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.”
Color pencil drawing by Anthony Biggers, courtesy the artist.
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.
Matthew Burdine briefly pursued a career in finance on Wall Street after he got his master’s degree in business from the University of Mississippi at Oxford.
But, “I decided, ‘Nah,’” Burdine says.
Instead, he became a “river man.”
Burdine, 37, now gives professionally guided canoe trips with his Mississippi River Expeditions, guiding people down the Mississippi River in multi-person Voyageur canoes. Throughout the year, he offers a range of trips on the river. People camp on islands, sleep outside, and cook meals over a fire.
Born in the Mississippi Delta, Burdine grew up on Lake Ferguson in Greenville, Mississippi. His father, Hank Burdine, is now an author and Delta Magazine writer as well as a levee board commissioner in the Mississippi Delta.
When Burdine was 9, he moved with his family to Colorado, where he fell in love with the mountains.
While working on his master’s degree, he heard a presentation given by John Ruskey, owner of Quapaw Canoe Company in Clarksdale, Mississippi. “He builds these huge cypress canoes and takes people out on the river on multi-day trips,” Burdine says. “Sleeping under the stars on islands. Being in the river world.”
That clicked.
While still in graduate school, Burdine met Ruskey. He was completely hooked when he saw one of Ruskey’s 30-foot canoes parked in front of his Clarksdale shop. “I was like, ‘Man, what am I doing? I want to do what this guy does. I want to share with people this type of passion and attitude toward this huge wilderness.’
“Up until a couple of hundred years ago, the main way to travel was by canoe. It wasn’t just on the Mississippi River, but all the tributaries.”
After his brush with the finance world, Burdine moved back to Colorado. “I started living in the back country, spending time in the mountains,” he says.
Burdine will take any size group out on his tours of the Mississippi. (Photo: Mark River Peoples)
He also stopped shaving and he let his hair grow out.
“I gave myself a five-year walkabout to live off the grid, live differently — and try to learn everything I didn’t learn in business school.
“Over the course of living in the mountains and spending time on the river, I became a white water river guide on the Arkansas River in Buena Vista, Colorado, and a ski instructor in the winter in Vail, Colorado. At the five-year mark, I found myself in a 16-foot canoe at the head waters of the Mississippi River with 2,400 miles in front of me to the Gulf of Mexico, and no time limit.”
His mother, Sallie Astor Burdine, died from breast cancer in 2003. So, in addition to the trip being his own “spiritual odyssey,” Burdine partnered with the Breast Cancer Research Foundation in New York to raise money with his river trip, which he called “A Million Strokes for a Cure.”
Burdine began the trip in fall 2015 and ended it in the spring of 2016. “I took my sweet time down the river. That’s where the magic is,” he says. “I was photo-journaling so people would have their own river trip through my pictures. All the while raising money for breast cancer research in honor of my mother.”
He always “felt safe in a canoe,” even though he knew “how big water moves” and “all the different levels of the Mississippi River. Every year it fluctuates 10, 20, 30, 40 feet, depending on where you are on the water.”
Burdine with one of his canoes (Photos: Michael Donahue)
When he pulled into the Gulf of Mexico after six months, Burdine had “an amazing feeling of internal calm. I was ready for anything at that moment.
“Once you reach a goal in life, you just start moving on a course,” he says. “Sometimes life can take you in ways you never imagine.”
In fall 2020, Burdine began thinking about starting a sailing career. “I was getting ready to move to the Virgin Islands and start sailing. After a decade in the mountains, it was time for something different.”
But “it was the islands of the Mississippi River, not the islands of the Caribbean, that were calling.”
While visiting his family farm in Lake Washington during the ice storm of 2021, Burdine called Ruskey. “I said, ‘If you need help guiding on the Mississippi River, I’ll be around.’ He basically said, ‘Yeah, you can help me guide, but maybe it’s time for someone to start thinking about opening their own operation in Memphis.’
Photo: Fern Greene
“Right then, there was a lightning bolt down my spine. Three weeks later I was driving to British Columbia to pick up the first canoe of the fleet for Mississippi River Expeditions. The wooden ones John Ruskey makes take a year or so to build, but I needed a canoe sooner than later.”
His new canoe was built to “handle the big waves in the Great Lakes and the big waves of the Pacific Coast. So, they’re a super-safe craft, and a whole new way to experience river travel with a sail. It’s the perfect, capable craft for the Mississippi River.”
Burdine decided to base his business in Memphis. “After 10 years of living out in the mountains and trekking all around America, I never thought I’d be moving back home. I wasn’t ever running away from the South, but during that time I realized that some of the biggest hearts were down here. I missed the lushness of the South.”
He also missed the mighty Mississippi. “I love all rivers. Those river canyons in Colorado and the deserts of the West. The rivers out in Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Idaho, and California. The river canyons of the West are a vertically grand world, but on the Mississippi River, it’s a horizontally grand world. All of the old feelings I had on the wild rivers of the West, I have all of the same feelings here on the Mississippi. You don’t need rapids to enjoy a river. It’s one of the largest rivers in the world. Once you’re out there on it in these canoes, you feel like you’ve stepped into a long-lost world.”
Being on the Mississippi River is “in our psyche because of Huckleberry Finn and Mark Twain,” Burdine says, “but not a lot of people get out and play on the Mississippi.”
Of Burdine, Ruskey, whose Quapaw Canoe Company partners with Mississippi River Expeditions, says, “His heartfelt charisma comes from a deep passion for adventure, education, and conservation of the American wilderness, of which the lower Mississippi River is the single most important natural landscape here in the center of the country.”
With all his experience, Ruskey, adds, Burdine “brings together the maturity and charisma and ethics and strength and grit and wherewithal in one person to overcome the challenges and obstacles he’s sure to encounter as a small businessman.
“As a storyteller and a speaker, he’s in that salty vein of the river-rat tradition of the Mississippi River — the keelboats, the flat boats, the explorers, and the captains of other steamboats, and the crew. He carries the tradition forward. Mike Fink and Jim Bowie were keelboatmen. Twain writes a bit about their salty characters and very colorful and passion-filled speeches and stories, which were often self-aggrandizing, but also full of self-humor.”
During the summer, Burdine offered half-day trips because of the heat. His sunset and morning cruises took place during the coolest parts of the day. “They became a hit,” Burdine says.
Like all his trips, people met at the Memphis Yacht Club at Mud Island Marina. From there, they shuttled up river, where they put in at the mouth of the Wolf River. They then paddled across to Loosahatchie Bar, where they swam and explored the beaches of the island and ate Burdine’s hors d’oeuvres, which he calls “river charcuterie.”
In September, Burdine resumed his full-day and camping trips. They meet at the marina mid-morning for the six-hour trip. From there, they put in at Shelby Forest and canoe 17 miles back down to Memphis while stopping on islands, eating lunch, and exploring all the main and back channels.
Each canoe holds up to 14 people. Burdine will take out any size group, whether it’s one person or 30.
Burdine also does yoga and artistic retreats, friends and family groups, youth groups, and corporate retreats. These include Full Moon Floats, Creative Retreats, and Supper Club on the River.
Huger Foote, an internationally known photographer and native Memphian, has been on the river many times with Burdine. “It’s pure magic being out on those waters with Matthew,” Foote says. “At first, I was uneasy about being on the mighty Mississippi in a canoe. But with Matthew, I felt so confident and comfortable on the water, that fear drained away and was replaced by a sense of awe and a connection with the river. Matthew’s experience navigating rivers all over the country makes you feel secure in the canoe as a paddler at one with those swirling currents.
“As an artist,” Foote continues, “I found real inspiration on the sand bars. As a photographer, I found a lot of inspiring subjects. The river, every time it rises and recedes, it reveals a new landscape.”
Burdine is ready for fall with a fleet of new canoes. “It’s an honor to be able to show people this Mississippi River wilderness,” he says. “This Mississippi River we all live on the side of, but rarely go into.”
Burdine is a fan of “this rare, unique city nestled on a bluff overlooking this iconic river. It’s a great way to experience it and see the city from a new perspective. At sunset, the city is a glowing orange.”
It’s a treat “to see Downtown Memphis rising out of the trees and seeing the silver Pyramid glowing, and to be paddling under the bridge as the lights light up the Mississippi River.”
The professionally guided canoe trips also are a way to rid people’s fear of the river, Burdine says. “For thousands of years people have been telling their youth to stay away from the river. ‘It’s dangerous.’ In all different cultures across the world, it’s a common thing. We grow into our adult life being told to be scared of it.”
People refer to it as “old man river,” but, Burdine says, “I see it more as a feminine river. A great mother river. It can turn wild out here in a split second if strong winds blow. But most of the time it’s calm, flowing beauty.”
For more information or to book trips, go to canoememphis.com or search Mississippi River Expeditions.
