Artist Leia Bell—whose music posters have been featured in numerous nationwide exhibitions, the compilation book The Art of Rock, and Flatstock print conventions in Austin—has more recently embarked on a second career as a mother. With her partner Phil Sherburne, she has been raising sons Cortez, Ivan and Oslo, while still maintaining her prolific pace as an artist.
Their eldest son, 5-year-old Cortez, has taken after both parents (Sherburne also paints) and eagerly picked up the pen and brush to create his own works full of his own vibrant personality, and he will display the first exhibit of his art along with his mother’s in yet another unique turn for Signed & Numbered. It will be one of the last shows in the space below Slowtrain Records before the gallery relocates from the Broadway area’s steepening rents to the Kilby Court area again, where Phil & Leia first resided together while operating Kilby as a music venue.
Bell’s work initially came out of watching bands and designing music fliers into more intimate still life and character studies (“Mother & Child No. 4” is pictured). Cortez’s artwork is full of the typical stuff of early childhood: animals, monsters and robots, yet he injects them with more dimensionality than many children his age, no doubt due to his parental influences. It would be fascinating to see another exhibition every few years to examine the artistic progress of both of them.
Mother & Child: New Work By Leia Bell & Cortez Sherburne @ Signed & Numbered, 221 E. 300 South, 801-596-2093, through Sept. 12.