Thoughts about art and community.
Look up. Look around.
I'll be honest - this is as much for myself as for you. To help with that, I made us both a sampler platter of stories (and paintings) of folks being awesome.
Plus, my best attempt at movie trailers for each piece, complete with soundtrack.
Creatively, I've been mulling over patterns. Literal and physical patterns in our environment. How single motifs or behaviors add up in meaningful ways over the course of a lifetime of a person or a landscape or a community. How we repeat societal patterns over and over until they become calcified habits, no matter the damage.
And how change happens in spite of all that.
(You know. Breezy stuff.)
Read MoreI give you my final painting of and about the Water Valley community. The large brick building houses the B.T.C. and the tiny white awning is the Violet Valley bookstore.
This piece is emblematic of how the community has continued to evolve over the decades, or at least according to the stories that I've heard.
Read MoreThis past summer, I had a show at the E.E. Bass Cultural Arts Center, home of the Greenville Arts Council. As I was prepping for the exhibition, it occurred to me that I didn’t have any pieces of the Mississippi River itself.
Which is embarrassing and shameful, for the following reasons: 1) I’ve lived within 150 miles of this behemoth for 40 of my 45 years on the planet, and 2) the Mississippi River makes Greenville, Greenville.
Read MoreWhen I sent an informal survey asking people about third places, one of the responses was the Greenville Cypress Preserve, a 16-acre ecosystem right in town that has a couple miles of public walking trails.
Read MoreIf you’ve ever spent time in the Mississippi Delta, you likely noticed, among other things, the presence of tamales on nearly every menu and tamale stands in most towns. Sometimes literally driving down the highway.
Read MoreI garden because my mother gardens.
My mother gardens because her father gardened, and his people gardened, and their people gardened.
We come from a long line of east Mississippi dirt farmers.
Read MoreGet a peek at the inspiration behind and the unfolding of The Book Vault, the first painting of 2024…
Read MoreAllison and Andy McGuire, two theatre-makers at the George Daily Community Auditorium, zipped me over to this magical spot in their golf cart during a tour of the town.
Here’s the run down of what they shared with me.
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