I am excited to announce the opening of my art show
Grand Simplicities: Inspired by Eudora Welty.
The show will open July 5th and close October 30th in the main gallery of the Ned, 314 E. Main Street, Jackson, Tennessee.
If you know my work, then you know that I often find my inspiration in great poets and authors. These days I am immersed in Eudora Welty. I read her originally in high school (thanks to a wonderful public school experience in Jackson, TN), my interest was revived in college and recently my interest resurfaced when a friend gave me a book describing the renovation of Welty’s garden in Jackson, Mississippi.
I find many commonalities to draw on within Welty’s life and work. She is a Southern writer with a deep awareness of her feminine perspective on the world. Her work is awash in what one author has described as an “aesthetics of place”: the importance of family, community, communal memory, rural and small-town tradition. She is also a writer of shifting perspectives, experimentally concerned with exploring as many different ways of looking at the world as she can imagine.
In her famous essay “Place in Fiction”, Eudora Welty begins by seeing “place” as one of “the lesser angels” attending the writer of fiction, but ends by seeing it as the “gathering spot of all that has been felt, is about to be experienced…”
As always, I’m not interested in illustrating her world, her place. I am inspired by her to try to reflect on and envision mine.
“Her art, after all, appears always to have been aimed at grand simplicities, not usually found at the first flirtation with a typewriter, but not all that complicated either. It takes years perhaps to learn what is simple and what is right.”
Henry Mitchell