PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST: `AARON HORRELL: RECENT WORKS' TO OPEN MONDAY AT UNIVERSITY MUSEUM

CHAFFEE -- Children run in and out of Aaron Horrell's basement studio, which is lighted with only a 60-watt bulb, warmed with a space heater and seems to be missing an easel.

"My kids have caused this to evolve and happen," Horrell says "... They're always handy, climbing on cows' backs."

His kids and the cows on the family farm appear frequently in the surreal visions that spring from Horrell's life on the farm, work that invariably provokes viewers to take second, third and fourth looks.

"I'm trying to create something that's never been created," he says.

His suppers get cold when one of these visions won't wait, but Horrell's 14-year-old daughter Toni enjoys having an artist for a father.

"It makes you open-minded," she says, "because his art's so different from everybody else's."

Her father's art is so different he had to coin a word to describe it. He calls the marriage of photography and painting he is known for "phainting."

Horrell's work will be displayed in an exhibit titled "Aaron Horrell: Recent Works" opening Monday at the University Museum. A reception for the artist will be held from 4-6 p.m. Jan. 26.

This will be Horrell's fourth solo show. He previously had exhibits at Gallery 100, the Margaret Harwell Gallery in Poplar Bluff and a show at Wichita State University.

Horrell dates his art career from the day in high school he saw a calendar filled with vivid colors.

"I remember thinking if I ever painted something that pretty I wouldn't have to worry about anything," he says.

But he attended college only briefly before becoming a Navy Seabee. Stationed on Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian ocean, he was asked to paint murals to liven up the galley.

"Art became important to me in the service," he said. "People didn't know me at all. I would paint generic landscapes and people started buying them."

He began taking photographs after marrying. He estimates tens of thousands of photographs reside in boxes all over the Horrell house.

"After the fifth photo album I thought, This is ridiculous. Nobody's ever going to look at this."

Horrell realized that many photographs that may be so-so in their entirety nonetheless contained good individual images. So he began cutting those images out and combining them with other photographic images.

Then he experimented to see if the photographs and his acrylic paint landscapes could be combined.

He began as a landscape painter and, in his way, remains one.

Horrell sometimes cuts out an image but uses only the silhouette in the phainting, filling the silhouette with an entirely different image or sometimes multiple images.

He may be unschooled in the traditional sense but Horrell has actively studied art. For awhile he painted in the mode of Abstract Expressionism. He read about artists he particularly liked, like Michelangelo and Titian.

He particularly liked the way the German Expressionists tried to express feelings through colors.

Horrell was never content with painting straight-ahead landscapes. That eventually led him to phainting.

"I like trying to invent," he says. "It's like a car that doesn't run on gasoline."

Not everyone likes Horrell's art. That group even includes close family members, some of whom wish he'd stick to the realistic paintings of ducks and other wildlife he still does if commissioned.

Horrell almost wishes he'd been satisfied being a brick mason, a career Navy man or a factory worker. Life would have been simple and the money would have been better.

He has worked all those jobs and more. He grew up in a farming family, was a dairy farmer for awhile and still raises a few head of beef cattle. Now he is employed at the family hardware store in Jackson.

But an artist is who he is. "All artists who are true artists search for years to find a way to say through their art `this is me,'" he says.

The Betroll

When men introduced the exotic tree

Brought from a foreign world

They should have been able to foresee

How the local accord would be swirled.

But they were blinded by their vanity

Their colored forethought in control,

And in a rush of insanity

Established this carnivorous Betroll.

Now it is obvious for all to see

This Betroll is no Christmas tree!

It eats wild animals of the wood

Snatching away with grotesque lips

Every native creature it could.

Every single one it could eclipse.

And no matter how hard you wrestle,

What picture you paint of the past,

This tree is no tomato trestle.

What it needs is a dynamite blast.

Now it is obvious for all to see

This Betroll is no Christmas tree!

The Restoration Orb

The animals are changing

Into animated robotic freaks.

And it's not easy ... to take

Because I've loved them.

As my father loved them.

Deer, butterflies, and whales

Fish, unsufferable nightingales.

This hideous butterfly disease

Wants to superseded their beauty ...

Wants to make them its own ...

Its own animated robotic anomaly.

Scientist work in a frenzy

Like Captain Ahab out of his boat

Angry, terrified, overwhelmed

Desperately seeking the antidote.

But they need not wrong themselves.

The remedy occupies no shelves.

Salvation comes in dimensions

Mortal minds can scarce absorb.

Two children have discovered the

Restoration Orb!