Richard W. Rodriguez
It’s clear after only a few minutes in conversation that Jay Decker is a well-rounded, highly versatile person who is curious, accomplished, and knowledgeable across a wide range of subjects.
He has a math mind — his words, not mine — with an English degree from Dartmouth, where he played on two Ivy League championship men’s soccer teams, both of which advanced to the NCAA Tournament’s Elite Eight.
He made a career out of finance. Today, he is the CFO of Crimson Chemicals in Fort Worth. Hunting, fishing, and outdoor pursuits are recreational passions. He’s dabbled in photography through the years. Dabbled is probably underselling the thought.
He is also a man of faith, this Renaissance man, which is the only way he can explain finding joy in one of the most unexpected turns of life — the discovery of a hidden talent as an impressionist painter.
It all began when he gave himself a painting lesson for his 50th birthday.
“I thought I'd try a painting, and halfway through the painting, my teacher says, ‘What are you doing after this painting?’ I'm like, ‘I don't know, why?’ He says, ‘Well, you have a gift so, you need to keep painting.’ I'm like, ‘Oh, OK. Sure.’”
Decker not only pursued what he calls “truly a gift from God.” Jokingly — I think — he describes himself as an “an artist disguised as a finance guy.” Whatever the case, Decker is today an award-winning impressionist artist — the winner of Best in Show at the Waterscapes Art Exhibition in 2022 with his oil on canvas, “O’Dell Creek.”
At 54, his future is painting.
“That would be ideal,” he says. “And maybe having a little gallery on Camp Bowie or something would be pretty cool.”
In all, Decker estimates that he’s finished 60 or 70 paintings, with more and more of them commissions. His work is on display — and for sale — at the House of NeVille Gallery & Gatherings.
He kids that his wife wasn’t the biggest fan of his new find, though his art is hanging all over the house.
Decker was born and raised in Fort Worth. Elementary, middle, and secondary school were all done at Country Day. He thought he wanted to study economics at Dartmouth, one of the world’s great academic institutions in Hanover, New Hampshire, until he discovered its Economic Department wasn’t great.
“I wanted to get a Wall Street job and thought I was going to be an economics major, but the Economics Department at Dartmouth at the time was pretty terrible,” he says. “I took an English class, and I ended up [in a class] with the chair of the department and really enjoyed the class.”
The professor asked Decker what his major was. He told him — economics.
“He says, ‘No, no, no. Switch to English.’ So, I did.”
After graduation, Decker returned to Fort Worth — after unsuccessfully landing the job on Wall Street. Ultimately, he was appointed to a role with Carlson Capital, founded by Clint Carlson in 1993. Carlson had previously served as head of risk arbitrage for the Bass family before splitting off. Carlson is, coincidentally, a trustee of the Dallas Museum of Art.
“He needed a young guy just to train to be a trader,” Decker says. “I was always good at math, so I knew I could handle it, and I was able to learn from him and build really complicated spreadsheets to trade some really cool stuff.”
Like, for instance, a company in Switzerland that owned pieces of 10 other public companies across Europe.
“I'd build spreadsheets to value these things and then also calculate the currency risk so we're able to trade 'em and make money on 'em.”
He spent the next 20 or so years in CFO-type roles, finding himself most recently at Crimson Chemicals, the Fort Worth-based company in the food industry.
He is also now hanging with the likes of Billy Hassell, an accomplished Fort Worth artist with artist credentials — a bachelor’s from Notre Dame and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Massachusetts.
“I've gotten to know Billy,” Decker says. “I was over at his house a few weeks ago because he actually bought one of my paintings, and it was kind of weird for him to be a collector of mine and I want to be a collector of his.”
It’s strangely unreal in a way, he says.
It was with his math brain, he believes, that he learned to paint. His teacher was very methodical. He’d start by gridding the canvas with watercolor pencils, then do the same to the photo he was working from.
“It's my math brain getting the canvas laid out right. Once the grid goes away and I start painting, I squirt oil paint on my piece of glass or my palette, and then the colors just kind of mix themselves and go on. It's pretty surreal.”
Decker sold his first painting three or so years ago, as best as he can remember. Once, however, he received a commission and realized someone was willing to offer more than he could sell his paintings for, “I’ve just kind of been doing that ever since,” he says.
He works, he says, every day to become a better artist. “I don’t know what that is yet exactly, but I will keep learning as much as I can. I paint with the intention of getting the values as close as possible to reality and then add as many necessary, different colors to those values as I can see.”
His creative side always manifested in photography. He’s been a photographer since high school, back in those days when you shot rolls of film and “you get 24 chances, and you don’t know what you got until” it was developed. In today’s digital age and a smart phone he’s always carrying while elk hunting or hiking in the mountains for fly fishing, “I’ve got more photos than I could ever paint in a lifetime.”
His best-of-show work in Sante Fe, “O’Dell Creek,” is a setting in one of his favorite places, Ennis, Montana. That was his second painting. He has displayed at the Aspen Arts Festival, though he didn’t make it this year. Too busy with his day job, which has caused a crinkle in his painting schedule, he says, since beginning five months ago. However, “I’ve kind of gotten things balanced out. So, I can leave the office at 5 or 5:30 and be able to paint for a couple of hours at night.”
Rotator cuff surgery did the same thing. He had an injury that he had never fixed. A fall in an over-40 league soccer game did in the troubled shoulder. He’s used to being on the sideline. He broke his back skiing years ago. But the shoulder surgery put his art out of commission for six months.
That was the end of his soccer career.
His wife suddenly loved his new passion for painting.
An Exhibition
A survey of Jay Decker's artwork:
“Dawson”
His son Dawson. “This is from a picture I took of Dawson when were in Montana about 10 summers ago. Just kind of caught him with my phone camera, just at the perfect shot really for a portrait like that.”
“When I Grow Up I Wanna”
"That was actually from a photo a friend took. I think on a ranch just in north Fort Worth. I think it was on the Bonds Ranch."
“Listening for Bugles”
"That was on a buddy's ranch in Colorado where I was elk hunting with a couple of really good friends. I've been a photographer since high school. Back in the day when we had to shoot roll of film, you got 24 chances, and then you didn’t know if you got it until you get a roll back.”
“Pink Cadillac”
"This one is actually sitting in my office here with me at work. That was a black-and-white that I found on the internet. Added some color to it and some depth to the clouds and had fun with the impressionistic part of the rocks by the horse and the mountains in the background. It's a matter adding color to it, really."
“West of the Gage”
"That was from a photo we took on a trip to West Texas during the quarantine. It was just west of the Gage Hotel. We’d eaten dinner at the Gage, and then we're heading out back to my buddy's ranch, and it was just a spectacular sunset. We pulled over, and I snapped a picture of it."