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Occasionally the media publishes articles about Caddylak Maxy, Caddylak Graffix, Caddylak Maxy’s Art Work and sometimes more specific articles about his Greeting Cards, Christmas Cards, Cartoons, T-Shirts and/or other Cartoon Art Products. We display these articles below for informational purposes and for your entertainment. Enjoy and if you have any questions click questions@caddylakgraffix.com to contact us. “There ain’t any funny articles on this page but you ought to check out mah Thank You Cards!” –Says, Caddylak Maxy.

Newspaper Article: Northwest Houston Business News
Place: Houston, Texas
Date: August 15, 1981
Headline: Max Gathings: Creative, Innovative and Gifted
By: Gail Rickey

If you set out to find one person in Northwest Houston who can tell you memorabilia about this community's celebrations and anecdotes about its leaders, who knows about Northwest Houston businesses ---both fledgling and veteran and who records the events around him with talent and humor, you will probable bump smack into Max Gathings.

Max is an artist. His cartoons keep popping up in advertisements, posters and magazine covers. He likes to draw illustrations that have zest and individuality. People seek him out to design trophies for golf tournaments and chili cook-offs, to create distinctive gift plaques and to draw Christmas card designs that express their personality.

Max's studio resembles a noiseless whirligig. On his desk is a Texas Christmas card that he is designing. (There's no doubt that it represents Texas. Where else could you find an armadillo sitting on Santa's lap, flanked by an oil derrick and a cowboy astride a longhorn steer?)

On the walls surrounding Max are prints of college mascots --all bearing a distinctive Gathings touch. Rice's Owl, dressed in his professional robe and his mortar board stands on top of his defeated foes --S.M.U.'s Mustang, Arkansas's Razorback and Baylor's Bear. The University of Texas longhorn sits down to dine --on an Aggie with a football crammed in his mouth. A ravenous Cougar hunches over his bowl of "Coug Food" --Longhorns, Mustangs and Aggies. The L.S.U. tiger has a lean and hungry look.

Everything in Max's studio bears the artist's mark. If something stands still, Max has painted on it. Filing cabinets, cinder block storage bins --Max's brush has set them apart from the colorless, mundane figures that they might have been. (Curiously enough, Max views his studio differently. "There's not too much paint in this studio. I haven't been here long enough," he says.)

Max has always liked to draw. When he was growing up in Fort Worth, his father brought home reams of paper for the three-year-old boy to doodle on. "I taught myself to draw. I've been drawing all of my life. Every year the Fort Worth school system picks one child from every grade in every school and gives them a scholarship for lessons at the Fort Worth Art Center. I won every year from second grade through high school," Max explains.

Studying under painter David Brownlow, Max learned the technique of using a wide palette knife. He likes creating relief paintings on large canvasses, with the paint standing our one-half to one inch. "I call myself a primitive," Gathings says.

Gathings continued his study of art at the University of Texas and the University of Minnesota. "When I got out of college i wanted to be a painter. I found that was tough."

The artist began earning money in other occupations and painting in his spare time. "I was in the real estate business for several years. I was even in the saloon business while I was in college,"he says.

Four years after he finished college he opened a studio in Arlington, Texas. "I finally had enough money to paint full time," He says.

Later he moved his studio to Champions III on FM 1960. An early arrival in the growing community, it became a center foe artists. People who wanted to buy art supplies, frame their pictures or take art lessons went to Gathings Studio.

Once in a while a customer would ask Max to draw a cartoon --maybe a humorous birthday greeting or a logo for a new business. The artist began spending more and more of his time creating fanciful cartoon characters.

About two years ago Max redirected his career: he started a new art business called Gathings Art Concepts and he became a partner with his uncle in Gathings Oil Company. Meanwhile, his wife Lyn opened Greenwood Frame Shop.

Gathings Art Concepts specializes in innovative posters, logos, business cards, brochures and advertising. Often Max uses his talent for cartooning in creating the work that clients request.(His own logo is an armadillo poised on top of paint brushes.)

"Gathings Oil has afforded me the freedom to do what I like to do," Max says. He spends several days a week near San Antonio where he watches the progress in the field and gathers information for reporting to investors in the oil company.

In addition to her work in making custom frames, Lyn Gathings sells Max's cartoons at her shop, which she sometimes refers to as the Crazy Armadillo Factory. Some of his cartoons sold there depict various occupations --teachers, dentists, druggists, mothers diapering their babies. (Gathings titles this cartoon "Home Olympics.") Each cartoon is slightly different. Max hand paints each one and gives it an individual touch.

Gathings is now forming an additional corporation that will market his Christmas cards and graphics. He plans to expand his graphics designs to include a party line of invitations, plates and cups. Always he is planning his next venture. After he markets his Southwest Conference mascots designs, then he can turn to professional football teams, and then...

Max gathings, the cartoonist, is a prolific artist who draws his figures quickly and expertly, talking as he works. He likes to laugh with his audience. Sometimes he puts himself in the picture, poking fun at himself by exaggerating his midsection and making himself look more nearly bald that he really is.

Max Gathings, the primitive painter, has to retreat from the world to paint. "I have to get my head cleared to paint. I paint for two or three weeks. I may not eat for three or four days." Ghost houses are among his favorite subjects --Victorian houses that still live and seem to invite the viewer to explore them.

Max Gathings, the artist, is energetic. "I do my best work early in the morning and late at night. Sometimes I get up at two or three in the morning and come to the studio. "Painted in sunny yellows, vivacious reds and majestic blues, his work reflects his optimism. Max splashes color, and pleasure, across the lives of all who see his work.

Newspaper Article: North Suburbia News
Date: September 29, 1976
Place: Houston, Texas
Headline: Gathings Opens Gallery

Gathings Collection, a full-service and full facility art shop and gallery, has leased 2,657 square feet in Champions Village 3, announced developer, Joe A. McDermott.

Along with its fine art collections, the Gathings Collection will feature a custom frame shop, classroom facilities and the latest art supplies. It will also feature weekly one-man showings.

This is the first Houston business venture for co-owners Max Gathings and Dr. Jack Burroughs who plan a grand opening for October 1. Expansion plans are currently under consideration.

Newspaper Article: Pleasure Magazine
Date: 1979
Place: Spring, Texas
Headline: “Art” Max Gathings (His Paintings “Evolve”)
By: Sue Dauphin

If you talk to Max Gathings about painting, sooner or later the word “evolutionary” will come up. That’s his favorite way of describing both his individual paintings and his style. Generally, he says, he sits down to do a painting with no preconceived idea of how it will turn out. “I come into the painting with paint and they kind of evolve. Somewhere between where I put the first dab of paint on the canvas and where it’s finished, I feel good about it and I stop.”

Max is a prolific painter, preferring to work in acrylics because they dry fast and he can work over them quickly. He is currently painting linear abstractions: says he is a “Primitive” in the sense that he always uses some subject matter but treats it abstractly. The subjects vary, but Max tends to get into one idea and work with it in many variations for a period of time, sometimes as long as two or three years.

Right now he’s into houses. Old ones. Victorian ones with lots of intricate detail, but always abstract so they’d drive an architect crazy. It would never do to try to fit anything so ordinary as a kitchen into one of Max’s houses. And lately, he’s been bending some of his straight lines into circles, giving a buddy effect as if viewed through champagne-colored glasses.

But houses are not the only thing Max paints. Sometimes there are horses as at Epson Downs, or people. Often when Max paints people they come out looking like his friends, or like self portraits. He doesn't’t plan it that way. The likeness just pop up in group scenes. Max also has a talent for cartooning and finds his small caricatures popular selling items.

Sometimes he draws a painting out first, using a felt tip pen. Often he gets to a point where he doesn’t like it, and then he’ll start scribbling and drawing on it, later painting in the new shapes he has made with the pen.

The artist paints every chance he gets. With a hideaway back of his gallery, he can slip off to paint when things are quiet. Would he like to get off on a desert island and just paint? “You better believe it!” One of his improbable dreams is to go to Corpus Christi and run a bait shop and just paint and paint.

The time when he can do that may be a long way off because at the moment his gallery and framing business threatens to take more and more of his time. He and his partner Dr, Jack Burroughs plan to open a second “Gathings Collection” at I-45 and F.M. 1960 in March and hope to follow that with six or eight more, strung out all over Houston.

A native of Fort Worth, Max has studied art ever since he was a small child scribbling on cardboard his daddy brought home from his packaging business. The young artist won many competitions, from grade school through courses at the Fort Worth Art Center. Later he majored in Art at University of Texas at Arlington, Tarrant County Junior College and the University of Minnesota. He was drafted in ’67 and served as a staff artist both in the states and in Vietnam. Later he went into the oil business with an uncle, and used a stake earned there to set up his first gallery in Fort Worth. Brother-in-law Jack talked him into coming to Houston, and F.M. 1960’s Gathings Collection was born.

But painting is what Max really wants to do. There’s an urgency about it that makes him lock himself in his home studio with a “DO NOT DISTURB” sign on the front door for days at a stretch. “It’s a high,” he says. “I don’t think there’s anything that feels as good as being in the process of a painting. You just stand back and look at it and you feel good!”

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