This weekend, artists Robby Johnston, the late Anthony Biggers, and John Ruskey will present “Delta Chique” at Off the Walls Arts. “All three of us are inspired by living around the Delta,” says Johnston. “[The show] gives you three different perspectives, three different mediums, one subject, one night of fun.”
The longtime friends, who met “probably drinking beer,” as Johnston says, had always talked about doing a show together before Biggers passed away in 2020. “We just never got around to it,” Johnston says. “So this is just a way of paying respect to him now that he’s gone.”
Biggers, who made his living as a graphic artist and later a graphic arts professor, never exhibited his work publicly, though he did design WEVL’s Blues on the Bluff posters. “His personal work kind of took backstage,” Johnston says. “When he passed away, we got with the family and found volumes of these incredible color pencil sketches. So we’re going to be showing his work in kind of a retrospective.”
The late artist was born legally blind, Johnston adds. “When he would draw, his face would be about three inches from the paper, sketching from memory. If you get to see his work, they look like photographs. It is amazing.”
While Biggers gravitated towards the people of the Delta for his drawings, Johnston is more interested in the landscapes of the Delta. “I’ve always been a Delta artist,” he says. “It’s a land of beautiful sunrises and sunsets, history, pain and suffering, but also, it’s a hotbed for creativity.”
Johnston works mostly with acrylics, having picked up his first paintbrush some 12 years ago. “It was a little bit of a midlife crisis, really just trying to find my voice, and, I don’t know, I just started painting. … I’m really coming into the realization that it’s something I want to try to transition into full-time.”
Like Johnston, Ruskey is a self-taught artist. He builds dugout canoes in Clarksdale and owns Quapaw Canoe Company, which offers voyages on the Mississippi River. Ruskey, Johnston says, “started taking sketchbooks on his trips [for note-taking], and then he started taking watercolors. And then they started evolving into paintings. The river taught him how to paint, that’s what he says.”
“Delta Chique” will be on view through November 17th at Off the Walls Arts.
“Delta Chique” Opening Reception, Off the Walls Arts, Saturday, November 4, 6-9 p.m.