Wayne Gilbert, the singular Houston artist who died August 17 after a brief battle with cancer, was known largely for using human cremains in his paintings. If you expected an artist who utilized death as a medium to wax philosophically about his own mortality, you didn’t know Gilbert very well. “I’m a day-by-day, moment-by-moment person,” Gilbert said three weeks before he passed. “I try to stay as close to the moment as possible. Obviously it’s scary, and it’s hard to get your brain off of it.” He paused. “Plus, you don’t feel real good.”

Gilbert, who was 76, was a bit of a bayou stoic, perfectly willing and able to philosophize but more interested in doing than explaining. He wasn’t known for savvy self-promotion, which might be one reason why his work—striking even before you know the details of its creation—isn’t better known. Raised and based in Houston, he operated outside the New York art epicenter, though he certainly has fans there. His use of cremains, which began about 25 years ago, was seen by some as a gimmick or a macabre, attention-seeking gesture, rather than what it really was: a pure, unironic statement of memento mori, an expression of empathy for the human condition, and a melding of form and content that resonates all the more when you know the story of the art and the artist.

Gilbert collected abandoned ash from a funeral home, which he then mixed with a gel, using a palette knife to spread and shape the material. Some of his paintings fall along the lines of vibrant surrealism, mixed with pungent themes of domesticity. But his most powerful works use varying earth tones—the cremains come in different shades, generally darker if the deceased was cremated in a casket—and are often slyly and humorously political. One of these works, Stars and Stripes Forever, is a rendering of an American flag drained of its iconographic vitality.

“All the color’s gone,” observes Gus Kopriva, a longtime friend and the president of Redbud Arts Center, which recently hosted a retrospective of Gilbert’s work (and which sits across the street from Gilbert’s G Spot Gallery in the Heights). “We’re essentially a huge power that has eliminated a lot of the original residents of this country, plus the wars we’ve had. In many parts of the world, this is a symbol of a great colonizer. I think this perfectly symbolizes what others think of us as a country.”

I got to know Gilbert through his other driving passion: recovery. He hosted meetings for addicts and alcoholics for much of the 45 years that he was sober, leading with a philosophy of open-mindedness. Do you believe in God? That’s great. Do you not believe in God? That’s great, too. As long as you’re doing what you need to stay sober. His approach was welcoming to many an alcoholic (including me) who embrace the mystery of it all. Those in recovery often trace their sobriety to a kind of great awakening or moment of clarity. Gilbert’s came when his wife, Beverly (who survives him), convinced him to take art lessons with her from the Texas painting giant Chester Snowden. Looking at Snowden’s paintings, Gilbert was seized by a sense of purpose. “I had this kind of psychic occurrence,” he told me. “I just immediately knew I could draw and paint.”

He had a similar occurrence years later when, driving along Interstate 610, he first thought about using cremains in his work. He found a sympathetic funeral director who was struck by Gilbert’s interest in using abandoned ashes, in a sense giving new life to the forgotten. Gilbert had no interest in funerary art; he turned down multiple (and potentially lucrative) requests from people who wanted him to make art from the remains of their loved ones. He was after something both more transcendent and somehow down to earth, of the earth.

Among his fans in the art world is Susan L. Aberth, a professor of art history and visual culture at Bard College in New York. As Aberth says in the documentary about Gilbert and his work, Ash: The Art of Wayne Gilbert, there is “a spiritual luminosity to his work. Those remains exude a power that transfixes me when I stand in front of them. They do not fill me with fear. They fill me with a profound empathy for the deceased and what they went through, and the people who mourn them, and empathy for those who were left behind, whose remains were never claimed. Just because your remains were never claimed doesn’t mean your life was without meaning.”

Aberth had Gilbert as a guest in her outsider art courses several times, where they discussed matters such as labels affixed to artists and who does the affixing. “Students loved him, and they felt free to talk to him,” she said in an interview. “He spoke really openly about his alcoholism, his involvement with recovery. They felt like they could talk to him about their problems without judgment.”

Now Gilbert’s work remains, with its ample meaning. But the question of his legacy is up in the air. Aberth recalled that Gilbert liked to joke about what would happen to his work after he died. He said he would get a bulldozer, dig a big hole, and bury all of his paintings. “I told him that’s not going to happen, but he felt good saying it,” Aberth said. “It would be his final temper tantrum for his lack of recognition. But I'm telling you right now, he will be recognized. A lot of artists don’t get it until, unfortunately, after their death. And I don’t think he’s any different.”

Redbud’s Kopriva and his partner, gallery executive director and curator Tanja Peterson, hope Gilbert’s name does not go gently into that good night. He didn’t have an agent, he flew under the radar, and even with his art degree from the University of Houston, he was a bit of an outsider. “The legacy is in question,” Kopriva says. “You have to have publicity. You have to have future shows. You have to be in important collections. You have to have people writing about it. That possibility might go away if Wayne isn’t here.”

Here’s hoping it doesn’t. Gilbert’s work deserves to be widely seen, and his story deserves to be heard. An artist who found beauty in what remains, he remains ripe for discovery.