Roger Winter is the most important landscape painterof the post-1945 period in Texas. His work is in the collection of every major institution in the state, and he has played a major role in the careers of artists of the next generation. As a student at The University of Texas at Austin, he worked with the legendary landscape painter, Loren Mosely, who brought the constructivist landscape aesthetic of Cezanne to rural Texas and injected a rigor into the regionalism of Texas art. It was from this fundamentally European tradition that Winter began to conceive of landscapes as pictorial fields constructed with patch-like gestures, each of which embodies an optical sensation.
To this fundamentally Cezannian concept, Roger Winter added a personal dimension, and, when he arrived in Dallas as a young artist in the 1960's, he created landscapes and urbanscapes filled with personal elements - images derived from old photographs and memories of childhood inserted into pictorial realms that relate directly to visual experience. This combination of direct observation and memory is the hallmark quality of Winter's art, and it became the bedrock of his brilliant teaching at SMU, where he worked closely with David Bates and John Alexander, encouraging them to mine the landscape of their childhood. Indeed, without Winter, the connective tissue of the Texas Tradition would have been lost.
Richard Brettell, 1996
