BEHIND THE SCENES - Meet Bruce Lee Webb

Texas Road Hog Red, etching, 30 x 22 inches, 2017l

Flatbed had the pleasure of working with Bruce Lee Webb in 2017 to create a series of etchings called the “Road Hog Series” and a smaller etching titled “Cowboy” The “Road Hog” prints were printed in three different editions with color variations. The sugar-lift aquatint drawing references Webb’s interest in phrenology with his love of traveling in Texas. Printed under this image is a photo-etching of ledger pages with doctor notes from a pharmacy in the early 1900s. Link to see Webb’s Flatbed collection and see all the variations!

He was born on August 7, 1966, in Waxahachie, Texas. Bruce Lee’s grandparents were missionaries in remote hill stations in the mountains of Kerala, South India during the 1930s and ’40s, where his mother was born. The esoteric books and folk art from the Sub-Continent he grew up with have had a pervasive influence on Webb’s artwork. Bruce Lee was absorbed by skateboarding and punk rock culture in Dallas in the early 1980s and met his wife Julie, who collaborated on a cut and paste fanzine called Bad Karma wherein Bruce included drawings and layout design. Bruce Lee inherited his grandparents’ antiquarian book collection and has added to the collection of printed matter with folk art, railroad hobo lore, train car graffiti, the study of the occult, and fraternal history.

The Webb’s moved to Waxahachie in 1987 and began to buy and sell antiques and folk art from their shop “Beyond Time Antiques.” By 1991 Webb Gallery was open, providing the Webb’s an unbounded opportunity to explore and share art and unusual antiques. Throughout their travels, the Webb’s began to visit Southern folk and visionary artists Johnnie Swearingen, Royal Robertson, James Son Thomas, and others. The artists who Bruce Lee has encountered along the way have had a profound influence on Bruce Lee's own oeuvre. In his travels, he collects vintage cotton seed sacks, canvas bags, and journal and ledger paper on which he then paints and draws.

Along with co-author Lynne Adele, Bruce recently completed a book published by the University of Texas Press, As Above So Below - Art of the Fraternal Lodge, 2015.

Cowboy, etching, 24 x 18 inches, 2017.