The Green Gate: Remembering Uncle Guy Linton

Before there was a KLube, before my father earned the first of his four art degrees, there was Uncle Guy and the Green Gate — a nightclub on St. Mary's Street that he converted into an art gallery in 1970, because why should a room only do one job?

Guy Linton had no aspirations to be famous, though he was a local celebrity whether he wanted it or not. He painted, he hustled, he kept the lights on doing what he loved. His paintings still come up at Vogt Galleries from time to time, and when one does, somebody in my family always goes to look at it like it's a relative visiting from out of town — because it is.

I painted Green Gate Nocturne thinking about what that room must have felt like at 1 a.m. — half bar, half gallery, all San Antonio. Black and gold, smoke and stage light. Every artist in my family has had to invent the room they showed their work in. I got luckier than most: mine came with Ted and Donna already in it.

The lesson of the Green Gate isn't nostalgia. It's that the art and the hustle were never separate things, and nobody should be embarrassed about that. Uncle Guy wasn't.