I had seen that look in Warren Burnetts eyes before but I couldn't remember just when or where. We had been friends for year since the late sixties, and had gone together to Broadway openings, book parties and a hundred other celebrations of life's mysterious renewal. Now it was April 9, 1988, a Saturday, and we were mingling with an enthusiastic crowd that had jammed the Galveston Arts Center on the Strand to view the work of a Houston artist named Sally Chandler. 

There is always an old world charm about the Strand - it's like a walk through Dickens’s London' - but the world of Sally Chandler was older than Dickens, older than Chaucer, older than the record of time.

The exhibition went out of its way to flaunt contradiction: there was live jazz and modern dance right out of the sixties, and there was wine and cheese which contemporary art patrons regard as the bare minimum of civility. Then there was Sally Chandler herself. She seemed too young to be a serious artist, too pretty and vulnerable.

Her work struck me as a fresh, almost child like expression of hope but there was something about it, some another contradiction that people appreciate when they've seen too much corruption and given in to too much cynicism I wasn't sure how Sally's work struck my friend Burnett. My guess was, given a choice of things to do at the moment, he would rather be staked across a bed of red ants and then I heard him say, “Something is happening here,’ and saw that faraway and long-ago light in his eyes.

The subjects of her seventeen canvases were vegetables Profusion's of happy and healthy vegetables swam in a matrix of brilliant acrylic, a harmony of colors and currents and atavistic impressions.  In the center of the room was a piece of art that looked like a banquet table - Sally called it “A Moveable Feast’ also in the vegetables motif. Shadowed by candlelight and strewn with rose petals, grapes frolicked with egg plants, beans embraced tomatoes and carrots frolicked in the sun like teenage angels in space. The show reminded me of that wonderful moment in "The Fantastics” when the two fathers sing about the unparalleled delights of gardening.

But this wasn’t a statement about gardening, it was a universal declaration of peace and goodwill, a caring so profound it was almost old fashioned. That a young woman from Houston had captured joy and abundance in the throes of an economic depression seemed so abstract I could barely grasp it but Burnett pointed out something that made it also utterly surreal ‘She grew up in Fort Stockton,” said the lawyer who has lived must of his life in Odessa, “When you grow up in West Texas images of lushness give you hope and keep you from going crazy.” Burnett shook his head in wonder, and then said again “Something is happening here.

Later that night Burnett mentioned buying Sally Chandler’s work. I took that to mean one or two paintings. A few days later I learned that he had bought the entire exhibition. He was even talking about building a home suitable to show it. When Burnett gets that look in his eyes something indeed is happening I still can’t recall where I saw that look before but the year must have been about 1968, when the world was young and we a I believed in sappy things like peace, hope and harmony. Goodwill isn't a characteristic peculiar to any generation, and neither is good art. 

GARY CARTWRIGHT, Senior Editor Texas Monthly
 
 

Sally Chandler has a positive vision of the world in an age of anxiety, she has underlined hope. At a time when most art is a bed of nails, hers is Matisse’s easy chair. The series of paintings and objects comprising Earth Mass, is a paean to the beauty of the world.

With a broad brush dipped in brilliant acrylics, the Texas artist has composed the images of celebration. Inspired by travels and nurtured by her lively personality, Sally Chandler's reverence for nature and romance with color artfully expressed in these works. Produced over a three and half year period, the series is the artist's ecological statement. "Its about my concern for the environment and the future of the planet," Chandler said.

Earth Mass could have been merely an escape but it is  instead, are fully an eloquent statement of optimism. The ebullient paintings are not landscapes in the traditional sense, although the sky and the oceans, the contours of the land and its bounty are recognized. Rather, the images allude to the poetic power of nature and focus on the elements as they interact and reinforce each other.

There is exultation in the androgynous figures in The Three Graces and ripeness of flavour in Cacophony. Gardens and abundant crystal blend in pictures of Eden on Earth, as in Findhorn and Caracol.  The harsher aspects are not ignored as evident in Tornado Watch, where the rage of winds is what Chandler portrays, but in the end like the adage says, there cannot be a rainbow without the rain.

The meeting of Sally Chandler and Warren Burnett was fortuitous, for Earth Mass is one of those rare collections of work in which the artist has completed a thematic cycle and the collector has made a commitment to its wholeness.

>Born a generation apart she in 1951, he nearly three decades earlier (1927), both grew up in what Burnett describes as the "desiccation and alkali flats of West Texas”. When the lush exuberance fired by Chandler’s imagination sparked a responsive chord n Burnett’s, the joyous result was a harmony of purpose.
 

PATRICIA COVO JOHNSON / Art Critic Houston Chronicle