Video interview: Dallas neighborhood artist Chris McHenry

by Mike Bullock , John P. Meyer

On a sunny morning a couple of months ago, I closed the door to my Old Lake Highlands abode and fired up the filmguymobile, eager to begin another day of movie reviewing and neighborhood coverage from the global nerve center of Pegasus News world-wide liberal conspiracy media operations. (Or maybe the corporate folks from Seattle were in town for a visit, I can't recall exactly.)

While motoring up Northlake Drive, I couldn't help noticing a guy in an Aussie hat sitting behind an easel with a brush-like instrument in his hand, seemingly in the act of painting a view of a perfectly ordinary (perhaps even sub-ordinary) street scene from this modest East Dallas residential corner. I mean, we're not talkin' the Champs-Élysées here, folks.

Curious behavior, but I figured it was just some local geezer's passing fancy. I drove on.

Passing fancy? Nothing of the sort, as I discovered over the next several weeks. I kept driving by this chap and his easel set up in different locations around the neighborhood, sometimes down at the Classen end and sometimes closer to Peavy, but always tethered by some sort of thematic umbilical to the (seemingly) bland and uninteresting 50's bungalow architecture of the houses fanning out from Northlake Dr.

Slow on the uptake I may be, but bonk me upside the head often enough and I'll eventually catch on: there was probably an interesting story behind this fellow and his seemingly monotonous artistic regimen. So I stopped and introduced myself and scheduled an interview.

What struck me immediately upon getting a glimpse of his oil-on-linen (on board) work-in-progress was how magnificent he made these humble houses appear, as if he'd rendered their images with a magic brush. It just goes to show: a good artist actually CAN make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

You can find out more about Chris McHenry - which this gentleman's name turns out to be - on his website.

- JM

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