The 30th Annual George Dombek Open Studio begins Saturday, Nov. 1, at the artist's home studio on Blue Springs Road in Fayetteville, near Goshen. Dombek’s work can be found in more than 60 museums and corporate collections. Ozarks at Large’s Kyle Kellams recently spent time with Dombek in advance of the Open Studio.
George Dombek’s paintings of barns, rocks, birds, bicycles, and trees are seemingly part of Arkansas’s DNA. His original works, as well as prints, can be found in museums, homes, and businesses all across the state and beyond. His sculptures, too, though fewer in number, are also distributed among collectors across the country. His watercolors manage to embrace reality while adapting it just enough to catch and hold our eyes.
This year's Open Studio, the 30th annual, also celebrates the artist's 65 years of painting. He first created a watercolor in art class when he was in 10th grade at Paris High School in Logan County.
“The first thing we did in that class was watercolor. And after a few weeks, we changed over to something else. All the other students did. I never did,” he says.
Not that it has been a direct line from that high school class to now. While he says he received early praise for his work, he also says it wasn't easy to find books about art in 1960s Paris, Arkansas, “A coal mining town. They had a library there in the courthouse, and they had a bunch of books down there. And I hung out there a lot until I looked at all the art books. But that summer, I graduated in ’63. We were taking, I don’t know if Time magazine or Life magazine or something. And then there was a story, I’m not what order, but one week there was Louis Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock.”
So that summer, he says, he became Logan County's version of Jackson Pollock, pouring paint onto a canvas.
He was still investigating what it might take to become an artist. There was a semester at Arkansas Teachers College, now Central Arkansas, in Conway. Then a cold semester in Wisconsin, and then back to Conway. He left again and spent time recreating the backs of buildings in watercolor while he was living in Fort Smith. Skeptical that he could make a living as an artist, he took some advice and earned his degree in architecture at the University of Arkansas.
What followed was a series of jobs and experiences that would inform his art. He worked as an architect in San Francisco, spending free time there studying and painting fire escapes. A friend encouraged him to visit in Youngstown, Ohio. There, George Dombek captured steel mills on canvas.
There was a graduate degree. He accepted a tenure-track job at Florida A&M, and while in Tallahassee, he took leaves to teach in Saudi Arabia and Florence. He says the Saudi experience wasn’t exactly enjoyable, but it did provide him the money to buy the land where his current home and studio are located. Florence, though wonderful and artistically valuable, he says that’s where he discovered rocks. He says it was a revelation.
“When I was in graduate school, I painted barns. They're not like anything like these current barns, but I painted barns. And I got to San Francisco and painted fire escapes. That’s all I did. And then when I got to Ohio, I painted steel mills. But then I had a retrospective show at the Butler Institute of American Art there before I went to Italy. I went in and had all these paintings, these three series. And I didn’t like it for some reason. I didn’t like the show. And I said, I’m going to change, and I’m going to do nature. Everything else was man-made.
“So I got to Italy, and I had a hard time. For a few months I was painting leaves and trees and nature. And then I went to Isle of Elba. Elba is 38 miles around. That’s where Napoleon, of course, was exiled to. And I went to the beach there, and they had marble beaches. So marble, as you know, is every color imaginable. And that hit a nerve. And I started painting rock paintings.”
Rock would continue to be an inspiration decades later. Turns out rocks found along the Buffalo River come in almost every color as well. He says rocks not only presented something new for him as an artist, but also inspired something different for people looking at his work. Up to this point, he says, he would show his work at a gallery and there was a routine. Patrons would shake his hand, tell him they loved his work.
“And they’d walk away, usually up to that point without buying much, if anything. But there was a different reaction, and they started buying these rock paintings and a few tree paintings. And I don’t know at that point, I don’t think my bicycle paintings, but I don’t know if I showed them anyway. And so I thought maybe, well, maybe I can try that again. Maybe I can make a living.”
He did.
George Dombek jokes that when he first considered life as an artist, he thought the only way was to be a commercial artist. Just not realizing that, in a sense, all art is commercial art. And that's something he learned when a gallery owner in New York called him about the sale of a painting. That gallery owner wanted to know how much Goerge Dombeck wanted the buyer to pay.
“He said, ‘how much is it? And I said, well, if you don’t know and they want it. He said it's an important collector. I said, $50,000. I could hear him now, ‘Now don’t be ridiculous.’ And I said, well, what do you think? And he sold it for $600. And he took half of it.”
Though he still has shows in other galleries — he’s had them in Nashville, Memphis, and Tulsa in just the last year — he says he likes his open studios in his own town far more than exhibiting in other places.
“Having a show in a gallery, which I’ve had them in a lot of places in the United States, is not any fun. You go there, you stand up an hour, hour and a half. People stand up in line and shake your hand and say they like your work. If they like your work, they’ll come up and tell you why. If they don’t like your work, they won’t tell you anything. Yeah. But here, the big difference is that we don’t have one for an hour. We have it for four hours. We don’t have it for one day. We have it for, like, in this case, six days. So it gives me the opportunity to talk to people, you know, or listen to people.”
This year's Open Studio will take place the first three weekends of Nov. from 2 until 6 each Saturday and Sunday of those weekends.
The first six years of this annual open studio were in his home before his current studio was finished. The studio, though, is sleek and inviting. The saplings he planted surrounding that studio have now grown to provide a canopy, and he says in the last 10 years he’s changed his approach a bit.
He says he used to spend a few years concentrating on capturing a single subject — two or three years painting barns, a couple more painting only rocks, or those years in San Francisco singling out fire escapes.
“But in the last 10 years, more years, I’ve jumped around. You know, I don’t work on one painting at a time. The parts of the painting are somewhat tedious, not tedious. Tedious is not the right word- demanding- but they take a certain amount of concentration. And I do that usually in the morning.
“And until recently I was doing that starting at 6 o’clock in the morning and painting till 6 o’clock at night. I’ve slowed down a little bit in the last, especially in the last six months. I’ve actually gone a couple of days that I haven’t painted. I’m not too happy about it, but I’d rather be painting. But, hell, I’m 110 years old.”
You can see original George Dombek creations in Crystal Bridges, including a trademark bicycle and tree sculpture on a trail just outside the museum, or his work in glass at The Preacher’s Son restaurant in downtown Bentonville. Or you can see his work at his studio. He still gets to work almost every single day at 6 a.m. and says he’s grateful that that 10th-grade art class propelled him along this journey.
But, he says he remembers the path wasn’t always clear. In fact, he remembers his time in San Francisco when he was working on an architectural project so nondescript that he didn’t even know what it was.
“I went to work one day and I stopped in a coffee shop in the morning and I ordered a glass of orange joyce. And the guy went up and picked up the orange juice. And this isn’t the story you’re wanting, but I started thinking, God I wish I had something that meaningful. You do something and you have it, you know? I couldn’t have, I don’t know.
“I was fortunate enough to hit a nerve when I was in high school. That painting. And I never looked back.”
The 30th Annual Open Studio is at George Dombek Studio at 844 Blue Springs Road in Fayetteville. That’s almost to Goshen. It’s the first three Saturdays and the first three Sundays of November, from 2 until 6 each day.
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