Renaissance man Lloyd Robert Mardis 'painted with his heart'

Photo by Mike Maple // Buy this photo

"Moonlit Cityscape" by Lloyd Robert Mardis.

Lloyd Robert Mardis will have his first solo art exhibit on Saturday, the same day as his memorial service.

Mardis, who was 80 when he died on April 21 from cancer, will be honored at 11 a.m. Saturday morning at First Unitarian Church of Memphis (the Church of the River) followed by an opening reception for 25 of his acrylic paintings that afternoon from 3 to 5 at The Caritas Village.

Photo by Mike Maple

"Moonlit Cityscape" by Lloyd Robert Mardis.

Photo by Mike Maple

"Picture in Picture" by Lloyd Robert Mardis.

Onie Johns, founder and director of The Caritas Village — a nonprofit coffee shop/community and cultural center in Binghamton — had heard about Mardis’ art through her daughter, who suggested she display it. After several false starts, Johns scheduled a show for April 15.

“And he said, ‘I hope I’m around then,’” recalls Johns. “We thought initially that we would do it while he was still here. We were in a big hurry to get it up. I thought we could do a video of the reception and show it to him, but then it was past that point. Now we’re doing it on the day of his memorial service.”

Preacher, author, cyclist, real estate broker — Mardis was all of the above, and at 76, he added painter to the list.

According to wife Nancy Mardis, her husband — whom she married in 2004 — took up art after she gave him lessons with noted watercolorist Fred Rawlinson for a Christmas gift that year. “He had a contagious personality,” Rawlinson said. “Many people try to paint pictures, and he painted with his heart.”

Over the next four years, the largely self-taught artist produced dozens of pieces, first in watercolor and then in his preferred medium, acrylic. Mixed media also became a fascination for Mardis. For example, he applied kitchen spices to delicate abstract works done with pen and ink, and even mixed into some paint ground-up bits of Tuscan brick he had gathered on a trip to Italy.

His work, at times abstract, at times sensual and impressionist, belies an eye for color and form, a love at once for Vincent van Gogh and Jackson Pollock. Spirituality also runs through the work of this former minister. One painting simply titled “Flower with Woman” leaves no doubt that the woman in question is the Virgin Mary, while another titled “Stained Glass” weds religious subtext to geometric abstraction as if Thomas Merton were having a dialog with De Stijl founding member Theo van Doesburg.

One of the more striking pieces in the show, a large canvas called “Moonlit Cityscape,” almost glows from its intense layering of blue hues and gold accents. The city itself seems to be Moorish, though even his wife doesn’t know for sure, and that, she says, is the way he would have liked it. Without being site-specific, the painting takes on a more mythic role, the imagined spiritual city of one’s inner faith, perhaps. It’s no coincidence that the painting is hung beside one that reads in almost joyfully defiantly bursts of yellow the word “Peace.”

“He knew what our mission is,” Johns says. “Our mission is to break down walls of hostility between the races, to build bridges of love and trust between the rich and those made poor. I wish I had had the opportunity to know him better.”

Art was but the latest and last challenge Mardis gave himself. When he retired at 65, he bought a bicycle and put 8,000 miles on it biking through Texas. At 69, he covered another 6,000 miles on bike traveling through the Great Plains into Canada. In his 70s, he began writing and published seven titles including a children’s book, a recount of his Texas travels, and a five-volume mystery/romance series (his books can be found at Amazon.com).

Marriage also belongs on Mardis’ rather unorthodox list. He had known his wife, now an accounting professor at the University of Memphis, some 40 years prior in Oklahoma. They lost touch for decades, and reconnected only via e-mail in the summer of 2004. Recalls Nancy: “He arrived in Memphis on August 10th — and we had not seen each other in 35 years — and got married the next afternoon.”

“He was the perfect Renaissance man,” she adds. “Someone who didn’t let age affect him in any way, which tells everyone that you can just keep creating, keep exploring.”

Lloyd Robert Mardis

Exhibit on display at The Caritas Village, 2509 Harvard, through the end of May. An opening reception is 3-5 p.m. Saturday. For more information, call 327-5246.

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