When Monte Brickey puts paint to canvas, he’s particular about what he creates.

“I don’t do abstracts,” the Port Arthur native, a career advertising professional in Houston, said. “I don’t do nudes.”

Brickey, 71, paints the small-town, rural, east and central Texas he travels while hunting or for simple pleasure. He paints the Port Arthur he remembers as a boy. He paints a Texas that may be vanishing except for what his brush can capture, squeeze and embrace.

“Growing up in Port Arthur, I had a wonderful platform of the outdoors. I soaked that up; that became part of my subject matter,” he said.

So did small places like Jasper, Woodville, Calvert — a disappearing Texas and America. They include rural things “on their way out,” like fading homesteads and long front porches and whatever back roads form in his own mind.

 

Work on display

Brickey served as a judge at the Museum of the Gulf Coast’s recent “Mysteries of the Deep” art competition. Winning contest entries and selections from his own work are featured in the museum through July 27.

Those include two recent Brickey favorites: One of the Big Oaks Club in Vinton, Louisiana, circa late 1960s; the other of the Breeze Inn near Sea Rim State Park, which closed in 1980. The former is named “Saturday Night … Again,” the latter, “Open … Again.”

Both hark back to his youth, with wind in his hair and anticipation of cold beer and a hot band on a Saturday night. The Big Oaks Club was home base to the Boogie Kings and other memorable regional musicians starting in the ’50s, and was a favorite destination for Texas teens who could drink at 18 on the Louisiana side of the Sabine and dance to swamp pop and later blue-eyed soul.

If you wanted a beer between Sabine Pass and High Island, Brickey said, you’d need to buy it at the Breeze Inn. It was the place to pick up hamburgers, ice, cold drinks or play pool.

“In that age group I was in, we spent a lot of time there on the beach.”

Make a living

Brickey didn’t set out to be an artist. He and his mom, Roberta, lived on 13^th Street in Port Arthur, near the old Thomas Edison school. He graduated from Thomas Jefferson High in 1965 and drove to the only college he could afford — Lamar University — that offered him training in a field in which he was interested. In another life, with more money, he might’ve studied architecture at the University of Houston, but Lamar offered him a chance to get training in something that beckoned him, that drew upon his artistic side.

Brickey stayed at Lamar for five years in an advertising program that initially lacked real-world applications. The department’s focus, he said, was fine arts.

But, he added, Lamar hired Luther Youngblood, a young advertising professional who’d gleaned real-world experience in advertising and who “had the horsepower to be in the ad world.”

That’s what he lent Brickey: a focus on the practical side about finding work and making an impact in his profession. Brickey said Youngblood’s influence “ignited him”; his portfolio grew and, at graduation, he didn’t lack for advertising connections in Houston, with its burgeoning growth and highpower agencies. He never did. Brickey worked at turns as a graphic designer, illustrator and senior art director with Houston ad agencies and became a full partner in the agency of Dunk, Bigelow & Brickey.

Houston was where the jobs were. But he didn’t wholly neglect the arts side of his nature, despite that need to make a living. Nor did he forget his hometown.

 

The art side

“I came from a blue-collar background. My mom worked the switchboard for the Texaco plant. My dad worked at Gulf,” he said. Making a living was imperative.

But art was in his nature. He developed that side of himself, too, at Lamar, taking classes from Jerry Newman, an “iconic fine arts professor” who told him he had some painting skills.

“You have an ability to visualize things that are not there,” his professor told him of his painting. “You can see things in your mind and bring them to life.”

What he had in his mind more recently were the Breeze Inn and the Big Oaks Club. The latter lived in his mind for years before he committed it to canvas.

“I had a concept for this painting in my head for years, coming back to it occasionally as I worked out the details. Its composition, the elements, the lighting, perspective and mood were critical,” he said in a prepared statement. “This couldn’t be just another cool painting. It had to be ‘the painting!’ It had to convey that certain aura, that mythical Oaks vibe.”

Both original works were painted from images of about an inch square, solicited on Facebook pages related to Gulfway Drive. Both, he said, will be offered to the public in prints through his email, which is lbrickey93@yahoo.com.

He’s posted his work, including “Open … Again,” and the response has been immediate and voluminous. But no one has seen “Saturday Night… Again,” not formally, and won’t until Wednesday morning. The originals will be on sale.

Museum director Tom Neal specifically asked he hang those paintings in the exhibit.

So the secret is out.