Tex Buss: Bird Artist
Editor’s Note: Tex Buss is one of many talented artists whose work is featured in Golden Gate Bird Alliance’s first-ever online bird art auction, which runs from May 17 through June 1, 2020. We hope you will support Tex, all of our artists, and GGBA by purchasing their beautiful work.
By Ilana DeBare
For Tex Buss, the silver lining behind the dark cloud of Covid-19 is that she’s had more time to paint birds.
Buss, a 48-year-old artist from San Francisco’s Bernal Heights neighborhood, straddles the worlds of tattoo art and traditional fine arts such as painting.
Buss is a co-owner of Authentic Tattoo on Church Street, which had to shut down with the pandemic’s shelter-in-place rules. Stuck at home, she’s spent her days home-schooling her six-year-old daughter and strategizing for how to eventually reopen the shop safely. But at night, after her daughter’s in bed, she has time to focus on bird paintings.
“That’s the bright spot in all this,” she said.
Buss is among the 22 artists featured in Golden Gate Bird Alliance’s first Online Bird Art Auction, which runs through June 1, 2020 at goldengateauaubon.org/auction.
She is a third-generation birder: Her grandmother and parents were enthusiastic birdwatchers.
“I grew up with birdwatching,” she said. “I took a break from it for a decade and half, then came back in my 30s.”
Raised in Texas, Buss travelled the world, came to San Francisco in 1995 for a temporary “pit stop,” and ended up staying. Legally named Laura, she took on the nickname Tex when she was one of four Lauras working at the Lucky 13 bar on Market Street.
She was a tattoo artist before becoming a painter.
“I got my first tattoo as a teenager when I was a punk rocker,” she said. “I felt a lot of the arts were elitist and closed off to everyday people. Tattooing was every-person kind of work, at least back then. It was also something you can do for a living. It’s very visceral, satisfying, and energizing on a human level, since you get a lot of direct contact with people.”
Since starting as a tattoo artist 26 years ago, Buss has done literally thousands of bird tattoos. She takes pride in understanding bird anatomy and movement.
“Doing any kind of figure drawing is challenging because people can see if it’s wrong,” she said. “Then with animals you have muscle groups. And with birds you have feathers, lightness, and flight. They can’t look like a leaden weight. A lot of [tattoo artists] miss that because they don’t spend a lot of time looking at birds.”
One of her favorite birds to portray is the American Kestrel.
“I love the color scheme, that gun-metal blue and rust—muted yet it pops. They are incredibly fierce predators but also little and beautiful, all the characteristics I love about birds in one.”
She’s also partial to Bushtits, which visit her yard.
“Some birds I love for their exotic beauty, others because they are outside my door, my constant companions,” she said.
Over the years, she expanded from tattoo art into painting and print-making. She’s currently working on a series of prints of birds from her favorite birding spots, including Point Reyes and Vermont.
Buss has two works for sale in the Golden Gate Bird Alliance auction. One is the initial print in her birding-hotspot series—a 12×16 museum-quality print of three San Francisco birds, a Yellow-rumped Warbler, Bushtit and Northern Flicker.
The other is an 8×10 original watercolor painting of a Cedar Waxwing.
Amazingly, Buss started and completed the waxwing painting on the weekend that the auction opened.
She’d heard about the auction at the last minute and wanted to take part. While Golden Gate Bird Alliance is splitting sales revenues with most of the artists, Buss offered to donate 100 percent of the proceeds from her works. When GGBA enthusiastically welcomed her into the auction, she dove in and created the waxwing painting in 24 hours.
Why the waxwing in particular?
“Cedar Waxwing was my grandmother’s favorite bird,” she said. “I’d never painted one before, and I wanted to honor her.”
To view all of the works in the GGBA’s Online Bird Art Auction, see goldengatebirdalliance.org/auction. Click here to view and bid on Tex Buss’s Cedar Waxwing painting. Click here to view and bid on her print of San Francisco birds.
To learn more about Buss’s art and work, see her web pages for fine art at bussfineart.com/ and tattoo art at textattoo.com/. She plans to reopen Authentic Tattoo in a safe manner—probably by reservation only—once public health guidelines permit.