The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
ALL-STAR GAME’S SPECIAL FOCUS
New Mint Gallery exhibition illustrates artist’s unique skill.
With back-to-back wins for interim coach Nate Mcmillan, the Hawks finished the first half of the season strongly in the tumultuous days after Lloyd Pierce was fired.
Moving into the second half, the team and general manager Travis Schlenk will face several questions, ranging from whether this group has playoff potential to what the roster will look like after the NBA trade deadline March 25, with John Collins set to become a restricted free agent after the
season.
Schlenk has been active at previous trade deadlines (last season, he brought in center Clint Capela, who has proved to be a massive improvement at center). As of now, he said the Hawks (1620) are having conversations with teams around the league, but there’s nothing pending, though that obviously can change in a hurry if the right offer is made.
“You rarely get teams’ best offers, nobody gets real serious until you get down to the last week or two,” Schlenk said. “It’s hard to gauge. We certainly will look to do anything we can that feels like (it), is going to make us a better team in the short term and the long term. Those sometimes don’t go hand in hand, but we’ll look at any situation we think that will help us.”
Collins, specifically, will gar
ner interest from teams, as an energetic young power forward with scoring capabilities, who has taken another step forward on defense this season. He’s averaging 18 points and 7.6 rebounds, shooting 39% from 3-point range. He has started and played in all 36 games.
The addition of Capela has helped Collins slide back to his natural position. Capela acting as a rim protector and defensive backstop frees up Collins, who last season had to play ample games as a smallball center, which is a tough request for him on defense.
With all the rebuilding and moves made over the past few years of Schlenk’s tenure, Collins is the longest-tenured Hawk, in his fourth season. The Hawks made him a “competitive” offer going into this season, but the two sides weren’t able to reach an agreement for an extension, and therefore Collins will become a restricted free agent after the season, if he’s still with the team. In the past, Collins has mentioned he feels he should be in the conversation
for a max deal but has also said he knows you don’t always get exactly what you want in negotiations.
Schlenk said Collins is a big part of the Hawks, and emphasized the Hawks will have the opportunity to match any offer that comes his way. He said he can’t see the Hawks letting Collins “walk for nothing” in restricted free agency.
“John’s a big part of our team. I think he’s second on the team in scoring right now. We all know how effective he can be offensively with his ability to finish in the lane and to shoot the ball from the perimeter,” Schlenk said. “So we still view John as a part of our team, certainly. He’s made the decision this fall to go to restricted free agency, and that was his choice and obviously we respect it.
“But we’re going to have the opportunity to match any offer he gets. We’ll certainly make him an offer in free agency as well, and he’ll have the ability to see if he can get an offer from another team. But at the end of the day, we view him as part of our team, and I don’t see a restricted free-agency situation where we would just let him walk for nothing.”
As to whether the Hawks are
actively listening to trade offers for Collins, Schlenk acknowledged teams have interest in him. That part isn’t surprising, as Collins could certainly help out many teams.
“We listen about all our guys, that’s our job, to see what the value of all our guys are,” Schlenk said. “John is a good young player, and teams have interest in him, no question about it. But we listen on all our guys, I guess is the short answer.”
Schlenk said the Hawks recognize what Collins brings to the table, and Collins doesn’t have to prove anything further for the Hawks to match an offer for him. Of course, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what other teams will offer Collins, or exactly what they would offer in exchange for him via trade.
Collins has been one of the cornerstones of the Hawks’ rebuild, along with Trae Young, who arrived a year later.
“I don’t know that I need to see anything from him, to match an offer for him, to be completely frank,” Schlenk said. “We know who John is as a player, we get how productive he is. He doesn’t have to prove anything to us.”
Atlanta painter Gerald Lovell, 28, has already had the kind of success that seems to foreshadow a phenomenal career to come.
He just wrapped a sold-out solo exhibition at NYC’S PPOW gallery. And he’s currently featured alongside figurative painters Jurell Cayetano and Dianna Settles at Atlanta’s Mint Gallery — where his work also quickly sold out.
A largely self-taught artist, Lovell paints warm, lovingly rendered portraits of friends and families hanging out, making art, posing, beaming.
His subjects have nuanced, textured faces, achieved via the richly layered impasto painting style. Set against Lovell’s less
‘A lot of my work is from lived experiences, so the more that I do things, go out to places, meet new people and stuff, the more it informs my work.’
Gerald Lovell
dimensional backgrounds, the faces of the people he renders gain even greater depth and poignance. The layers of oil paint bring a dynamism to the faces as if they have just stopped to look out at us for a moment, before continuing on their way.
His snapshot-style moments are inspired by the pleasure he used to take flipping through his grandmother’s photo albums. That reflection on time, memory and love was one part of his artistic journey.
Lovell always loved to draw. As a kid he spent his money on how-to-draw books. He sold his first painting when he was in fourth grade for $25. At 16 he was uprooted from the familiar surroundings of his home in Chicago, and plunked in Lithonia, where his mother thought her family would be safer. “It was hard at first.” In Lithonia, he was an hour and a half by public transportation from downtown Atlanta.
“And the train stop used to be two blocks down the street from our apartment in Chicago.”
He took advanced placement art classes at Lithonia
High School. “But as I graduated high school, being an artist seemed like this sort of weird fairy tale to me.”
So he decided to pursue something more practical and enrolled in a graphic design program at the University of West Georgia until he realized that “I don’t like sitting at computers all day.”
He left school, and taught himself to paint, discovering his signature use of impasto while watching a Youtube video. Lately, he’s been watching Youtube to learn how to talk about his work.
“I am super nervous when it comes to interviews. I am still finding my voice,” he says. Watching
contemporary artists talk has taught him both the need and the difficulty of conveying the complexities of his own work.
“I realized art world talk is like putting supernatural things into words.” For Lovell, painting is “my spiritual practice.”
“A lot of my work is from lived experiences, so the
more that I do things, go out to places, meet new people and stuff, the more it informs my work,” says Lovell. That pleasurable, collaborative working process was decimated once COVID-19 hit.
“I didn’t paint for four months,” he says. “I was in a pretty bad place. I had to talk myself into going back into painting.”
Doom scrolling through the news every day, not seeing friends, he tortured himself about what he should be doing with his life.
“How does what I do add value to the world or bring value to people’s lives?” he would ask himself. “I had to do some inward growing and reflection,” he says. And ultimately, he realized “this is my life’s work.”
“Being able to be around people and being able to highlight their person,” was his purpose.
“To say that this moment is a grand moment,” he says of paintings that enunciate the quotidian pleasures of Black existence.
But Lovell has often felt stymied by some viewers’ impulse when they look at images of Black people done by a Black artist to read politics or race or agenda into his work.
“Why can’t I paint this picture of my friend at the park and it just lives as that?” he asks.
“This thing that I do does bring me joy. And I am also reflecting joy in the work.”
“I always feel like when people are trying to understand my work they’re looking for something other than joy. And that’s a weird problem.”
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