artist – Memphis Flyer

Robert Fairchild’s artwork has evolved from the drawings he made at 5 years old.

“I did crayon drawings,” says Fairchild, 21. “Star Wars characters with lightsabers.”

He continued to draw as he got a little older, but, he says, “I was a big nerd, so I drew a lot of dragons and Halo aliens. Like just really the nerdiest subjects I could draw in my sketchbook.”

Michael Donahue

Robert Fairchild

Now his work is “more about the scene and what the figures are doing in that space and occupying that space.”

Fairchild’s work, which is in private collections, has been shown at Crosstown Concourse and other spaces.

His work began changing when he got to high school. “I guess when I started realizing being a nerd wasn’t too cool,” he elaborates. “So, my subjects definitely changed. As I grew up, I started to value things differently. I valued people around me rather than fantasies. I valued reality more than my imagination.”

Fairchild took steps to become a technical artist. “Just by observation and learning skills such as perspective drawing and how to render a subject,” he says. “I wanted to push my limits to that. I’m still trying to do that. It’s an ongoing process.”

He credits his Houston High School art teachers Amanda Schulter and Bobby Spillman with helping him take his art to another level. “They showed me art could be a career and you could turn it into something pretty incredible.”

He made pencil and gouache drawings of family and friends. “I didn’t have a really sophisticated idea,” he says. “I just loved these people, and I wanted to do a drawing of them.”

But making art wasn’t easy, Fairchild says. “It was very difficult. It’s been a long, hard process to get where I am now. This kind of work took a long time. And art never came easy for me. I always had to work at it pretty diligently.”

He knew he was going to major in art when he entered college. “I was fortunate enough to get a full ride to the University of Memphis with their scholastic scholarship. That was an absolute miracle. That’s why I went to college. They have a great program, and I’ve been studying under Beth Edwards and Jed Jackson. And it’s just been great.”

His teachers helped him create art that makes a statement. “There’s nothing wrong with doing a dog portrait, but figuring out why I’m doing a dog portrait. Having some reason and concept behind it.

“I love Edward Hopper. His work is about telling a story with figures and having a meaningful subject. I kind of take from his aesthetic choices and try to put them into my work. Right now, my pieces are about public interaction and private interaction between people. So, it’s about comfort in a social setting.”

Describing his painting Millennial Moment, Fairchild says, “I worked from a photograph from a New Year’s party two years ago. It took me about three months to make, but that was when I started to see how many figures I could have in a scene and how much movement I could get, as well as show this isolation within a very packed environment.”

It wasn’t a strict depiction of the party, he says. “I’ll alter the scene. I’ll change the color palette and paint certain people abstractedly rather than try to render them. The main figure is a girl on her phone. And there are two larger female figures in the forefront of the painting. And you have some wild movement in the background.

“Every figure in the painting is in black or dark, [except] the main girl in front wearing a big pink puffy coat. And she’s on the phone ignoring everyone.

“I knew I wanted to do a party painting and I wanted a lot of figures and [to demonstrate] the fact that [the party] was in my home,” Fairchild says. “And I wanted to show how nasty it was. It was kind of smoky and gritty and dirty. But it was also a really fun time. It was a memorable party.”

His work now is “less about the figure and more about the environment. Now I’m trying to challenge myself with different materials.”

Fairchild still wants to show isolation in his paintings, but his focus has become less about realistically depicting subjects and has shifted to show a subject with “a gestural depiction of a figure. And that they’re alone.”

Most Community Development Corporations (CDCs) try to revitalize their chosen neighborhood, even if it’s just rehabbing one house at a time. South Main and its surrounding area are in the midst of a housing boom, but a new plan says it could benefit from a CDC, too.

Only this one would be charged with creating affordable housing for “low-income artists.”

“For an arts district to be sustainable, artist housing has to be an integral part of the community,” says Lorie Chapman, an urban planner with the Center City Commission and the facilitator of the South Main strategic plan presented last week.

Chapman began the project last September while working on her master’s in city and regional planning at the University of Memphis. She needed a final project and, having already studied arts districts in Indianapolis, Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver on a travel fellowship, she had a solid background on what creates a viable arts district.

“I would say this pulls everything together,” she says. “People had looked at the neighborhood in terms of redevelopment and rezoning before, but no one had looked at it as an arts district. Arts were the stimulus for the revitalization, but none of the previous plans looked at arts in depth.”

The community was also interested in things that may sound like any other redevelopment area: sidewalk improvements, attracting more retail and restaurants, and public transportation. “The question was: How do we create a thriving neighborhood that is also an arts district?” says Chapman.

“In South Main, so much of what has happened has come from the private, for-profit sector. It’s developers coming in and transforming properties. Some things need to happen with additional investment from the public sector.”

The plan suggests adding more public art at railroad underpasses and trolley stations, creating a street garden program, in which the community would maintain gardens in public spaces and lining the streets, and licensing artists to sell their work in designated areas of South Main.

“There was a lot of interest in the area known as the ‘dead zone’ between Linden and Huling. There are a lot of vacant storefronts,” says Chapman. The plan proposes displaying works of art from South Main galleries in the empty storefronts, or, if that is felt to be too much of a liability, displaying art posters instead.

In fact, many of the ideas center around making the area look like an arts district, in an art-imitates-life kind of way. Or life imitates arts district.

“I think if you stand at Beale or Linden, you can see a lot of revitalization going on, but you can’t really see what kind of revitalization it is,” says Arnold Thompson, owner of the Universal Art gallery at Central Station and president of the Memphis Downtown Artists and Dealers Association. “You have to get in front of an individual storefront to see the character of the neighborhood.”

Thompson opened his gallery in 2002 but originally worked in the area during the ’90s. He says the early residents thought the revitalization would be further along by this point.

“The veneer appears to be very successful. The residential is obviously very successful. But the retail and arts-district side is still very much a struggling experiment.”

An arts district needs artists to survive. Chapman’s research identifies roughly 20 artists who live in the district, but many of them moved to South Main years ago and she says she doesn’t see a thriving young-artist base in the area.

Consider the case of the residential boom around the South End. Condos are being sold in the area with price tags ranging from $130,000 to quadruple that.

Consider a 1,300-square-foot, one-bedroom, one-bath condo right off the trolley line on South Main. The asking price is $240,000, with $300-a-month in homeowner fees.

“It is important for it to be sustainable to accommodate younger artists. If the established artists leave, who is going to pick up the baton?” asks Chapman. “For the true artists who dedicate all their time to the art, South Main is not affordable.”

Which is why, in addition to the CDC, the plan suggests creating a limited-equity artist cooperative, retaining a nonprofit to develop artist housing, and looking at building dormitories for art students.

“There are more traditional revitalization models that you can apply other places,” says Chapman, “but I think an arts district is a special place.”