Homeless for the Holidays
Hart Gallery offers one-of-a-kind artwork
Jasen Boston dreamed of an eerie and beautiful Irish waterfall as he cared for his ailing father in a gloomy East Ridge motel. Torrents poured down a cliff and were slammed by a fierce wind at the bottom of the mountain, blowing the water skyward.
Boston’s resulting piece of art, titled “Catastrophic Beauty,” presents the illusion of a spectacular waterfall flowing upside down.
It was a perfect subject for Boston, who adores surrealist Salvador Dali. As his money dwindled and it was clear he and his father would soon be homeless, his dad still insisted that his artistically gifted son spend time each day drawing.
“Even in the darkest times, he wanted me to always be encouraged,” Boston says on Nov. 19, gazing at his completed waterfall. “He died yesterday. He lived long enough to see I was a success. I earned $6,000 selling my work last year at the Hart Gallery. I finished culinary school on a scholarship and now work at The Chattanoogan. I love the people at Hart. They saved my life.”
Boston is just one of the homeless or physically or mentally disabled artists that Ellen Heavilon has helped since she founded Hart Gallery five years ago.
“We don’t put every client’s work on sale, just those who truly have an artistic gift — but we find a creative activity that unlocks the imagination for everyone who comes to us for help,” she explains.
Fort Oglethorpe’s Amy Dinsmore created a 3-D collage with an imagination fueled by Tom Waits’ lilting, yearning song “Shiny Things”; the lyrics are inscribed around the frame. A crow painted against an idyllic farm scene holds a huge and real quartz teardrop earring in his beak. Below him is a real bird’s nest containing the detritus of romance — broken bits of jewelry, bright-colored ticket stubs, tinsel and shreds of love notes.
Richard Thompson uses glass bubbles and swatches and slabs of jade, sea blue, crimson and cream glass for sculptures as bold as mosaics with the luminous splendor of stained glass. The breathtaking Milky Way dwarfs the mountains in Ron Johnson’s lovely Milky Sky.
Many of the artists have their pieces as modestly priced as $5 because Heavilon believes everyone should be able to own art. Each artist, homeless or temporarily housed, donates 10 percent of the sale price to a charity.
“Sometimes an art dealer comes in and tells me that we’ve undervalued a piece and he can get thousands for it, so I tell the artist: Time for you to fly and let him show his art there,” Heavilon says. “But even when they sell at at an upscale gallery, they always donate that 10 percent to a charity.”