Capturing symmetry of the Delta

"Levee," painting by John Robinette

Full moons and ramshackle structures dominate "Recent Work," John Robinette's current exhibition at Askew Nixon Ferguson Architects.

"Levee," painting by John Robinette

The 64-year-old painter and illustrator's Mississippi Delta-themed work has evolved significantly over the last decade. The iconic imagery -- tumbledown shacks, one-room churches, and rusty water towers -- has remained the same, but Robinette's raw, folk art inspired painting has given way to cleaner, more structured lines.

"A lot of it goes back to my design background," Robinette says. "I've always been a real composition-minded person. It's the same subject matter, and the same type of compositions, but over 10 years they've gotten very stylized."

The church, which Robinette saw on numerous trips to Robinsonville, Miss., disappeared when the casino industry came to Tunica County. So did the ramshackle sharecropper's shack, which had a homemade basketball court outside its back door.

"I drove down one day, and the shack was leveled. I started doing paintings of things I remembered down there, and it just mushroomed," says Robinette, who has produced work for magazines like Fortune and Newsweek, as well as clients ranging from Random House to RCA-BMG Music.

The 30 paintings that comprise "Recent Work," which is on exhibit through March 20, combine Robinette's flair for the dramatic with his agility to reduce those remembered, complex scenes into pure geometry.

In "River Church Yellow Moon," that humble church is bathed in the luminous gold of a full moon, while "Hwy White House" captures a shooting star that zooms over the rooftop of the Robinsonville shack.

Using mostly acrylic paints, Robinette reduces fields into simple planes, and strips his structures of all architectural elements until just their hulking outlines remain. Lines of cotton plants are precisely laid out, as if rubber-stamped directly on the canvas. Water is nearly always rendered impenetrably dark and ominous. Unexpected textures -- the bark on a tree trunk, or the rough surface of a crescent moon -- break away from the canvas with a vigor that's almost startling.

"I think it goes back to my childhood," says the Ohio-born artist, who moved to Memphis in his teens. Recollecting the times his father, a district manager for McGraw-Hill Publishing, loaded up the family in their Nash Ambassador to relocate, Robinette says, "We'd travel at night, because we had no air conditioner. I'd lay in the back seat, and all I'd see is the moon, and maybe sometimes a structure in the distance."

That memory, coupled with a fascination with the 1955 gothic thriller "Night of the Hunter," has further fueled his creative bent.

Just as actor-turned-director Charles Laughton employed the moon to great effect in his film, the somber orb is ever-present in this work, watching over bluesmen bent over their guitars and hanging over cotton fields, as in "Big Moon Blues" and "Crop Yellow Moon," respectively.

"The symmetry of it and the subject matter just appeals to so many people in Memphis," says Ciara Neill, the marketing coordinator and art gallery curator at Askew Nixon Ferguson.

"People just go insane for his work," says Neill, noting that even in the current recession, Robinette continues to sell paintings.

And, when actor Samuel L. Jackson was in town filming "Black Snake Moan," he purchased three paintings for his homes in Los Angeles and New York.

Robinette remains unfazed by success.

John Robinette, "Recent Works"

At Askew Nixon Ferguson Architects, 1500 Union Ave., through March 20. For more information, call 278-6868 or go to www.ANFA.com.

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