Courtesy of Joel Cooner Gallery

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Today's FLP (or FLPs) come from the Joel Cooner Gallery. They're called door boards, and they are exactly what they sound like: boards that are hung over and around doors.

Or the openings to homes, anyway.

These are from the Star Mountains in central Papua New Guinea from the Ok mountain culture. (Pronounced "oak.") "The designs are visual abstractions of the human form," Cooner explains.

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Courtesy of RO2 Art

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People can be, shall we say, incredibly emphatic when they talk about religion. But, sometimes, they're a little too emphatic. Enough that you can't help but wonder what they really feel.

Today's FLP, "Fanatic Aunt" by r. mateo diago, one of four pieces in a series titled "iChat God Talk," examines just that question. Without their knowledge, the subjects, members of the artists' family, were photographed continuously as they were discussing their religious views.

The images that diago captured are full of passion, wonder, and humor, as well as confusion and uncertainty. Each piece is accompanied by a short handwritten swatch from the conversation, highlighting each person's religious views.

The result is a visual eavesdropping of sorts, particularly fascinating because there are no aural cues. The movement, the posture, and the person's use of their hands all become more essential with the absence of sound.

It is far easier to lie with words. The body and the face often give us away. 

r. mateo diago: every then and now is on view at Ro2 Art Downtown through January 28, 2012.

Courtesy of Craighead Green Gallery

​Sculptor Shawn Smith likes to take stuff apart so he can put it back together--pixel-by-pixel. He finds images online, and then crafts them into 3D reality: One little piece at a time. He starts with a Google image, usually nothing more than a thumbnail.

He zooms in until the image is pixelated, and then he draws what he sees on graph paper. From there he creates a map, of sorts. Then it's on to cutting tiny pieces of wood, dying them, and, ultimately, assembling them.

In "Disintegrating Eagle," a three-dimensional bird looks as if he might dissipate into pieces. The simple act of searching online gives us an image. But Smith dissects that image and then reassembles it, painstakingly recreating in reality what was instantly granted virtually.

So, there's an interesting social commentary at work here: Is there artistic value in the Google search, as well as the resulting rendering? Are you, Google searcher, a part of the art?

They're interesting questions, all ones you can seek to answer at Smith's current show at Craighead Green Gallery, where you also can see the work of Peter Burega and Pamela Nelson through December 19.

Courtesy of Marty Walker Gallery

​Some art leaves a singular, momentary impression. Other work sets the mind afire. Michael Reafsnyder's paintings definitely fall into the latter category. In this week's FLP, "I've Got a Feeling," Reafsnyder takes the eye on an amazing race through every scrape, swirl, and, dribble and blob.

Get close enough--we swear--and your eye finds the shape of a smiling face that Reafsnyder appears to have squeezed perfectly from a paint tube. It's a subtle, but bright reminder to cheer the hell up. Just trust us, OK?

There's no perceptible rhyme or reason. The colors race and wiggle and swerve. It's an expression of playfulness that can be best served up close and personal.

See it at the Marty Walker Gallery through December 23.

Courtesy of Jacques Lamy Gallery

Culbert's "Red Tree"

​Steven Culbert is one of those artists who eschews the idea that there's any limit to the number of ways you can paint. You can see that in his current show, Big and Small, at Jacques Lamy Gallery.

Upon viewing the show, you might not even guess that all of the work is from the same artist. The works are indeed big and small. But they are also robust and minimal. Boisterous and meek. Colorful and pale.

This FLP, titled "Red Tree," invokes an under the sea feel with the central feature looking more like coral than any earthbound tree. The thick paint Culbert employs reads like reef on the canvas. You can almost sense the slow drift of underwater movement -- a sway, really. Culbert's work is often about mood and this piece certainly has one: meditative and anticipatory and watery.

See Culbert's Big and Small until December 5 at the Jacques Lamy Gallery, 1607 Dragon Street, 214-747-7611, www.jacqueslamy.com.

Jeremy Red's "Alex 1," 2011

​While the rest of us are freaking out about what to buy Aunt Fern for the holidays, Conduit Gallery is basically blowing up with shows.

There's Jeremy Red's solo show of unconventional portraits, Catching Up -- his first here since he moved from Denton to Seatle, WA in 2003. There's a group show called from outside, in floats a music box, and then Tom Russotti is putting on a mock trial of sort under the show name Hatchjaw and Bassett LLP. The latter is clearly a commentary on overpriced attorneys and frivolous lawsuits. The former, well, they are an exciting mash-up that provides us a three-in-one of Fine Lookin' Pieces.

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Courtesy of Kirk Hopper Fine Art

​The piece is called Lake Austin Motel, Room 133. But as soon as I hear the title, I think of Lake Austin Spa Resort. I imagine the reclining figure is taking a much needed break after taking Nia classes and kayaking in the lake all day long.

The black and white of the painting lend an air of mystery: The figure appears to be wearing a mask. She doesn't seem to know - or care - that she is being watched. She appears to be the watcher.

She turns her gaze, and enjoys a glass of wine. There is something all together relaxing about this piece. The figure is peaceful, snuggled in the linens which the artist invites the viewer to imagine as being plush and cozy. A painting of a plant hangs above the bed.

The lines and dots and shapes are loose and the edges are undefined. The result is a sense of ease and invitation to learn more. And the more you look, the harder it is not to know just what it is that she's looking at...

See Tolbert's work through December 3 at Kirk Hopper Fine Art.

Courtesy of Valley House Gallery and Sculpture Garden

​Quilts have long been misunderstood. People have considered them craft, pretty blankets sewn by women with too much time on their hands. Although many quilts are quite beautiful, they are also incredibly powerful. Frontier women crafted them to shelter their families from the dangerous cold. Slaves created them as creative outlets in otherwise austere lives. And, some say, they designed them as road maps, pointing the way to freedom's door.

The paintings of Sedrick Huckaby raise quilts from craft to art in his incredible renderings of quilts alone and in groupings, with props and without, hanging and crumbled, revealing backs and fronts. They are masterfully tactile and strangely provocative.

Huckaby's piece "The Day We Talked a New Talk" is an exceptional example of his understanding of quilts as far more than pretty craft. The quilts in this piece are among graffiti, wood, and cardboard boxes. Perhaps they are what makes an alley a home, fills a dark space with the light of art, or provides warmth. Or, maybe they do all three.

In Alice Walker's famous short story, "Everyday Use" Walker challenges readers to consider the things we choose to surround ourselves with and how we use and respect (or disrespect) them. That is precisely what Huckaby's work does as well, creating conversations where before there was only ignorance and silence.

See the exhibition, Sedrick Huckaby: When Old People Talk to Young People, through December 3 at Valley House Gallery and Sculpture Garden. Huckaby will speak on his work Monday, November 14, at 7 p.m. also at the gallery.

Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York. © Diana Al-Hadid

Diana Al-Hadid's "Gradiva's Fourth Wall"

​It was pretty damn magical Friday night in the Arts District. The galleries were open late and light, video, and sound installations of one kind and another dotted the streets as part of Aurora. The Nasher hosted the final 'Til Midnight of the season with The Bright playing on the stage and the original Tron playing on the screen.

And just down the hall from the Nasher Café sat the inspiration for this week's FLP, Diana Al-Hadid's "Gradiva's Fourth Wall." The piece is part of the Nasher's Sightings, "a new series of small-scale exhibitions and installations that explore work by established and emerging contemporary sculptors."

The piece is made of steel, polymer gypsum, wood, fiberglass, and paint. But it looks as if it sprang from miles of fabric and a zillion shapes crafted from cardboard with oddly shaped holes cut into them. There are colors mixed and muted and random on the layered pieces, which are all gluey and glossy and glazed.

Layers and layers of the cut-outs form levels and a lake of sorts is revealed on top of which is a platform with treelike figures all around looking as if they are covered in Spanish moss. And in the center of it all, the vision of a body draped across a divan. Only there is no body and no divan, only the suggestion of both.

All of it seems to be floating. It's architectural, ethereal, masterful. You want desperately to touch it, knowing it must be hard, but imagining it soft. Gazing at the voluminous fabric that pools and drapes and hangs, you fight an inspired urge to climb the impossibility and faint back into the scene, as classical as it is wholly new.

See Sightings: Diana Al-Hadid through January 15, 2012 at the Nasher Sculpture Center.

Courtesy of the artist

​Her name is Stacey Maynard but she calls herself Lucky Girl. And rightly so. Maynard, unlike way too many people, is actually doing what she loves -- creating art.

The high school art teacher working in a variety of media hails from Australia, but she's celebrating her first solo exhibition, Artist Abroad, Thursday here in the US.

This Lucky Girl piece titled, "Taking a Stance," is one of those that reminds us how easy (or is it lucky) it can be to stumble on a really intriguing piece in a funny little gallery from an artist you've never heard of, still finding her feet.

Something about these two little birds calls out. It is extremely stripped down and free of pretension or hesitation: It's a painting of two birds.

But there's much more to it. These two birds are clearly in conversation -- the left one, angry and aggressive. You can see it in his eye, in his puffed out chest, and in his outstretched foot, inching toward the other bird. The bird on the right is scared -- his stance tight and upright. The other bird has backed him into a corner, figuratively, and to the end of the branch, literally. Even his tail droops down like a dog's between his legs.

Who knows what the problem is. One bird stole the other's worm, girlfriend, nest. It doesn't much matter. What does matter is that there is a conversation at all, in rough-hewn lines and raised feathers on the back of the right hand bird's neck. So much attitude with such simple shapes and strokes.

One thing is certain: I would not want to be that little guy on the right.

See this one night only show this Thursday, October 27, from 6:00pm - 9:00pm at A Touch of Paris Art Gallery 202 W. Wall Street, Grapevine, TX.