Part 3 in a series of dispatches from James Michael Starr’s trek from Dallas, to Austin, to Houston, delivering pieces for upcoming shows.

Remember my mention of standing under that Big Ass Fan (www.bigassfans.com) and chatting with Debra Broz? Just an hour or so later my wife Alison and I are across town at Arthouse in downtown Austin, surprised to find ourselves facing Debra once more, this time as represented in her three-part series of altered ceramic figurines. Polycephelus, Kitten Deity, and Serpentine Geese are barnyard animals that, in a less tolerant time, might have been secreted out the back door of Hummel one stormy night and sold to the carnival sideshow.

Now they are something not to be shunned but embraced, familiar as Debra says. “I find them and then I alter them using restoration techniques. Their alterations, for me, aren’t about genetic engineering or mutations caused by negative things.” I can see that.

But I can’t help but also see her supernumerary menagerie as portraits of, if not this artist, an artist. Eyes everywhere, looking for magic, hands into many things. Debra is not only Pump Project’s Exhibition Coordinator, but also an editor and writer for Cantanker Art Magazine, a professional art restorer and founder of Science of Art, Dr. Frankenstein to Polycephelus, and, finally, Exhibit A in my case for what makes many artists so happy. Which is doing everything you can to have another day to make more art.

I realize that sounds less like a recipe for happiness and more a desperate struggle to survive. Maybe it’s both. Most of the artists I know are happy, sweet people. They get to do an exhilarating, almost intoxicating thing: make art. But like a drug, it can lead you to give up many of the things others think one can’t live without. Eating out in nice restaurants, travel, health insurance.

My dad, who didn’t partake in many of those things himself, was a blue-collar guy; I apologize to him in my head every time I’m forced to use valet parking. He liked my drawings and my watercolors but he wouldn’t understand the things I make now. And he might not say anything, but he’d probably also wonder about driving 650 miles at $2.50 per gallon to deliver them.

He would, however, understand the happiness. So we head east on 7th Street for Highway 71. There’s a Cookies & Cream Sonic Blast with my name on it waiting in Bastrop, and Geri Hooks of Hooks-Epstein Galleries waiting in Houston for my next delivery.