Tag: Gallery Fifty Six

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Art Art Feature

Art by Art

Art Covington began selling his artwork when he was five years old.

He copied cartoon characters. “I did Popeye and Mighty Mouse, and I would take them to my dad,” he says. “I would leave them on his chair.

“I would come back to get it maybe later that evening. I got through playing. There would be a nickel or a quarter.”

Covington, 61, who now shows his art locally at Center for Southern Folklore, Gallery 56, and Painted Planet, credits his dad for encouraging him to pursue art. “He saw that talent in me. As a matter of fact, later on, I guess around my junior high years, he and my sister enrolled me into this mail art course.”

They discovered the Famous Artists School art course on a matchbook. It said “Draw Me.” “And when you open it up [it’ll have] a little bulldog or something there. I think mine was a boxer. I drew the boxer and they sent it in. They’re supposed to let you know if you have talent or not.”

It was costly, Covington says. “I think it’s like $800. Back then, that was a lot of money. Norman Rockwell was one of the faculty members there.”

He stuck with it for a year. “I was too young. I eventually started missing my classes.”

Covington’s parents said, “We’re not going to be wasting our money on you. You’re not committed enough right now.”

“Draw Me” wasn’t a total waste of money; Covington learned “the foundation of how to project images. I never had anyone showing me that. How to make the foreground darker and, as you get closer, make the images lighter. And how to do the lines. The perspective.”

Noted Memphis artist George Hunt was Covington’s next inspiration. Hunt was Covington’s art teacher at Carver High School. “I would watch over his shoulder and see how he applied the paint to his artwork.”

But, Covington says, “I did not know that he was such a phenomenal artist because he didn’t put it out there. He didn’t brag about his stuff.”

Covington got away from painting after he got a full-time job. “I would paint just to get a few dollars here and there. When I got inspired to do something I would do it, but it was just every now and then.”

Hunt invited him to paint at Carver. “He said, ‘Why don’t you come on back? I got a little extra room. You want to use it for your studio?'”

Covington, who had married, also was encouraged by his wife, Vanessa, who said he should participate in a fine arts competition sponsored by Church of God in Christ.

He won the “Visual Artist’ category and went on to win a partial scholarship, which he used to attend Memphis College of Art.

Over the years Covington’s subjects have ranged from landscapes to “country stuff” — barns and outhouses — to Rockwell-ish “expressions of life.” He now paints a lot of music-themed works.

Covington discovered Center for Southern Folklore about 15 years ago when he was trying to find someplace to hang his artwork. “I noticed they had some artwork on the wall and met Judy [Peiser, Center for Southern Folklore founder and executive producer]. I’ve been with them ever since.”

Covington began selling his paintings at the Center’s Memphis Music & Heritage Festival. “Most of the people buying my artwork are people from out of town.”

“Art Covington uses his art to tell us about the people and places he knows,” Peiser says. “From someone talking on the phone to the Pyramid at Memphis, Art’s work allows us to know more about this place we call home.”

One of Covington’s popular works is “Kings of Beale” — his Memphis take on the Beatles’ Abbey Road album cover. Instead of the Beatles, he painted W. C. Handy, Elvis, Isaac Hayes, and B. B. King.

And instead of Abbey Road, the men are crossing Beale Street. “It’s such a beautiful place,” Covington says. “Especially at nighttime when it’s all lit up. I wish I had time to put it all in there, but I just wanted enough so people would know, ‘Hey. This is Beale Street.'”

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Art Art Feature

Imagine That

CREDIT: Holly Fisher, Louie

In David Perry Smith’s “Fresh Horses,” one of this year’s most flawlessly integrated three-person shows, Holly Fisher wields steel like sticks of charcoal and forges strips of metal so fluid, digital images of her work look like contour drawings. We feel muscles rippling throughout the torso of a horse labeled Louie. We see into the cartilage and bones of a skeletal structure that is delicate but strong enough to lock the animal’s slender legs in place as he throws back his head whipping up his mane and tail.

An award-winning equestrian as well as accomplished encaustic painter, Mary Cour Burrows, floats near the top of her Chagall-like self-portrait The Horse Whisperer. Mouth to nostril, Burrows breathes life into a creature whose prominent snout, gentle eyes, and thick fur look like a not quite solidified version of the red mare at the bottom of the painting. In Dancing with the Red Horses, Burrows and four sorrels circle faster and faster until their fully extended bodies move in an unbroken circle — hand to tail to hoof to mane — that brings to mind the primal joy of the nude figures in Matisse’s masterwork La Danse.

In Mary Reed’s haunting collage painting Pause Prance, a woman both rides on and merges with a translucent steed created out of layers of handmade paper and white-gold glazes. The sleek woman is as golden-red as the atmosphere through which she rides. Like many of Reed’s heroines, she looks away from the viewer. Lost in her own dreams, this Guinevere turned gallant knight, this Woman of La Mancha sets out on a vision quest that mixes the legendary and surreal with the deeply personal.

Through June 30th

Included in Pinkney Herbert’s David Lusk exhibition “Broken Time — Progressions” is Fanfare 1, a pulsing pastel on paper. The work’s lime-green and deep-blue asymmetrical rectangles — framed in red and surrounded by jagged strokes of black — powerfully parallel the show’s title, which is the jazz term for irregular, improvised syncopation. The overlapping ovals at the heart of drawing looks like the lips of the trumpeter opening and closing around the mouthpiece of his/her instrument reaching for the high notes and crescendos. 

In a decided departure from Herbert’s driving sometimes explosive style, Tower 3 is a tall but fragile structure in which lines climb, change direction, intersect, and go back up and out as Herbert reaches for that open-ended framework that facilitates fresh vision and the creation of highly original pieces of music as well as works of art.

Through June 30th

Everything glows with life in WKNO 1091 Gallery’s “Artist Spotlight Exhibit: NJ Woods and Marie Babb.” In Woods’ high-key acrylic painting When You’re on a Hill, You’re Closer 2 da Moon, the lightning bugs are huge and children climb a hill as steep as a mountain. An enormous moon shimmers in the sky. Small shacks take on a life of their own as wooden slats turn gold in the moonlight and steep red roofs blow in the wind like the sheets on the clothesline at the bottom of the hill. The painting’s ebullient child-like joy doesn’t register as kitsch, as Grandma Moses-quaint, or even as exaggerated. Instead, Woods reminds us, this is the way children experience the world, the way they remember the magic.

Through June 30th

Some of the most sensual and iconic works of Niles Wallace’s career are currently on view in his Gallery Fifty Six exhibition “Sticks and Stones.” Dozens of deliberately misshapen stark-white ceramic bowls fill the top shelves of Wallace’s 8-foot-tall Collection Cabinet. Fired with a single glaze, Wallace’s colors are sometimes as crisp as the white and black halves of a yin-yang symbol, sometimes as nuanced as tea stains against hairline cracks in a porcelain cup, sometimes as sleek as the petal of a rose.

On the bottom shelves, Wallace places one plastic container inside another and warps both bowls with a heat gun. These surprisingly beautiful bowls writhe, reach out, and fold back upon themselves — sometimes tortuously, sometimes with delicate grace. These asymmetrical, shape-shifting works of art speak to every aspect of the creative process — ideas gestating, art and life evolving, and imagination as malleable as molten plastic.

Through June 25th

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Art Art Feature

Almost Eden

Accomplished painter and university professor Beth Edwards is best known for portraits of vintage rubber dolls that provide wry insight into human nature and the American dream. For her current show, “Along the Way” at David Lusk, Edwards takes her toy dolls, ducks, and dogs out of their showcase homes and places them on the open range in Horse and Rider and into idyllic farmsteads in Happy Cow and Peaceable Kingdom. In the series of paintings titled “Meadow I-V,” there are breathtakingly blue skies, striking red poppies, and healthy, happy honeybees.

Lest we think she has lost her ironic edge, Edwards slips the work At Peace into the show. In this remarkable painting, Edvard Munch’s 1895 masterwork Death in a Sickroom hangs on the wall of one of Edwards’ dream homes. Numbed by grief, the Munch family looks anything but peaceful. This is pre-penicillin Norway, the number of childhood deaths is staggering, and Munch’s beloved sister Sophie is dying.

A baby duck with a strawberry doily on top of her head stands next to Munch’s portrait of despair. Her orange beak is slightly parted, eyes shut in reverie, fat cheeks turned white-gold by sunshine streaming through the window, her tiny wings raised in what looks like a spasm of joy. An ecstatic rubber duck next to the death scene initially feels jarring — what an outrageous juxtaposition, what an aesthetic affront. And yet, the longer I looked at this portrait of pure joy in the face of the world’s relentless sorrow — rather than wincing or guffawing — the more I wanted to weep and let go.

Through July 2nd

David Hinske is also after something rarified, almost ineffable in “Transcendental Vocabulary” at Art Under a Hot Tin Roof. In this exhibition of nonsensically titled luminous abstractions, Hinske asks us to let go of visual and verbal associations, to play in fields of free-flowing color shot through with light. 

Barely visible, thumb-sized smudges in several of the paintings conjure up the first bits of matter coalescing and the first artist making his/her signature mark with a chunk of charcoal in a Paleolithic cave. The rest of Hinske’s boundless and effervescent surfaces bring to mind cotton candy and Technicolor amoebas. Like Edwards’ surprisingly powerful rubber duck portrait of bliss, Hinske’s melted-popsicle pools of radiance are also a joy to behold.

Through June 26th

At first glance, the American flags, vintage photos, handmade prayer cabinets, and antique Bibles in “One Room Schoolhouse,” J.C. Graham’s Gallery Fifty Six exhibition, looks like a show full of feel-good patriotism and down-home religion. Take a good long look. Graham’s flags are torn, his vintage photos are the frightened mirthless faces of children too soon grown up, too quickly indoctrinated. The small pools of blood-red acrylic that seep through the bull’s-eye of a target and through a little boy’s jacket at heart level suggest emotional wounds at the center of us all. This is soul-rending, icon-shattering Americana. 

In the satisfyingly ironic, mixed-media work Confession, two boys with mischievous faces have written and rewritten “I will not confess” on a blackboard. On blackboards, school tablets, prayer cabinets, and soiled stripes of the American flag, Graham writes in urgent child-like scrawl: “Run, run run,” “Mary, Mary, Mary,” “Don’t you see,” “What’s the point?” Like these youngsters, Graham is not afraid to ask questions, to challenge authority.

Through June 30th

Lisa Jennings’ increasing mastery of collage is particularly powerful in “Presence,” the L Ross exhibition that honors ancient wisdom and the web of life. In her haunting self-portrait Body of Clay, Hair of Flowers, the artist’s face flows, nearly seamlessly, into her clothing, hair, and the vegetation surrounding her. This near-abstraction is not the facelessness of anonymity or the fractured psyche of cubism but a powerful reminder that psyche and substance are intimately connected.

A skilled sculptor as well as painter, Jennings carves found pieces of wood into figures like the roughhewn work titled Wisdom. The top of the head is gnawed away. Its skull is bleached white, its eyes are huge and hollow, and a branch is attached to the sternum of this fierce creature who still reaches out to embrace the world.

Jennings tints the the figure titled First Love with acrylics, balances a tree limb on top of her head, and places a stone tablet in her long supple arms. As beautiful as she is wise, First Love isn’t a lawgiver but a young woman who wears her heart on her sleeve (as well as a limb on her head), who learns to balance body/mind/spirit, who bears witness to a world that is equal parts whimsy, pain, and grace.

Through June 30th

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Art Art Feature

Top Form

For “A Delicate Balance,” the mixed-media installation in the ArtLab at the Art Museum of the University of Memphis, Colin Kidder and John Morgan turn toy balloons into fine art. They bend, twist, wrap, and blow rubber balloons into amalgams of vegetable and animal life as they explore what happens when nature’s delicate balance is poisoned, globally warmed, and irradiated almost to extinction.

The only recognizable creatures in their post-apocalyptic jungle are the hummingbirds Kidder and Morgan have sculpted from Polymer clay. While the birds’ tufted bodies and wing feathers are still intact, their beaks are now pointed metal darts sharp enough to pierce the rubbery hides.

And it looks like they’ll be needing them as they hover and dart just beyond the reach of the hundreds of deep-purple, opalescent-orange, and electric-blue tentacles that reach out from the walls or scurry across ArtLab’s floor dragging what look like smooth pink intestines — turned inside out — behind them. Their bellies are stretched to the point of bursting as these phosphorescent, toxic creatures allure and then poison unsuspecting prey.

As edgy as they are instructive, Kidder and Morgan’s original, beautiful, and topical mutants make “A Delicate Affair” a must-see exhibition.

Through February 27th

In Pinkney Herbert’s four large pastel drawings at Playhouse on the Square, energy builds, coalesces into increasingly complex shapes, and culminates in a 100-by-125-inch pastel titled Alpha, one of the most inventive works of Herbert’s career.

A softly glowing, sable shadow, hovering in the background, sucks us in as we are swept across the surface by a spinning serpent. Something more profound is suggested by the serpent’s huge, hinged mouth, its deeply furrowed green forehead crowned with tufts of feathers or leaves, and the threadlike umbilical chord that loosely ties the free-floating shadow (womb? black hole?) to the creature’s belly where large black spermatozoa gestate. Herbert has assembled characters from several creation stories including Mesoamerica’s Quetzalcoatl, the British Isles’ Green Man, and the male and female principles of Shiva, the Hindu god dancing the world into existence.

Mounted in Playhouse on the Square’s impressive new performance and gallery space, Alpha can be read as metaphor for all artists (playwrights, actors, musicians) attempting to shape new ideas and new art forms out of the primordial stew.

Through February 22nd

Christian Brothers University’s current exhibition “Raw Silk” provides viewers with the opportunity to see the collages and silk paintings of two accomplished fabric artists working at the top of their form.

It’s late autumn in Japanese Torii, Contance Grayson’s most evocative collage, in which hundreds of pieces of kimono and Japanese money, stamps, advertising flyers, and vintage postcards are layered and stitched into a deeply textured tapestry of the gardens, sea coast, mountains, and Shinto shrines of Japan. Grayson take us through the gate of a shrine into the courtyard beyond where a tiny figure (the only human presence in the piece) meditates in the garden.

Phyllis Boger’s dyes and resist on silk include crisp, colorful, child-like geometries of Italian hill towns and translucent mosaics. But Boger’s most moving and strikingly beautiful work is Procession.

A weathered copper roof tops a sagging, deep-red facade. Three hooded figures, completely in shadow, stand on mottled royal-blue and teal tiles. One of the figures raises his cloaked arms and gives thanks for the tiny windows of light, umber woods, and rolling fields that border his town. Deep-green and raw-sienna shadows swirling inside the penitent suggest that, instead of merely going through the motions, he deeply feels the ritual he performs.

Through March 11th

Elisha Gold is best known for his metal sculpture, such as the nine-foot sunflower planted at Memphis Botanic Garden whose face is covered with 700 rounds of ammunition instead of seeds.

For Gallery Fifty Six’s current show “Forgive Your Enemies,” Gold has mounted a series of paintings that are as sardonic, socially conscious, and politically astute as his sculpture. 

Replete with Ben-Day dots and comic-book-inspired scenes of military battle and beautiful women, Gold’s slick and crisp-edged enamel paintings are, in part, homage to Roy Lichtenstein. In Gold’s particularly chilling portrait of cynicism and presumed superiority, a socialite raises her glass of champagne and toasts the viewer with the work’s title, It’s True. The Bigger the Lie, the More Believe.