Buys’ photos tell ‘Delta’ stories
The best art has a story to tell. Stories — and emotions — pour from the cyanotype photographic prints of Hot Springs artist Beverly Buys. Her exhibition “Delta in Blue” hangs through April 14 at the Argenta branch of the Laman Public Library System in North Little Rock.
Buys has been working on a photographic essay of the south central Arkansas Delta since 2011. She explains the project’s genesis:
“I went on a road trip with an old friend, Jodi Morris, who was doing research on Crowley’s Ridge. When we drove over the ridge into Helena, it blew me away. It’s changed a lot since, but so many things about it just felt so familiar. I knew immediately I wanted to photograph it.”
Buys did research on the Delta and made several trips a year to take photographs. She was on sabbatical that first year and has received grants to support her work through a Margin of Excellence Grant from Henderson State University’s Ellis College of Arts and Sciences and the Arkansas Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
“Because there has been so little development in the
Delta, many of the old structures remain,” she says. “The area seems so familiar to the way I grew up … but it is geographically and culturally very different. Trying to understand those differences was a big motivation for me.”
Cyanotype — a photographic printing process used to create cyan blue images, aka blueprints — seems especially apt for Buys’ subjects. The various shades of cyan can have the patina of a forgotten old family photo that has been stored in a box in an attic or closet.
The medium is especially effective at tapping feelings of nostalgia and yearning and, often, a sense of sadness, abandonment and a bleak loneliness. Buys’ photographs — such as overgrown landscapes, cemeteries and abandoned buildings — arouse curiosity. Whose business was this? Who lived here? What happened to them?
The human presence is inescapable.
“I never photograph people, yet the photographs are all about the people,” she says.
There are, as others have said, ghosts in Buys’ photographs; the energetic imprint of the people who once lived there; the ones buried in the cemeteries. They arouse our curiosity. We want to know their story, but there is no one to ask. All that remains are the buildings and land that bore witness to their lives.
Some high points:
Wholesale Warehouse, Helena, AR, is especially well composed, capturing the building and a sky that has a sense of foreboding.
Home Cooking Served Daily, a mural on the side of a building.
Trumpet Vine in Spring and Trumpet Vine in Winter focus on the plant that envelops an abandoned house. These images have an ache one can feel when seeing images of abandoned houses taken during the Depression of the 1930s.
Church in a Mississippi Cornfield is a stark, bleak landscape that taps the psyche in much the same way as Buys’ 2015 Arkansas Arts Center “Delta Exhibition” entry High Lonesome. It’s not hard to hear a desolate blues, country or gospel song when you see these images. Church has what appears to be a utility line rising from the building, flowing upward. A direct line to heaven, perhaps?
Her appreciation of Arkansas artist Carroll Cloar shines in Angel in a Briar Patch (After Carroll Cloar), which taps a scene Cloar also painted, and Crowley’s Angel.
The arrival of “Delta in Blue” at the Argenta Branch Library follows other showings, including Arkansas State University, the Delta Cultural Center in Helena-West Helena and Henderson State University, where Buys was professor of photography. She holds a master’s degree in photography and a master of fine arts in printmaking.
“Delta in Blue” is packed with great stories. It is haunting, moving and strikingly beautiful.
“Delta in Blue,” photographs by Beverly Buys, through April 14, Argenta Branch Library, 420 Main St., North Little Rock. Hours: 9 a.m.-6 p.m Monday-Friday, 9 a.m.-1 p.m. Saturday. (501) 687-1061.
Two current and two former Arkansas Democrat-Gazette staff members are featured in “Outside the Lines,” which hangs through May 16 at Mugs Cafe in North Little Rock.
Kirk Montgomery, assistant managing editor/design and graphics; graphic artist Nikki Dawes; recently retired features writer and illustrator Ron Wolfe; and former graphic artist Dusty Higgins are featured in a show that embraces the serious and the whimsical.
Montgomery, represented by Cantrell Gallery, works with a vibrant palette of ink and acrylic to create intriguing images that hint at a kind of dystopian vision ( The Village Burns) or explore the idea of a warm, idealized memory in Standing Outside My Home as a Child.
Dawes’ charcoal drawings are particularly impressive; Charcoal #6’ s strong, slashing lines set the tone for a deeply emotional portrait of a woman in psychic or emotional distress.
Wolfe expands his artistic vision in the mixed media Bat Girl, which blends a comics sensibility with vintage pinups. His watercolor work is strong.
Higgins, who has found success in the world of graphic novels ( Pinocchio: Vampire Slayer), has several poster-style images. Fight for Right is especially effective.
“Outside the Lines,” works by Kirk Montgomery, Nikki Dawes, Ron Wolfe and Dusty Higgins, through May 16, Mugs Cafe, 515 Main St., North Little Rock. Hours: 7 a.m.-6 p.m. Monday-Saturday. (501) 3799101.
John Sykes Jr., chief photographer of the Democrathas joined the roster of artists represented by the Little Rock contemporary gallery Boswell Mourot Fine Art. He has four new works in his psychographs series hanging at the gallery.