Cheairs' new impressions still magical
Experiences alter touch, cling to whimsy
It was a magical moment, just a few hours before painter Nancy Cheairs began trundling her work down to Askew Nixon Ferguson to hang her show, "New Paintings," which opens tonight.
Cheairs' East Memphis backhouse-turned-studio was absolutely packed with art.
"Morning" is among the works by Nancy Cheairs currently on view at Askew Nixon Ferguson Architects.
A dark cloud hangs over a lonely girl in Nancy Cheairs' painting, "The Field."
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Ten canvasses -- each one representing a different fairytale, dream, memory or metaphor, take your pick -- lined three walls. Watercolor studies hung on another wall, and smaller watercolor-and-coffee pieces, documenting wildlife from the neighborhood, lay head-to-toe on a worktable that dominated the room.
Cheairs, an important fixture on the local art scene since the early 1980s, explained that she drew on images found in folk art, medieval tapestries and early American needlework for inspiration.
The influences are tangible -- fantasy and reality are hopelessly intertwined in Cheairs' oil-on-canvas work. Her vocabulary as an artist is erudite, yet she translates it with a graceful naiveté: Birds are caged in wire dress forms, horse silhouettes dance across the sky and women stand as tall as trees.
One painting, "The Field," twists the spatial conceit of Arkansas artist Carroll Cloar's 1955 masterpiece, "My Father Was as Big as a Tree." In Cheair's work, a young woman wearing a red blouse and transparent orange skirt stands in the foreground of a luminously grassy expanse dotted with a pair of trees, her shadow replaced with a dress three times her height. Darkness looms overhead, an ominous foreshadowing of the girl's future, even as the trees in the background explode with blooms.
In "Morning," another girl stands, arms outstretched, between two trees. She's wearing a wonderfully intricate patchwork dress that falls in realistic folds created, Cheairs explained, by a glazing process. Every detail of the painting -- the geometric shapes that comprise the ground, the mottled oranges of the sky, and the figure's hands and feet -- are painstakingly rendered, yet her facial features hover somewhere between the canvas itself and a final layer of paint.
Cheairs said that she started with a floating dress, then allowed the figure to develop on its own. She worked on the piece, she said, "every single day, from Feb. 1 'til the end of July."
"The Rain" uses a cooler palette to set a mood. Once again, a dress form -- draped, this time, in a flowing white-and-violet flowered skirt -- dictates the scene, framed by two silvery, stark trees firmly planted on a bruise-colored backdrop. A white bird is perched inside the form's mesh bodice. Perhaps it's the heart, or lungs of this piece.
Gallery goers who remember Cheairs' 1998 solo exhibition at Askew Nixon Ferguson or more recent shows at Looney, Ricks, Kiss and the Memphis College of Art will note a stylistic evolution broadcast by the complex abstract patterns that detail much of her new work.
Cheairs, a Memphis College of Art graduate, credited the hours of studying and painting she accumulated while working toward the MFA she received from the University of Memphis last year for the changes.
Gesturing toward a series of square abstract studies that hung above her desk, she said, "The good thing about being a student again is that I tried things I'd never tried before."
Preview
"Nancy Cheairs: New Paintings"
At Askew Nixon Ferguson Architects through Oct. 15.
Opening reception is 5:30-8 Sept. 26. For more information, go to NancyCheairs.com.
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