Within walking distance of once another, two artists’ solo gallery exhibitions will inevitably remind viewers of the work of celebrated 20th-century abstract painters while provoking different feelings about the associations they raise.

Randy Twaddle Distribution Line Drawing #4, 2011

Anyone who’s seen works from Richard Diebenkorn’s seminal Ocean Park series — more than 140 variations on a bird’s-eye view of the landscape near his Santa Monica, Calif., studio — will remember them when viewing Houston artist Randy Twaddle’s stunning new drawings of pole-mounted electrical transformers and their distribution lines.

And it’s impossible to visit Robert Jessup: New Works at McMurtrey Gallery without thinking of Willem de Kooning’s lyrical, gestural abstractions from the 1970s and their somewhat more figurative predecessors from the mid-to-late 1960s.

But while thoughts of Diebenkorn’s precedent soon give way to enthusiasm over what makes Twaddle’s departure distinctive, looking at Jessup’s latest may leave you wishing you were at a de Kooning show instead.

Twaddle may have noticed Ocean Park-like compositions, in the transformers and distribution lines — particularly as seen in silhouette at dawn or dusk. The two bodies of work have similar vertical formats, spatial organizations and senses of proportion that hearken back to some of Henri Matisse’s most radically stripped-down World War I-era paintings — a major touchstone for Diebenkorn.

But although Diebenkorn’s works conjure up Southern California light, water and atmosphere, more than anything they’re about the process of painting as Diebenkorn’s erasures, revisions and occasional drips contribute both to the final composition and to the picture as a record of itself.

By contrast, while Twaddle incorporates abstraction into his ink drawings by first staining the paper with coffee splashes and pours, observation seems to be the driving force. We never quite forget we’re looking at transformers and distribution lines, even as Twaddle repeatedly calls our attention to what he calls “their unintentional beauty and lyricism. They have a strong musical association for me, like some trippy score that’s been drawn in the air by an anonymous composer.”

That trippy score hits one joyful note after another as Twaddle’s confident line zips through every tangle of wire and a chorus of white and coffee-stained negative spaces brings the unintended symphony to a crescendo. The lively dialogues between chance and control, imagination and scrutiny, and abstraction and figuration are worthy of Diebenkorn but belong to Twaddle’s eye and brush.

Robert Jessup, Rabbit and Muse Return, oil on canvas.

Jessup’s new paintings, on the other hand, wear their affinity with de Kooning on their sleeve but give viewers’ minds few other places to go.

Some owe so much to the late master’s palette and brushwork that they could be mistaken for attempted forgeries, though I don’t doubt the word of Jessup, a figurative painter of allegorical scenes for most of his career, when he describes them as a response to a trip across Europe.

“I was determined to not just envision, but to become aggressively visionary,” writes Jessup, a professor at the University of North Texas at Denton. “By trying to utilize everything I had learned from thirty years of painting and picture making, I was determined to reconfigure my invented world, to subvert the known and destroy the comfortable.”

Uncomfortable as this departure may have been for Jessup, so far it has resulted in a decidedly comfortable group of paintings for anyone familiar with abstract expressionism. And the pictures’ lingering connections to Jessup’s figurative allegorical work, which he primarily achieves with a cartoonish outline in the manner of late Philip Guston, only serves to make their gesturalism look hemmed in and mannered.

Jessup’s deviation from his own history is admirable and may lead to an interesting new direction. In these works, however, he’s broken with his own past only to bog down in someone else’s.

RANDY TWADDLE: SOMETHING TO LOOK AT
Through July 2
Moody Gallery
2815 Colquitt
713-526-9911

ROBERT JESSUP: NEW WORKS
Through July 1
McMurtrey Gallery
3508 Lake
713-523-8238