About the Artist and Poet Bob Schneider:

Now in his mid 40's and originally from Ypsilanti, Michigan, he grew up living in Germany while his father pursued a career in the opera.  Eventually Schneider ended up in El Paso studying fine art, but dropped out and moved to Austin Texas to pursue his own career in music where he lives today. He has published two books of poetry and one book about his visual art.

His innate talent for drawing cannot be denied, as is his ability to free associate and compose on the fly.  Through the act of drawing, the artist leaves behind, the evidence of his train of conscience observations about the human condition, while the words as a compositional element are just as carefully crafted and become part of the artists' overall visual vocabulary.  The artist's flow seems effortless and belies the painstaking craft and time needed to execute images using the intaglio process. A thousand words compose the tongue of just one figure while in another composition only the "YOU" appears in a cryptic moment on a wall behind a surrealist metaphor of a person in the guise of a tree trunk. It is remarkable that Schneider is working on metal plates to do this. It is remarkable as he is etching lines and not just drawing on paper where mistakes could be corrected.  In one piece Schneider shows he has mastered, and indeed owns the intaglio process, and in a somewhat humorous fashion, he plays with the sometimes difficult feature of reverse lettering inherent to writing text in printmaking. From a central figure a conversation could be construed as someone talking out of both sides of his mouth, while the hundreds of words of text are written both backwards in a reverse text bubble, and forwards in another winding through the composition. This is only an inside joke to other printmakers, a technical pun, but well put, and well used.

 The title for the exhibition "We Invented Love" comes from a particular piece, found in the artist's presentation at d. m. allison, and the cover of Schneider's recently published book. The complete text reads, "WE INVENTED LOVE SOMEHOW, AND WITHOUT MERCY OR INSTRUCTION, HALF A HEAD COMING OUT OF THE WATER IN THE NIGHT." The selection of collage pieces and assemblages, along with the poetry found in the artist's book, offers the viewer a first unvarnished awareness of Schneider's mind at play as he experiments in a variety media. Here the process of discovery is raw but enough to warrant our serious consideration and holds out the promise of many good things to come.


This exhibition started as strictly a printmaking show, but after being introduced to more of what Schneider was doing it seemed a shame not to included as much about the artist as possible in this, his first solo exhibition in Houston.


d. m. a. 05/27/2014