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Mississippi River School: The Life and Art of Matthew Hasty

Sawmill Break captures the luminosity of the local nature (Artwork: Matthew Hasty)

Matthew Hasty did not get his art degree from the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College in Sarasota, Florida. He got a bachelor’s in fine arts from the Ringling College of Art and Design, which, coincidentally, is also in Sarasota.

When he tells people where he went to art school, Hasty says, “People think it’s a clown school.”

And, he adds, “I probably would have done better as a clown. I think clowns make more money.”

Despite the geographical and Ringling connection, Hasty doesn’t include any clowns in his painting repertoire. His works, which are reminiscent of 19th-century Hudson River landscapes, are more likely to linger on vivid sunsets and images of the Mississippi River. But he has also worked on Elvis-themed paintings, including one of Graceland’s Jungle Room, as well as Sun Studio and scenes from his European travels.

Commenting on Hasty’s work, noted artist Dolph Smith says, “I don’t just view them with pleasure and profound admiration. I always wish I was there. I don’t stand in front of them. I enter them. I actually feel them.”

Matthew Hasty (Photo: Jamie Harmon)

His work has graced the official RiverArtsFest posters and is included in collections at Germantown Performing Arts Center, International Paper Company, Methodist Shorb Tower at Methodist University Hospital, and others.

Hasty is exhibiting 19 of his paintings in his show, “The Illusion of Permanence,” which runs through November 20th at L Ross Gallery.

Workshopping
A native Memphian, Hasty chose Ringling over other schools, including Memphis College of Art, when he was 19. The choice was based on a simple equation. “There was a beach in Sarasota,” he says. “There was an art school.”

He originally studied graphic design at Ringling, but, he says,“I would have gone crazy trying to do graphic design. It’s too disciplined, I think, at the heart of it. You’re basically trying to please a client all the time. Which is still kind of what you do, I guess.

“Looking back, I wanted more of an atelier education, how they would have taught you in France. It’s just a workshop. The word means ‘workshop.’ It’s more of a rigorous training where they teach you how to use the materials.”

According to Hasty, an atelier education is the opposite of being “thrown into a classroom” where a teacher will say, “Just go outside, make a landscape, come back, and we’ll do a critique.” The Memphis-based artist says that method is “not teaching anybody anything.”

Hasty moved to New York after he graduated. “I wanted to get into Leo Castelli’s gallery, but that was ambitious. It was the most famous gallery, to me, at the time.”

Instead of getting his work in the gallery that represented artists Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, and other notables, Hasty became a house painter. “At least I didn’t have to get different clothes. I didn’t have to wear a tie.”

Hasty’s art at Shorb Tower at Methodist University Hospital (Photo: Davey Mann)

Finding a Palette
Hasty was still searching for his voice, his own particular style, but most of his work took the form of realism. “I did a lot of figurative work. I loved the Flemish masters like Jan van Eyck,” he says. Rembrandt was one of Hasty’s favorite painters “of all time.” A portrait of a stranger can be something boring to look at, but not when Rembrandt painted it, Hasty says. “The way he handled paint was so luscious. You can just get lost in somebody’s nose.”

Or, Hasty continues, enraptured, “just a shadow of someone’s lace collar. They’re just magnificent.”

During that time, Hasty experimented with a subject that has occupied artists since the dawn of time. He painted “a lot of religious, kind of allegorical things, but still kind of angry.” He did a dark painting of Adam and Eve. Adam is eating an apple that’s “glowing, radioactive,” Hasty says. “Nobody wanted that. A relative of mine said, ‘Why don’t you paint things people want to look at?’ So, I reflected on that and I was like, ‘Maybe you’re right.’”

He landed a show at the old The Wall Street Gallery in Huntington, Long Island. His pieces, which included a whimsical, dreamlike painting of a man getting shot out of a cannon at a circus, “were a little less angry” than some of his other work.

Hasty sold a handful of paintings during that time. “The guy I worked for, the house painter, my boss, bought a few paintings.”

<i>Memphis Rising</i> (<i>study</i>), the poster for the 2021 RiverArtsFest (Artwork: Matthew Hasty)

Moon Over Memphis
In his late twenties, Hasty moved back to Memphis. He worked on some murals and did some gilding and column marbleizing for one of the Wonders: The Memphis International Culture Series exhibits. But, he admits, “I didn’t have any kind of real plan.”

Hasty was commissioned to do murals for people’s homes. He also did a lot of interior painting of crown moulding and gilding for designers William R. Eubanks and Warner Moore. They helped him get his artwork placed in some of the homes they were working on, Hasty says.

He began showing his paintings with artist David Mah at Mah’s studio. “I would paint rice fields. And the river has been a long-term subject, and cotton fields. I still paint cotton fields.”

Sometimes he’ll say, “If I see one more cotton field … ” but before finishing that sentence, he adds, “It’s keeping the lights on. People love it.”

He did a lot of Mississippi River paintings for people who live on the bluffs. And he painted landscapes for hunters. “Hunters will say, ‘Come paint my hunting holes.’”

The hunting paintings were popular with women as well as men. “Women like it ’cause it looks pretty and guys like it because it looks like where they go hunting. So, I feel like I’m checking two people’s boxes.”

The moon is one of Hasty’s favorite subjects. “Like the blue moon we had the other night. The moon is so arresting to see when it’s full. It always inspires me to make another one. I’ve painted this moon quite a lot. I’ve painted the moon over Italy, France.”

He did a painting of Sun Studio at night “with the eclipsed moon above Sun Studio.”

“People are inundated with images all day with TV. Images are coming at you from every angle — your phone, your iPad. You can scroll and look at your phone all day. I try to make things that calm you down or make you feel serene.”

Hasty, who has only done “a handful of portraits,” says, “Why would I try to get in that world when there are people doing those paintings far and away better than I could do?”

He’d like to do some work that incorporates physics. “To do a piece that’s connected to the quantum world of particles, but utilizing painting. Two dimensional or three dimensional pieces. I can do everything I know how to do. Drawing, oil painting, or gilding, or sculpture, wood carving — incorporate all that into a body of work that has something to do with physics.”

The Illusion of Permanence
Hasty’s show at L Ross Gallery includes his landscapes, sunsets, and river scenes. Explaining the show’s title, “The Illusion of Permanence,” Hasty says, “It’s a different way of saying change is the only thing that’s constant. Even these paintings that capture a sunset. At some point they’re just going to be dust in the wind.”

Also at the gallery are prints of Hasty’s RiverArtsFest posters for 2020, which never took place because of the pandemic, and the recent 2021 event.

Describing Memphis Rising, the 2021 poster, Hasty says, “I’ve never painted the Hernando DeSoto Bridge. When the bridge got broken and nobody could use it, you realized what an important structure that is for just this area. The country, almost. It sort of crippled this region to not have that bridge working.”

The Gloaming is the title of the 2020 poster. “A hazy sunset over the river.”

The 2020 painting is the “sun going down on 2020,” Hasty says. The 2021 poster, on the other hand, depicts its subject on the upswing, with “the moon rising over Memphis. We’re growing and this town is becoming more significant.”

L Ross Gallery owner Laurie Brown says, “In addition to the beauty and technical skill of Matthew’s paintings, such that one feels they could just walk into the landscape, his work also deeply connects viewers with their past. It’s a privilege to hear the stories of fondly remembered grandparents, vacation travels … that visitors to the gallery share with me.”

Hasty paints Downtown Memphis’ skyline. (Photo: Casey Condra)

Voyage of Life: Childhood
Hasty began painting when he was in diapers, but his medium was a bit unconventional.

According to his father, Hasty painted on the wall near his crib. “I painted with my poop, basically,” Hasty says.

And, he says, “My dad tells the story, but I think he intends for it to embarrass me. But now I have embraced it as my first artistic outlet. To use that medium on the wall outside my crib.”

Hasty drew a lot as a child. “Oil paint, markers, and charcoal and watercolors, just the gambit of art supplies.”

He did figurative work growing up. “I found a piece recently in a book my mom had. I must have been 10. I got into Queen and, apparently, drawing them on stage with guys playing guitar. People are a centimeter tall.”

But, he says, “It doesn’t show any real promise. There’s no indication I might be good at art. It’s very childlike. Like a 10-year-old did it.” Which, of course, is the case.

His mother was an artist, Hasty says. “My mom had zillions of books and there was art all over the house.” He describes her paintings as “weird, surreal work. It wasn’t sellable.”

His mother, who was never able to be serious about her art, had to “get a real job,” so she worked as a cosmetic buyer for the old McRae’s department store. They moved a lot because of her job, so Hasty lived in Fort Worth, Dallas, and other places.

His artwork in his twenties was similar to his mother’s. “Lots of death, angst-filled paintings that were almost like a heavy metal album cover. A friend of mine used to call it ‘zombie porn.’”

Sunset on a River
The artist has come a long way from centimeter-tall rock stars and faux heavy metal album art; Hasty now sells his work all over the country. The late John Prine owned one of his paintings, Hasty says. “It’s a landscape. I think it’s a sunset on a river. Not a huge one.”

The wife of the late singer-songwriter bought the painting at a gallery in Nashville, says Hasty, who later met Prine. “I got to meet him backstage at the Ryman. He wanted to meet me, which is so far out. I could have died after that. I play his songs all the time.”

Prine was excited to meet him, Hasty says. “His wife said, ‘This is Matthew.’ He kind of perked up and lunged at me, shaking my hand. He’s one of my heroes. He said, ‘I wake up every day and see your painting.’ I was like, ‘Please write a song about it.’ I mean, just the fact that John Prine woke up every day and saw my painting filled me with just the biggest joy in life.”

When he’s not painting or meeting his heroes backstage at the Ryman, Hasty enjoys traveling to Europe. “I’ve been working on these little panels and painting places I’ve traveled recently: France, Spain, Italy, Cuba.

“I started bawling at The Raft of the Medusa by Theodore Gericault in the Louvre. I used to see it in the books. Just epic.”

He loves to paint works by Rembrandt. He’s tried to paint Rembrandt’s self-portraits “half a dozen times just to see if I could do it. Like a violinist tries to play a Paganini piece.”

Hasty now works out of his studio at Marshall Arts. “Somehow, I’ve been able to keep myself alive just by making paintings. I think I was just trying to make my mom proud of me. Which I think she was.”

His mother died three years ago. “She got breast cancer, but it came back in her spine. I still feel like she’s with me. I talk to my mom so much. I feel like she’s my Obi-Wan Kenobi. I think she communicates with me still.

“I always felt terrible my mom didn’t follow her dream. Knowing that kind of pushed me as an artist. I think that was my mom’s intent.”

L Ross Gallery is at 5040 Sanderlin Avenue, No. 103; (901) 767-2200.

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Beside Still Waters: The Life and Art of Jeanne Seagle

CREDIT: Fletcher Golden

Jeanne Seagle’s favorite Bible verse begins, “He leadeth me beside still waters and he restoreth my soul.”

“I’m not religious; don’t get me wrong,” Seagle says. “But I had to learn my Bible verses as a kid. And I remember them. I really like that one.”

Her own still waters are found at Dacus Lake, the subject of “Beside Still Waters,” Seagle’s first one-person art show at L Ross Gallery.

Fletcher Golden

‘Jeanne In Fog’

“My subject matter is the land inside the levee right across the Mississippi River from Downtown. Dacus Lake,” she says. “I have a great affinity for that land. I’ve always loved to go across the river, from the time when I first moved to Memphis. It was so much fun to go ride around in the fields and go down to the sandbars. I go over there a lot. It’s just a great getaway from Midtown Memphis. I can drive over the bridge and be over in the wilderness in 20 minutes.”

Seagle’s show includes 11 large black-and-white drawings and 11 watercolors of the Dacus Lake area. She takes photographs, which she uses for her drawings. “They’re very precise. Very photo-realistic drawings. It takes me about a month to do each one.”

Jeanne Seagle

of Humor,’ News of the Weird illustration for the ‘Memphis Flyer’

During her art career, Seagle, 72, has worked as an illustrator for ad agencies and publications, including the Memphis Flyer, where her cartoons illustrated News of the Weird for many years. Her public art can be seen at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital, and Methodist University Hospital. Books that feature her illustrations include Mickey and the Golem by Steve Stern and Mommy Without Hair by Selene Benitone.

But Dacus Lake has flowed through her artwork for decades.

In the mid-1990s, before they were married, Seagle and Fletcher Golden spent a lot of time at Dacus Lake, where Golden lived for a while in a mobile home. “I’d just go over every Friday night and ride through the bean fields. I really got to know the land over there. I house-sat for him, and I would just go down to the river and paint and draw.”

The area was a new world for Seagle, who was born in Pueblo, Colorado. “All of my art was about going out to Colorado to visit my family,” she says. “I just did brightly colored paintings of mountains and canyons and mesas and that kind of thing. I’d go out there every year and ride around and paint.”

When her elderly relatives died and she stopped making the trip to Colorado, Seagle was at a loss for subject matter. “I was not all that crazy about the flat Delta land. But little by little I started seeing all the subtle beauty and the surprises you find when you get up close in the swampland and the waterways. And I started making pictures of this Delta land.”

It never stays the same, she says. “It floods every year. It’s inside the levee, and that makes the landscape change. The waters rise and recede. It’s a great place for all kinds of water birds and animals to live. And because it floods every year, it’s not developed. It keeps the humans away. Because of that, there are animals that just roam up and down the Mississippi for hundreds and hundreds of miles. 

“If you go early in the morning, you see these animals. I saw a panther one time when I got up early and was sitting quietly doing some watercolor painting.”

And then there are the trees. “Because it floods, the roads are elevated so that trees grow up around them, but the trees take on very strange shapes, too, because of the Delta tornadoes that come through and tear off the limbs of the trees. They’re all raggedy-looking trees that are so unusual.”

Jeanne Seagle

charcoal pencil on paper

The area does attract some eccentric people, Seagle says. “When Fletcher lived there and I was visiting on a regular basis, there was a bait shop on stilts. It was kind of a community gathering place.”

And, she says, “There were other people living over there at the fish camp — people who don’t like living in civilization. They were people who are close to the land, people who hunt for beaver tails. Just very earthy, country people who have known all about the country, and the last thing they want to do is live in civilization. We got to know them, and that was really interesting.”

Seagle’s love of nature began when she was a child. Her family moved from Colorado to Mississippi when she was very young, then they moved to the woods of Arkansas when she was five. “My father worked for the department of forestry, and he got a job as a forest ranger in Western Arkansas in the Ouachita Mountains. As a little child, I was living in this forest. An only child.”

Seagle spent time drawing and walking through the woods by herself. “Being all alone with no brothers and sisters out in the country was probably a big influence,” she says. “If I’d been living in town and had lots of people to play with, I might not have become an artist.”

She was known for her art ability in school. “I remember in the first grade I would draw tattoos on little boys and I’d draw paper dolls for the little girls. I charged a dime. I kept on doing that all through school. I was the class artist.”

In high school, Seagle took an art class trip to Memphis Academy of Art, which later became Memphis College of Art. “I saw these kids in there that were beatniks. I loved that. I really wanted to be a beatnik. So when I got old enough to go to college, I came up here.”

She moved to Memphis in 1967. “By this time, the Art Academy had all the great people: Ted Rust, Bill Womack, John Mcintire, Burton Callicott, Ted Faiers, Veda Reed, Bill Roberson. Murray Riss started teaching when I was there. It was just wonderful to be around these people, and I got to take classes from all of them.”

Seagle majored in illustration. “When I was a little girl, I loved looking at my mother’s magazines. I really was not exposed to art galleries. We lived in the forest ranger station in Western Arkansas, so the art that I saw was in my mother’s magazines. And I wanted to be a magazine illustrator, a children’s book illustrator.”

Her schooling was interrupted after she married her first husband, a medical student. “My first marriage was very brief — to somebody that I met here in Memphis, and we moved to Los Angeles.” That was “a different lifetime,” Seagle says. “He was gone most of the time, being an intern at the hospital.”

Jeanne Seagle

Jeanne Seagle and Pomegrante Studio

After her divorce, Seagle returned to Memphis, where she completed her degree at the Art Academy.

She took a job as assistant executive designer with Dobbs Houses. “I dressed like the young executives. I wanted to be a young executive. I worked at Dobbs Houses in the interior design department and went to work in a high-rise building and dressed up with hose and skirts.”

Then, she says, “The director of my department was found to be embezzling from the company and the whole department was fired. That’s when I changed. I was fired from the executive track and so I just kind of totally changed then and relaxed and became more of a Bohemian, I guess.”

In 1973, Seagle got a job working with a couple of her classmates, Ellis Chappell and Jim Williams, at The Grafe, the in-house graphics agency for Stax Records. They created and produced Stax album covers.

When The Grafe downsized, Seagle became a founder of Chappell, Williams and Seagle, an illustration studio in the Timpani Building, an old cotton warehouse. The Malmo & Associates ad agency was their biggest client. After five years, they sold the building.

“We made a bunch of money,” Seagle says. “So I just went to Europe, traveled around, went to all the art museums. I came back and I started doing fine art.”

When her money ran out, she went to work for Malmo & Associates.

In 1993, Seagle became a freelancer. A major client was Contemporary Media, Inc., where she became a regular illustrator for the Memphis Flyer. She illustrated the Flyer‘s News of the Weird column for 20 years. “That was great training for what I’m doing now,” she says, “which is obsessive black-and-white drawings.”

Her Flyer illustrations were composed of “little tiny dots,” she says. “You had to be obsessive-compulsive to do it. And that’s exactly what I’m doing now in my landscape drawings. I’m just doing these tiny little marks that take forever to do. Everybody looks at them and says, ‘Oh, my God. You just have such patience to do that.'”

Seagle also began doing public art, landing UrbanArt Commission grants to create mosaic murals on two trolley stops on Madison.

In 2012, she created the 16-foot sculpture, I Can Fly, at Le Bonheur: “It’s a giant obelisk with mosaics on all four sides depicting the seasons with children playing, climbing trees. On top is a giant bluebird about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle with a little kid riding on top of it.”

The next year, she created the 16-foot-tall Genome Kids sculpture at St. Jude. She describes it as “a giant DNA helix with whimsical-looking little children climbing it.”

She then did a series of 6-foot square paintings, including “giant painted quilts,” at Methodist.

“I made a lot of money,” she says, “and I was able to, pretty much, retire from commercial art work and turn to fine art.”

She began booking shows, beginning with a one-person show at the Delta Cultural Center in Helena. Then, she says, “Linda Ross called me up and asked me to be in one of her shows. That was really a great turning point in my fine art career, to be able to be in a well-respected gallery. I’ve been in shows with her for five or six years.”

Ross, now retired from the gallery, says, “What has always attracted me to an artist is the movement, the feeling, of the line work in their art. So it’s no wonder that I found Jeanne’s body of work so compelling. She has such a deft hand, whether it’s the broader brush strokes in her quietly moving watercolors or the delicate-layered markings in her stunning penciled landscapes. Simply masterful.”

Jeanne Seagle

‘Flooded Shoreline,’ charcoal pencil on paper

Seagle’s current show at L Ross Gallery was supposed to open in the spring but was pushed back because of the pandemic. Originally, Seagle thought the “the fog, the water, and these stark winter trees” would be “too depressing” for a spring show. “Then, as it turned out, with the pandemic, I don’t think pretty pastel-colored pictures of things would be very appropriate for our world right now. These mysterious, dark pictures are very appropriate.”

“The level of detail and technical skill in these pieces speak for themselves,” says L Ross Gallery owner Laurie Brown. “But, to my mind, what really sets Jeanne’s work apart is her ability to capture the quiet, ephemeral moments of life so exquisitely. You can almost hear the breeze whispering through the branches or feel the cool dampness of the fog.”

As for future plans, Seagle says, “I want to make bigger pictures, and I really want to start being in museums.”

Seagle and Golden, who have been married almost 20 years, live on an acre of land in Cooper-Young. “It’s made the pandemic much more bearable to have all this land, all these trees in our backyard. It really looks like we are living out in the country.”

Seagle still makes the trip to Dacus Lake. “I’m still totally fascinated with this landscape. It’s always changing. The water conditions are always changing. The floods and the water rising, morning and night, and the light — it’s just full of ever-changing subject matter that thrills me.”

“Beside Still Waters” is on view through September 5th at L Ross Gallery.

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L. Ross Gallery Hosts Doodling Around Project

CREDIT: Courtesy of Alden Weatherbie

Courtesy of Alden Weatherbie

@aldenweatherbie on Instagram: “Sheltered in place with this doodle from @lisajenningsart courtesy of @lrossgallerymemphis. It became an exercise in Photoshop. Layers are fun.”

“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” – Pablo Picasso

Laurie Brown, owner of of L. Ross Gallery, hopes to spread this message with the gallery’s online Doodling Around project, featuring doodles drawn by resident artists for the local community to interact with by coloring, either by hand or digitally.

“My goal is to give people a creative outlet,” says Brown. “A lot of people have been stuck at home, and you see them going back to hobbies they used to have or maybe trying something new. And so we just thought Doodling Around was a fun way to keep them engaged with art or let them get back to art and stay busy.”

Brown was inspired to start the Doodling Around project when one of L. Ross Gallery’s artists, Laurel Lukaszewski, posted on Instagram a doodle she’d drawn during a conference call. The doodle became a hit with her followers, who were looking to calm their anxieties with meditative coloring. Brown loved this idea, thinking this was a great way to engage the community. So she asked Lukaszewski if she would be interested in becoming a part of Doodling Around. She agreed, and her work, entitled “Sakura (Cherry Blossom),” became the first doodle to kick off the project.

“And then I just went to the other artists and I said, ‘I think this is a fun idea,’” says Brown. “It keeps people engaged. It gives them something to do. It lets them explore their artistic side again. And so the artists have been sending me doodles to post.”

One such artist, Lisa Jennings, a multimedia artist based out of Nashville, has provided two doodles, one of an owl and the other of a bird resting on a branch, that show her love for nature and the outdoors. When Brown contacted her asking if she’d like to be a part of the project, she was happy to contribute, not knowing that it would wind up giving her some inspiration for her personal work. Colored doodle courtesy of Alden Weatherbie

@aldenweatherbie on Instagram: “@lrossgallerymemphis is feeding our need for art with doodles to color. This one, by @laurellukaszewski was a lot of fun to do on the computer. I’m looking forward to the next one.”

“I’ve kept notebooks and sketchbooks, so I sent her some that I had done some years back,” Jennings says. “But then I started doing new doodles and new sketches. And I’ve actually been creating one and posting one a day for about a week and a half now. And what’s wonderful about these doodles is it’s kind of opening up another part of me, and it’s given me ideas for some things that I want to do with my sculpture.”

Since contributing the two doodles for the Doodling Around project, Jennings says she has been inspired to experiment with her curiosity for Inuit art and has doodled a few whimsical healing masks for viewers to draw faces on to express their moods. “It’s kind of like a release for people to color and then put their own form of expression on the whimsical mask,” she says.

By the time the pandemic is through, Jennings hopes to create a story or a coloring book from her daily doodles. But most of all, she hopes her work will help encourage the community to pursue art and expression themselves.

“I’m trying to do what little I can with my gift to give back and to keep people’s spirits up,” she says. “Art is a necessary thing. It really is. It’s something that has been there for thousands of years, and it will be there even after the pandemic is done. We need art to keep our souls living and alive, and it doesn’t have to cost a lot.”

To view doodles featured in Doodling Around, go to lrossgallery.com. Download PDFs, color them, and share them on social media with the tag @lrossgallerymemphis.

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Melissa Dunn’s “Love Song” at L Ross.

There are numerous examples of political artists — from Théodore Géricault, Pablo Picasso, and Glenn Ligon to Barbara Kruger, Wangechi Mutu, and the Guerilla Girls. Their works use imagery and performance that the viewer can readily identify as making a statement — on civil rights, the normal conventions of beauty, or a significant event like the bombing of the Spanish town in the 1930s (Picasso’s Guernica).

The role of politics is not as clear with non-objective work. This art is often self-referential where the abstract forms are only usually unintentional metaphors to the larger world.

Memphis painter Melissa Dunn is aware of this. The colors and the titles of her work allude to certain images or reference certain events, but “Ultimately, it is a visual experience, and the viewer has to take responsibility to connect with the work,” she says. Being in the studio is a private, intimate time for her where she is constantly asking herself, “Why does art matter?” She wonders, “How does going into the studio alone and thinking about basic shapes ever going to contribute to the greater good of society?”

Dunn continues, “There is a cultural war going on right now, people are anti-science, anti-intellectual, and I am doing the only thing I know how to do to fight this: work in the studio.”

The pieces that comprise “Love Song,” showing at L Ross, are separate ideas, not variations on a theme, event, or previous work. The only constant is the potential for the viewer to connect to the work through the basic visual language she uses to create the shapes, color, line, and form. She has a borderline neurotic process of gathering and hoarding source material, obsessively drawing, redrawing, and drawing again every possible composition based on this source material. Dunn then uses small elements that she finds interesting from these drawings to construct the larger paintings.

She has sketchbook after sketchbook filled with writings ruminating where this cultural war is headed, stream-of-consciousness prose about a particular painting, color, or idea, and thoughts examining quotes from artists like Kerry James Marshall and Helen O’Leary. Because of this cultural war, she states, “Devoting one’s life to this basic visual language has complete purpose.”

In thinking about the current political situation, Dunn wonders if there is a place for love in our society. “Song,” as it is used in the title of the exhibition, refers to how we absorb music and let it flow through us. With art, it is different. “Visual art has to be analyzed,” she says. “The commodity and the experience with art is different, and this difference makes it more serious.”

Unlike previous work where Dunn felt compelled to completely fill up the surface of the painting “in order for it to have legitimacy,” these current works are more open, calmer. There is a certain serenity in the work which is as intentional as the ambiguous titles.

Standing in Dunn’s studio and looking at Trixie, Pancho and Lefty, I could not help but to sing silently to myself Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard’s version of Townes Van Zandt’s song, thinking about Mexican revolutionaries and the revolutionaries that are needed in today’s divided times. Can we count on artists to bring us together?

For Dunn, talking about things like why art matters, where love fits in, and how it connects us does not seem cliché or sentimental. Instead, talking about these things and how it relates to the act of making and engaging feels like acts of resistance. “Making art has never felt more political or necessary than it does right now,” she says.

One of O’Leary’s quotes seems particularly relevant right now: “One act of art is to document our being here, what it is to be alive now. We each must navigate our way; listen to what the times are asking of us but also do what allows us to hold onto our humanity.”

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Melissa Dunn’s “You, Me, and Us” at L Ross

Abstract painter Melissa Dunn says the formal nature of her work is a response to image saturation and constant overstimulation. “I feel like I’m being bombarded with information,” she says. “There’s just so much visual information coming at me all the time, I have to set parameters. Like a three-chord rock song.”

Dunn’s latest round of paintings, collectively titled “You, Me, and Us,” goes on display this week at L. Ross Gallery and draw from an inviting mid-20th-century color palette. They are inspired as much by the artist’s gardening and studio life, as her desire to understand and map her own process from concept through completion. The work is also inspired by the musical experiments of New Orleans musician and performance artist, Mr. Quintron.

The Singing House

“A few years ago Mr. Quintron made this thing called ‘The Singing House,’ and he documented it in a video,” Dunn explains. “It was a system of machines he’d invented that responded to the weather with ambient sounds. So, if it was raining outside, there was one sound. If it’s windy, that’s another sound. If the barometric pressure is one way, everything changes. And this one thing Quintron says in the video was a game changer for me. He said, ‘No two days sound the same.’ Well, no two days look the same either. I’m probably going to riff on that idea for the rest of my life.”

There are loose threads of pop and op-art running through Dunn’s heavily expressive work. She might play with the form of a rug from the 1930s or loosely sample a curtain pattern she found in a ’50s-era interior design magazine. “I might make a really loosey-goosey mark,” Dunn says, attempting to explain how her rigidly imagined formal studies can exude so much warmth. “I don’t use tape. I make sure you see the artist’s hand in there. The lines are still straight, but there’s something about a little wobble here and there.”

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Art Art Feature

Stir It Up

Anima/Animus,” Kurt Meer’s current exhibition at L Ross, references Carl Jung’s designation for the feminine/masculine qualities that exist in us all. A thoroughbred horse — a creature that is both graceful and strong, majestic and grounded — stands at the center of Still. Ears pricked, alert and calm, the thoroughbred gazes out over the landscape. The wide range of siennas and umbers that color the animal’s coat look as fertile as the freshly plowed earth on which this mare (or stallion) stands. The moist soil and silken fur reflect the lavender sky. Though no searing suns, no billowing clouds roil our point of view across the surface of his paintings, Meer’s skies feel all-encompassing and alive. Soft blue seamlessly gradates into silver into lavender into the radiant pink that borders the white-gold mist near the center of Clouds I. Peering into this painting — so accurately observed that every particle of moisture seems to vibrate with light — it feels certain the sun will soon break through.

Opening reception May 6th, through May 28th

In Memphis College of Art’s group show “The Greece & Crete Studio Elective Workshop,” architect and environmentalist Clark Buchner explores the fragile boundaries between line and form and illusion. The thick eroded walls and ramparts in the digital image Tree in Courtyard, Palace of Knossos, Crete, Greece suggest that some important monument or religious edifice lies just beyond our point of view.

Buchner, however, isn’t drawn to the grand or merely picturesque but to scenes that etch more indelibly into memory. He shoots low to the ground, accentuating the rubble in the courtyard and the decay at the base of the walls. The shadow beneath the trunk of a tree feels as tangible as the object that cast it. By placing the tree in the foreground of the image, Buchner suggests this leafless sentinel is as important as the ruined walls it guards.

Through May 9th

Larry Edwards, Pinocchio’s Dream 2, at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens

For decades, accomplished colorist, social satirist, and hell-and-brimstone preacher Larry Edwards has explored “the three F’s — the foolishness, foibles, and frailties of human behavior.” The Dixon Gallery and Gardens’ current exhibition, “3 Themes,” contains some of Edwards’ most unnerving artworks yet. In his saturate/surreal gouache, pastel, and watercolor painting Pinocchio’s Dream (2), multiple Pinocchios tumble and fall as scissors cut through their strings. Unseen forces set other Pinocchios on fire. Far right, a pair of scissors are about to cut the legs of yet another Pinocchio.

In another chapter of Edwards’ retelling of the children’s classic, Armored Noses Admiring Pinocchio, a blood-and-flesh Pinocchio — now a real boy — balances on three disembodied and helmeted heads stacked on one another. Pinocchio sports a nose that looks phallic. Noses and/or tongues (another body part adept at bearing false witness) protrude from the helmets.

In Pinocchio Falls into the Inferno, Edwards has his subject paying for his transgressions. But in The Phoenix, it’s another story, one which the artist describes as “a happy ending … the mythical bird and Pinocchio rise, reborn from the flames.” In Edwards’ oeuvre, however, entries into heaven and exits from hell are never easy rides. With a smile that looks more maniacal than transcendent and a nose that is, alas, as long as ever, Pinocchio is spewed into a pitch-black world where clouds are dense and brown.

Manipulated by unseen forces, easy prey to flattery, driven by desire, and possessing multiple personas, how can Pinocchio, or any of us, speak to truth? One thing, however, feels certain: Edwards — a tireless painter and retired professor emeritus now in his 80s — is edgier and more ironic than ever.

Opening reception May 19th, through July 24th

In Harrington Brown’s current exhibition, “Two Rivers,” the swatches of color on the surfaces of David Hinske’s paintings look as shot through with light as the Taos home in which he works. The rhythms of Hinske’s brushstrokes — by turns staccato and fluid, impastoed and full-throated — mirror improvisations of the jazz music playing in the background.

In works like In the Kitchen, Digging in the Pantry, and Basil (In a Can by the Window), what looks abstract is most real for this painter/chef/musician who multi-tasks. Hands on the meal prep as well as on his brushes — slathering oils onto canvases as high-key as the notes of a sax, pulling sprigs of fresh herbs from orange-lipped canisters, and peeling/slicing/dicing tomatoes and yellow peppers for the soup simmering in a kitchen that also serves as one of Hinske’s studio spaces: Everything is in motion.

Opening reception May 6th, through May 31st

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Art Art Feature

Charged Objects

Part Pop artist, part shaman, Willie Cole takes household objects and so charges them with danger and talismanic power, they become ego-shattering icons as well as riveting works of art. The artist’s best-known work, Stowage, was showcased at Cole’s 1998 solo show at the Museum of Modern Art. It also serves as the centerpiece for his Brooks exhibition, “Deep Impressions.” A long, slim projectile covered with tiny white dots lies near the center of this nearly black woodcut. Surrounding the projectile are a series of circles, each imprinted with a single iron-scorch. As we step in closer to this wall-filling work, we realize we’re looking at the layout of an overcrowded British slave ship ingeniously re-created with a blackened image of an ironing board and iron scorches. We’re staring through the ship’s portals into the stark lean faces of African tribesmen about to be sold into slavery.

At the edge of abstraction, Cole’s iron-scorched paperwork Raid looks like rusted hulls of ships ramming into one another. Or these could be blood-stained spears flashing in combat. Its emotional energy feels as sudden, unexpected, up close and personal as the melees that occur when slave traders “raid” African villages.  

The right panel of the triptych Man Spirit Mask contains another evocative image. For this work, a photo etching of the artist’s face has been elongated, cropped, turned upside down, and jammed into the sole plate of a Proctor Silex steam iron. Like Stowage and Raid, this strikingly original and unsettling work is filled with seemingly endless asides about the callousness and cruelty that occur when humans are treated like chattel, jammed into cargo ships, and consigned to the drudgery of planting/harvesting/hauling cotton and cooking/cleaning/ironing.

Through May 8th

You’ll find powerful portraits of architectural facades as well as faces in David Lusk’s current show, “Jared Small: Small World.” Over a Cup explores the boundary between the everyday and the sublime and finds transcendence in unexpected places. Dressed in his Sunday-best white shirt and suspenders, an older man sits in a small, clean, well-worn kitchen. The Hopperesque square of light shining through the window and framing his face suggests this is a holy place where a senior sips coffee and reflects on a hard but honest life. 

Small’s portrait Lena stands on its own as a moving character study as well as serving as part of a large mural depicting another biblical parable the Good Samaritan. As Lena turns on her fine black leather heels to walk away, she looks back at an injured person who lies just outside the picture plane. She doesn’t see the storm clouds racing across the sky, a building fraying/dripping/dissolving, or the pitch-black shadow hovering close to this beautiful, oh-so-busy young professional who serves as poignant reminder that everyone’s place in the world, sooner or later, comes undone; that all of us eventually will need a helping hand.

In a Row takes us from radiance to decay to total dissolution. Though the wooden frames of three shotgun houses are worn, the middle home’s lemon-yellow paint job is breathtakingly beautiful in sunlight. The cement walkways at the bottom of the painting liquefy and spill into what looks like a chasm. In light of recent earthquakes, tsunamis, and threats of nuclear meltdown, Small’s beautiful, ephemeral worlds feel more visionary than surreal.

Through April 30th

Sculptor and painter Anton Weiss witnessed World War II, spent his childhood in a concentration camp, and, after the war, relocated to the United States, where he studied Abstract Expressionism with Hans Hofmann. In his L Ross exhibition “Remnants,” Weiss’ life comes full circle as he captures the chaos and the potential for change that occurs when citizens of the world rise up against tyranny.

Weiss takes the long view — planets float in deep space, and loosely knit, irregular rectangles look like city-states coalescing and decaying, like civilization rising and falling. Weiss weds the inventive shapes of Abstract Expressionism with Surrealism’s cosmic mystery with Dada’s absurdist humor and anti-war sentiment. At the top of Remnants 003, a half-moon cradles a dwarf sun. Near the center of the work, several hammered, weathered metal strips resemble a military jacket — torn in two, brown with age, and stripped of all indices of rank.

After the war, Weiss vowed to stay away from the dark side. And so throughout his career he refused to paint black or nearly black works of art. In what Weiss describes as a “personal as well as aesthetic breakthrough,” the artist has created works that while very dark are also some of the most insightful and life-affirming pieces in the show. Measuring 48-by-24 inches, Remnants 007 feels figurative, personal. The work’s deep charcoal grays conjure up soot generated by industry or artillery fire, or, perhaps, this is the dark night of the soul.

In Weiss’ layered and scumbled acrylic surfaces and in his hammered and weathered metal fragments, you’ll glimpse shadows of the psyche, foibles of the human heart, and nearly indecipherable scripts that read like hieroglyphs in an ancient tomb or fingernail scratches on a prison wall.

Through April 30th

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Art Art Feature

Straight Ahead

Wardell Milan’s Clough-Hanson exhibition, “Landscape! Romance, Rottenness,” is a mesmerizing mix of figure and landscape, mystery and mayhem, ripeness and rot. In a series of mixed-media collages titled “Heroine: Nude and Landscape,” evocative and complex women stare at us with large, limpid eyes and secrets to share. The heads and long petals of purple sunflowers become Heroine #4‘s dark nipples and the translucent sleeves of a designer blouse that she has accented with skintight lizard-green gloves. Sultry and self-assured, she looks straight at the viewer as she touches the edge of her pubis, though not in shame or an attempt to cover herself. This is the gesture of a woman who feels empowered by sexual energy.

Roses sprout from the back and womb of Heroine #1. Her disproportionately short legs and slightly gangly body accentuate her youth. Small hands are cupped just beneath her chin in a gesture of surprise and an attempt to shield herself. In this compelling portrait of innocence, instinct, and sexual awakening, a third arm and hand (larger and more crudely drawn) reaches under the long mane of hair that covers the young woman’s breasts.

Heroine #5 is neither coiffed nor manicured. Part-woman and part-mother earth, her long strands of hair are tangled. Her torso morphs into a dense mix of vegetation and earth that looks like a compost heap, both fetid and fertile. The rest of her body is over-lit and stark-white. With the faintest of diagrams and drawings, Milan delicately traces part of her skeleton and reproductive system.

No detached oglings, no casual couplings are possible with Milan’s unnerving, iconic females. They draw us into the web of life, where we glimpse the part each of us must play in nature’s cycles of pubescence, full flowering, regeneration, and rot.

Milan’s digital C-prints of miniature stage sets — constructed from Pop art, family photographs, and myriad other sources — also teem with life and decay. Near the center of the C-print Christopher Columbus’ Discovery of the New World, Columbus wears what looks like an aluminum-foil spacesuit. He stands on top of an equally inept-looking aluminum-foil spaceship that bears the red cross that also appeared on the flags of the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria.

Across the top of the C-print, a jet liner flies past ancient ruins toward a large stone edifice toppled by natural disaster, modern warfare, Armageddon. African tribesmen stand next to slave traders, slaves, odalisques, and eunuchs. Near the bottom of the work, African-American teenagers, circa the ’60s, sit beside their “wheels” and boom boxes. Far left, a young woman with her hair in curlers strolls with a friend across the rubble of a bombed-out city — or perhaps, the rubble of time. 

Instead of discrete timelines, concise textbook accounts of history, or simplistic statements regarding the meaning of life (or progress or manifest destiny), in Milan’s crowded, chaotic C-prints you’ll find something richer, more entangled, and real.

Through December 8th

 

It’s a pleasure to watch an artist grow. During the last four years, Matthew Hasty has evolved from a good, slightly garish landscape painter to an artist whose panoramas of the Delta in his L Ross exhibition, “Gravity,” are some of the most spectacular and subtly nuanced landscapes seen this year. In Crepuscular Rays and Cloudburst, rays of light spread across the entire surface of these 4-by-5-foot paintings. As the rays pass through cloudbanks and open sky, their colors change from silver to endlessly gradated shades of ochre, amber, and white-gold. The moist earth that borders the bottom of these works is also softly glowing.

In another subtly stunning landscape, Moonlit Cottonfield, thousands of tiny off-white puffs create hundreds of rows of cotton. Like lines of perspective, the rows narrow near the horizon, converging in a pool of soft light cast by a full moon. Hasty’s mix of mist and moonlight nearly obscures the slender pines that stand like ghostly sentinels at the edge of a field.

Hasty’s dark, effervescent, but still compelling, River Sunset does not blaze with saturate color. Instead, clouds scatter across a lavender-gray sky like embers. The sky’s reflection in the muddy Mississippi turns water into burgundy wine. Just beneath the setting sun, a slender shaft of light streaks across the river. Hasty glazes the earth with as much care as his sunsets and the surfaces of water. You’ll find burnt sienna and gold-green tints in the fertile Delta riverbank at the bottom of the painting. 

Hasty hopes this body of work will “elicit an emotional response and have a soothing effect on viewers that invites contemplation.” Hasty’s luminous landscapes succeed in this and much more. If we look, really look — this increasingly accomplished artist reminds us — each bend in a river, each sunset, each patch of umber earth is a masterwork of texture, color, composition, and light.

Through November 30th

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Art Art Feature

Possibilities

Harrington Brown Gallery’s current exhibition, “Dancing into Fall with Contemporary Art,” includes work by technically skilled, strikingly original artists all new to the Memphis art scene.

For his still-life study Pink Fiction, Philip Jackson convincingly re-creates the slimy, uncooked white of an egg inside a water glass. The hint of red in the yolk heightens our sense that life has been cracked wide open. A bright-pink plastic egg — floating just above the glass and lightly touching its lip — captures the crass commercialism and higher ideas of Easter. What is most real, most incorruptible?

In Joyce Petrina’s bronze figure titled P, full breasts rest on top of a large, elegant womb that has been opened up to reveal the fully formed fetus inside — kicking up its feet, ready to jump into life. The mother’s huge trunk-like ankles and feet, firmly planted on the ground, help the woman balance her precious load. Her well-worn face, sunken cheeks, and Giacometti-like skull capture the grandeur and everyday pathos of motherhood.

At Harrington Brown through October 7th

The most memorable paintings in Hamlett Dobbins’ exhibition, “The River Beneath Us” at David Lusk, consist of shapes floating in fields of color so radiant they appear lit from within. Especially expressive line work and complex palettes feel endlessly evocative in pieces such as Untitled (I.V./G.L.M./T.L.W.), a 7-foot-tall painting referencing much of art history as a storybook figure morphs into a frenzied Looney Tunes character into a Cubist portrait that breaks down into pure abstraction.

Even Dobbins’ smallest works look monumental. The 20-by-22-inch work Untitled (for J.W./R.) pans out for an aerial view that suggests how this artist sees the world as well as the process of painting. An opalescent-lemon planet floats in space the color of flesh tones and sand. Dobbins saves his deep-blue and iron-rich earth tones for a silhouetted shape that looks like a butterfly made from the madras cloth that changes color and shape with each washing. In a body of work consisting of 18 paintings — each remarkably different from the next — Dobbins reminds us of the infinite possibilities of matter, mind, and paint.

At David Lusk through September 25th

For L Ross’ September exhibition “Duality,” Pam Hassler, painter, enamelist, and metalsmith, has created a one-of-a-kind body of work in which a copper disc painted with gold leaf and fine-art enamels are mounted on an acrylic painting. Strips of raw, hammered copper fused onto the face of the metal orbs look like coiled serpents glistening in the sun. The serpents never touch their tails, never spin into Ouroboros-like circles symbolizing unity and perfection. Instead, these are worlds in the making in which coiled copper unfurls koru-like across desert sands, seas, and solar systems.

Sometimes Hassler’s expressive black brushstrokes look calligraphic. At times, they look architectural, like the gate posts of a Shinto shrine. In her mixed-media painting Return to Sender II, Hassler’s bold black writing becomes more energized, rolls like thunder across the top of the planet, and ricochets into the void. Gold leaf falls into red-hot lava, capturing the sheer beauty and raw power of creation.

 Helen Phillips’ raku-fired bowls, birdhouses, and ducks, also on view at L Ross, are some of the most evocative works of her career. Into the Shining Sea suggests the world and everything in it. Crackled and glazed thalo blue on the outside, sooty on top, and a lustrous umber inside, this exquisitely formed ceramic vessel is the clear-blue bowl of heaven, is the parched earth, is the chasm that cradles the deep-green sea.

There is poignant humor here as well. In Wisdom of Silence, a singed duck wearing a metal collar and long monk-like robe glides along, cloaked and shackled for an outrageous mix of majesty, misery, slapstick, and spirituality.

At L Ross through

September 28th

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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