The Big Bend Sentinel 

January 25, 2007

The Rambling Boy
An artist grows roots in Terlingua

By LONN TAYLOR

Artists tend to come and go in the Big Bend, but Bonnie Wunderlich of Terlingua has been here for more than a decade. From all indications she plans to stay around for a while.

Wunderlich first came out here on a visit in 1973, when she was in art school at the University of Houston. She remembers that she drove a yellow Karmann-Ghia with a racing stripe from Houston to the Big Bend National Park, and spent a weekend photographing the scenery. “I had no idea where I was,” she told me over lunch at the Ghost Town Café not long ago. “It was the strangest place I had ever seen.” One of the places she photographed was Willow Mountain, the mountain on the east side of Highway 118 just north of Study Butte with a sheer cliff face.

Today Wunderlich lives and paints in a rock-and-adobe house that she built at the foot of Willow Mountain 25 years after that first visit. It is a substantial-looking structure, four miles off the highway and surrounded by ocotillo and prickly pear. Right now she is building a gallery on Highway 118, a two-room adobe building with porches and a dog run that will provide spectacular views of the Chisos Mountains. She is here to stay.

Wunderlich is a lean, scrappy-looking woman in her 50s with short black hair, blue eyes, and the kind of seamed face that comes from spending a lot of time outdoors in the sun. She grew up on her father’s truck farm in Klein, Texas, a little town north of Houston. Klein was founded by German settlers, including her great-grandfather, in the 1850s and is also the home town of singer Lyle Lovett.  “I always thought of myself as an artist,” she told me. “I liked to draw but they didn’t teach art in school in Klein so I took mechanical drawing instead, and it was easy.” She started painting at 19, and again she found it easy. “I was surprised at how easy it was,” she said. “I thought I was good, but I wasn’t – but I enjoyed myself. After all, art is about entertaining yourself.” 

Wunderlich did not get any formal training in art beyond her high-school mechanical drawing class until she was 23, when she entered art school at the University of Houston. She studied there for three years, and then transferred to the University of Texas at Austin, from which she graduated in 1978. During those years she concentrated on painting, but in her senior year she discovered that she had developed an allergy to turpentine, which is a necessary adjunct to painting with oils. “I painted with my hands a lot, smearing paint on the canvas, and I absorbed too much turpentine,” she told me. In her senior year she switched to ceramics, and for the next ten years she made vases and plates with brush drawings on them. “I’ve never enjoyed doing production pottery,” she said, “so usually each pot I made was a unique pot.” She also made tiles that could be made into table tops, often incorporating historic themes or scenes into them. I saw some of them at her house and they are quite handsome.

Wunderlich has an interest in local history; she told me that she never felt completely comfortable in a place until she understood its past. She has made a concerted effort to understand Terlingua’s past, studying old maps and talking with old-timers. She has come up with a theory about the origin of Terlingua’s name that I have never heard before but which makes perfect sense. “Most people say it has something to do with three languages,” she told me, “because ‘lengua’ means ‘language’ in Spanish. But ‘lengua’ literally means ‘tongue’, and it can also mean a tongue of water, or a place where a smaller creek runs into a larger one, and I think that is the root of Terlengua’s name – a place where three arroyos ran into a larger creek, Terlingua Creek.”

When she was at the University of Texas Wunderlich worked in the Country Store Gallery, an art gallery on Lavaca Street that specialized in 19th and early 20th century landscape paintings and used to keep an enormous block of cheese on the counter and a barrel of crackers beside it. Eventually she opened her own gallery, Wunderlich Gallery, in a historic building on Congress Avenue, and she became well-known for her interest in the school of figurative painters who worked in Texas in the 1930s and 40s and are now known as the Texas Regionalists, painters such as Everett Spruce, Jerry Bywaters, and Otis Dozier, all of whom occasionally painted in the Big Bend.

In the late 1980s Wunderlich discovered that her allergy to turpentine had disappeared, and she started painting again, working in the style of the contemporary American painters she had admired in art school: Larry Rivers, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, and Richard Deibenkorn. These were all painters, Wunderlich says, “who were freed in their brush strokes by their early involvement with abstract expressionism,” but who experimented with figurative painting, in much the same way that the Texas Regionalists that Wunderlich admires experimented with Modernism.

Wunderlich’s own painting does not fit easily into a category. It is certainly not Marfa Minimalism, nor is it the kind of cowboys-and-Indians realism that finds its way into so-called “Western” art exhibits. It is figurative, and it depicts the people, the landscapes and buildings of the Big Bend, but with a freedom that is certainly not found in realistic painting. Wunderlich says she is fascinated by the geometric shapes of landscape, light, and color. “When I paint,” she told me, “I am not so much painting what I am looking at but what I feel about what I am looking at.” Readers can see what she is talking about by checking out her website at www.terlinguagallery.com, but I will warn you that the computer does not do justice to the richness of color in these paintings. A better way to look at them is to drive down to Terlingua and visit the High Sierra Bar and Grill in the El Dorado motel there, where about a dozen of them are hanging and can be viewed by natural light in the daytime. They will knock your socks off.

Lonn Taylor is a historian and writer who lives in Fort Davis. He can be reached at taylorw@fortdavis.net.