Waits is a huge fan of my Meridian-raised great-grandfather and my Austinite great-uncle.

Another entry on his Observer list was the Alan Lomax Collection CD Prison Songs, Volume 1: Murderous Home. “Without spirituals and the Baptist church and the whole African-American experience in this country, I don’t know what we would consider music, I don’t know what we’d all be drinking from,” he said. “It’s in the water. The impact the whole black experience continues to have on all musicians is immeasurable. Lomax recorded everything. From the sounds of the junkyard, or he would go into a market and just record the cash register — disappearing machinery that we would no longer be hearing.”

Speaking about the song “Pony” from Mule Variations, Waits told the Austin Chronicle that he wanted the song to be “bare and by itself, like those Lomax recordings, those Library of Congress recordings that I love so much.”

Bill Hicks In Waits’s view, Hicks, a grad of Stratford High School in west Houston, was the spiritual descendant of Waits’s childhood hero Lenny Bruce. Rant in E Minor was the third Texan entry on Waits’s Observer list of faves. Here is what he had to say about it: “Bill Hicks, blowtorch, excavator, truthsayer and brain specialist, like a reverend waving a gun around. Pay attention to Rant in E Minor, it is a major work, as important as Lenny Bruce’s. He will correct your vision. His life was cut short by cancer, though he did leave his tools here. Others will drive on the road he built. Long may his records rant even though he can’t.”

On another list of favorites, Waits cited Hicks’s Flying Saucer Tour. “Bill was trying to get free of the nagging hunger for mainstream acceptance. These gems were recorded in towns barely on the map, and he sometimes had to make a mad dash for the car, outrunning an angry mob. Hicks was our Lenny Bruce. R.I.P.”

Daniel Johnston Waits recorded the Waller resident’s “King Kong” on the 2004 tribute album The Late Great Daniel Johnston: Discovered Covered.

Praha, Texas All right, maybe Waits doesn’t love this little Fayette County hamlet literally, but he does deeply enjoy the music from thereabouts.

The fourth Texan entry on his Observer list was the Arhoolie/Folklyric compilation Texas-Czech: Bohemian Moravian Bands, which featured selections of music recorded between 1928 and 1953 by Bacova’s Ceska Kapela, Frank Hermanek’s Band, Adolph Pavlas and his Bohemians, Julius Dietert’s Band, crossover country star Adolph Hofner, and the orchestras of Joe Patek, Ray Krenek, Benny Brosh, John R. Baca, and Houston’s own Bill Mraz.

Here’s what Waits had to say about the album: “I love these Czech-Bavarian bands that landed in Texas of all places. The seminal river for mariachi came from that migration to that part of the United States, bringing the accordion over, just like the drum and fife music of post-slavery, they picked up the revolutionary war instruments and played blues on them. This music is both sour and bitter, and picante, and floating above itself like steam over the kettle. There’s a piece [By Baca] called the ‘Circling Pigeons Waltz’, it’s the most beautiful thing — kind of sour, like a wheel about to go off the road all the time. It’s the most lilting little waltz. It’s accordion, soprano sax, clarinet, bass, banjo and percussion.”

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the jefe just related a story about hicks fascination with waits and said “if you talk to him, tell him to call me … i’ll tell him that story.” heh

** [HEY I WORK ON FANNIN STREET]

call for entries : Someone Else

six06 — Thu, 29 May 2008 15:07:15 +0000

May 16, 2008, 5:17PM
Portrait exhibition seeks ‘Someone Else’ entries

From Houston Chronicle

Artists of all ages and experience levels are invited to submit entries for a Someone Else portrait exhibition to be displayed in Lone Star College—Cy-Fair’s Bosque Gallery this summer.

Following last year’s successful open call for a Self-Portrait exhibition, this second open call for art submissions focuses on someone else’s portrait. The exhibition will run June 17-July 3.

Submissions will be accepted noon-4 p.m. May 29 and June 3; noon-7 p.m. June 4; and 11 a.m.-7 p.m. June 5.

For more information: 832-482-1038 or 281-290-3252.

[THANKS, MARTIN]

s i x 0 6 » Press

the art of love …

Spanglish Chick Interview …

assemblage pieces …

Old Dogs …

press …

arte y vida …

Casa Ramirez honors local artist, Lizbeth Ortiz …

press …

six06 newsletter :: october 2008

more press …

terribly unproductive …

motives ….

demon in the mirror

somewhere, sometime, a mutual admiration

God, Texas and Tom Waits

Tom Waits may not come from around here, but a good chunk of his favorite music does

By John Nova Lomax

Published on June 19, 2008 [HOUSTON PRESS]

Michael O’Brien

Houston’s long and crooked streets hold a lot of charm for Tom Waits.

Subject(s):

call for entries : Someone Else