Herman: 40 years of painting holiday decorations on windows – Austin American-Statesman

Ken Herman|Austin American-Statesman

An email with a good opening line is sure to capture my attention. Heres a recent one:

Howdy Herman. This is the bull sperm muralist with another idea for an article.

I like a good mural. And Im always looking for good ideas to write about. And, though Im not an expert, I have reason to believe bull sperm somehow is important in the bovine cycle of life.

The electronic missive came from Tom Besson, an artist I wrote about in 2017 when he completed a fabulous mural celebrating the history of Elgin Breeding Service, a Central Texas business that collects and sells frozen bull semen.

Thats right. Frozen bull semen. You got a problem with that? You think you can get frozen bull semen via Amazon? I typed in frozen bull semen and the first four results were for a masters thesis about Norwegian Red Bull semen, flea pills for dogs, an energy drink and a box of staples.

But Besson didnt want to talk about frozen bull semen. Pity. He wanted to talk about the festive holiday season.

My family and I have a 40-plus-year history of painting Christmas windows at Austins car dealers, Besson, who also goes by Snap P, told me. It started in the mid-70s when many car dealers were in downtown Austin and no one had to beg that we keep Austin weird because that was its natural state.

Weird, yes. And often unbound by traditional notions of taste and standards. Oh, Snap P, please do regale us with tales of car dealer holiday art of yesteryear.

The bean counters had not yet overtaken the world and the sales managers had a free hand, he said, recalling a downtown dealership that was OK with Bessons interpretation of a band of hippies dancing around a bonfire whose flames became a 20-foot-tall dancing naked woman.

Yes, that says festive holiday season. To somebody.

At a truck dealer, Besson, 69, once painted a New Years artwork featuring an outgoing-year grim reaper that was so scary they had to call me to change it because the grade-school kids on the bus started crying when they rode by.

Yes, what says festive holiday season more than crying kids on a school bus?

Thats all in the past, Besson said as he fondly recalled the last of the halcyon days of hippie Austin and cheap rent.

I recently caught up with him as he, with wife Beth Rolingson and son Pascha, were doing the windows at Leif Johnson Ford on East Koenig Lane. Fairly standard holiday fare was going up there, but Besson fondly remembered when lots of unstandard holiday fare went up on the windows.

It just depended on the personality of the sales manager and general manager, he said. Back in the old days, those people had more freedom to do what they wanted. Austin was a weird city. They accepted strange things.

Maybe even expected them, especially when Besson was hired. From his website bio: My work is born of some strange marriage of Paganism and Roman Catholicism, substituting the juxtaposition of evil and good with the mundane and the inspirational.

Reality, it says, comes with such limitations.

So true.

Besson says he generally doesnt get specific painting orders from his customers. Wife Beth immediately recalled that the problem with Christmas windows sometimes is Christmas. As youve perhaps heard, the word has become somewhat controversial. Besson told me that last year they had to scrape Merry Christmas off the window of a customer who didnt think it was a good idea.

You also can go wrong by excluding Christmas.

Someone came up to us telling us she was offended by our message, Besson reports. We had painted Happy Holidays and she said we were taking Christ out of Christmas. I gave her a little history of Christianity usurping the pagan holidays but this failed to appease her.

Surprising.

Images also cause controversy. Rolingson recalled a window on which they painted gnomes headed to a bonfire and carrying lit torches.

So,Besson said, youve got these torches in their hands and youve got this 10-foot figure and the people say, What in the hell are those torches for? Thats not very Christmasy. So you think, Damn, I dont want to have to scrape that stuff off. So, quickly, theyre holding bells!

Some customers offer general instructions on whether they prefer religious or secular.

I tell them, Well, if I put anything religious up there its so damn pagan nobody will recognize it anyway, Besson said.

Later that day, he sent me another email, this one devoid of frozen bull semen references. I read it anyway.

Do we do what we want or ask the client what they want? Besson wrote. For the most part we do what we want but across the years we have learned what we will be asked to scrape off and repaint.

A few years back, he painted what he called a beautiful winter scene with snow cranes on a winter lake on the windows of a Japanese vehicle dealership.

We were told it wouldn't do as it looked too Japanese, he said. It was scraped and repainted into the more mundane, resisting a mischievous notion to replace it with a Pearl Harbor scene. That would have been wrong.

Though it wasn't a Christmas window, Besson told me of another painting, one of our saddest scrape and repaints was a kneeling 10-foot Jimi Hendrix with his guitar aflame and with the hand of God passing him a joint from the heavens.

This years whimsical, yet pandemic-appropriate offerings include one on a medical facility showing a stethoscope-wielding nurse/angel.

Despite having to learn to live with periodic rejection, Besson enjoys window art.

Like most artists, I enjoy working at a large scale but find that large-scale work is hard to sell and very hard to store, he told me. Window work, which lies somewhere between art and cartooning, allows me to draw big and get paid for it. And the whole family gets to color for a living, at least for awhile.

And, because some things and people in Austin still are weird, sometimes the family gets to color outside the lines. No bull.

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Herman: 40 years of painting holiday decorations on windows - Austin American-Statesman