My personal website is JRCompton.com/.

 

vitae

I publish DallasArtsRevue, which I've been making in this medium all this century. Before that I published it on paper since December 1979.

Plus I do a bunch of other things in that and a couple other pursuits, generally switching among them according to which one seems least boring at the moment. But through it all, I always, first and foremost, consider myself a photographer, although sometimes I forget and wander in the wilderness awhile. When I come back, likelier than not, it's got to do with taking photographs.

I've been a photographer since 1963, had photographs published in Life Magazine, Jet, Texas Observer, The Dallas Times Herald, Dallas NOTES from the Underground, Hooka, The Austin Sun, Texas Monthly, Dallas Observer and a bunch of other rags, and I have been in more than 90 exhibitions, a couple museums and even had a photograph of Mel Farner in a floppy black hat and polka-dot shirt sandwiched between two other photos collaged on the cover of Grand Funk, Grand Funk Railroad's best-looking LP cover.

In the 1970s, I edited and published underground newspapers, including Dallas NOTES from the Underground and HOOKA and later worked at Fort Worth's Trinity River Messenger, The Austin Rag, The Austin Sun and San Antonio's River City News.

In 1974 I published a newsprint magazine called armadilla about nine-banded armadillos, which publication begat, five years later, DallasArtsRevue. I also photographed for, designed, then co-published Texas Jazz. My work generally has to do with creating and maintaining a sense of community.

Since graduating from the University of Dallas, where I co-edited The U.D. Shield, I've spent most of my life in Dallas, Texas, USA. With only one little side trip into the Air Force, a podunk in Kansas and a little place called Viet Nam, then back here again. I know where things are, and I can usually find my way there — and back.

D-Magazine, who claimed (correctly) that I've been been publishing stories about art longer than anybody else in Dallas, called me "Dallas' best local arts promoter."

To support myself and my various media habits I've done a variety of jobs:

Night Watchman at a Massage Parlor,

Yellow Cab Driver

Worker Bee at Mary B's Barbeque

Secret Film Courier in Viet Nam

Instructor of Desktop Publishing

Macintosh Computer Tutor


Webmaker for artists and galleries

Art Critic

Photographer of work that is art and

Photographer of other artists' work.

Sample photographs are all over DallasArtsRevue.com and my personal site, JRCompton.com

I have been on several boards of directors, which is why I do not have one of those and do not wish to have one, and this website will stop when I do.

I have been:

• Editor/Producer for the Artists Coalition of Texas. I'd already self-published some issues, but they contracted with me to publish more. Later, they insisted I change the name to Texas Arts Revue. Then they broke our contract by ordering me not to publish stories about other art forms, so I took it back. After Mary Washoviak Ward proposed they become a center for art in Dallas, ACT became D-ART, D'art, Dallas Visual Art Center, The Dallas Center for Contemporary Art and The Contemporary.
   
• The P R Guy and Founding Board Member of Dallas Artists Research & Exhibition (DARE, which became The MAC, y, a little, maybe, but usually not much, although they think it did. They're wrong. Eventually, they dumped the DARE name entirely, so they wouldn't ever have to support local artists, although they're the only art center around who even tries, and they often do a bangup job of it.)
   
• I was also on the board of the trailing edge of Allen Street Gallery, which disappeared off the face of the earth shortly after they fired me. Nyaaah-nyaah! I was their Program Committee Chairperson, and they did not find anyone else to do my job, so their benefactor took "their" building away when they stopped planning exhibitions. Those idiots fired me because I warned them about nepotism, a lot of which was going on at the time, and it got worse.
   
• Before that, I was a board-member of Electronic Graphic Artists of Dallas (EGAD!), a Macintosh Users Group, for which I had previously been the Disk of the Month (DOM) Guy — a much more interesting, important and fun job — distributing fonts, utilities and other programs on floppy disks I either gave away or sold for one dollar.
  
  Now I know better than to get involved with any boards of directors. DallasArtsRevue is not a bonafide 501{c)(3) nonprofit organization, primarily so I won't have to kowtow to a bunch of idiots telling me what to do. As it is and shall be, I do what I want when I want, and I say what I want. Mostly — although I sometimes ask for advice, especially from Supporting Members.

JRCompton.com has many more photographs — and ideas, including some you might not expect from whom you may think I am. There's my words about philosophy, psychiatry and romance — as if I knew anything about any of those. My resume, list of exhibitions and exhibitions produced and lots else, too.

That's also where you'll find my Amateur Birder's Journal usually about White Rock Lake — I've been writing about and photographing birds in that blog since June 2006.

I also write and produce the immensely popular (112,000+ hits now.) How to Photograph Art, plus a bunch of squiggly others including Cameras & Lenses Useful for Photographing Art, my Nikon D7000 Journal, my Panasonic Lumix G2 Journal, my Canon s90 Journal, ThEdBlog - about me being me, How to Start Showing Your Art and How to Design & Produce An Invitational Postcard on this and my personal websites..
 

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