Under Glass | The Manifest-Station | Legacy of Loss | The Last Book | Mr. Imagination | Meaders | Williams
Wild Art | Hideaways | Dial | Outside of Time | Tin Man | Oprah

Under Glass

An essay about my mother and a gift I finally understood

It looks like a still life from a sculptor’s garden: a bud pink vase holding a nosegay of porcelain blossoms. Butter yellow, baby-blanket blue, shell pink and white, they bloom amid green leaves and tiny sprays of gold leaf. Issued by the Franklin Mint decades ago, “The Imperial Palace Bouquet from the House of Igor Carl Faberge,” was purchased by my mother shortly afterward. She kept hers—elevated on a round, wooden platform and domed by a glass cloche—in her line of sight for the rest of her life. Read more…

Legacy of Loss

Leslie Mackinnon’s grief over relinquishing her sons for adoption inspires her passion to change the process

The gray porcelain floor tiles of the upstairs bathroom felt cool against her hot skin. Leslie Carroll Pate had left her job at the family’s appliance business before lunch because she didn’t feel well and was stretched out on the bathroom floor near the tub. As the blares and whistles of the college football game Granny watched downstairs filtered up through the floorboards, she swallowed her own screams. It was Oct. 28, 1967, three days after her 20th birthday.

Another wave of pain squeezed down her body. She grabbed the side of the tub until the pain passed. For a brief second, she wondered if she were having a miscarriage. If she were, no one would discover the shame she had been hiding for months under loose tent dresses and 50 extra pounds. Only a year after giving up her first-born son in an Alabama maternity home, she was once again giving birth, this time at her family’s home in Florida, unmedicated, untended and unseen.

In the months leading up to this moment, Leslie had been running escape scenarios through her mind. Read More...

The Last Book I Loved: The Original 1982 by Lori Carson

Maybe I should have expected Lori Carson’s first book to alter my chemistry. Her music – solo records, collaborations with The Golden Palominos, soundtracks for film and TV – has always taken me places I didn’t know I needed to go. When her first album, Shelter, came out in 1990, I was 34, working 50-hour weeks at a newspaper editing other people’s stories and trying to forget my own. Like me, Carson was from New York, and close to my age. Her music pulsed with sensual mystery. Her low-fi soprano mapped a heart’s topography: twisty roads, dark corners and the sweet spots in between. I couldn’t always tell who she was addressing (a lover? a stranger? herself?) but each tiny sonic world pulled me in – especially “Imagine Love,” her duet with Greg Allman. Read more...

The Manifest-Station

I was honored to write a guest post for Jen Pastiloff’s Dear Life: An Unconventional Advice Column, in answer to a writer’s question. Read more…

Mr. Imagination is 'about to rise'

"Wait right here, " Gregory "Mr. Imagination" Warmack says before ducking back into the dark, art-choked living room of his compact ranch, in the northwest Atlanta neighborhood of Riverside.

The visionary artist emerges into bright sunlight with three blackened sticks and a reverent smile. With the air of a weathered rock star --- black beret, lots of silver rings, a goatee he sometimes braids with copper wire --- he looks barely 50, much less 62. Read More...

Lanier Meaders: The Face Behind the Jugs

Georgia folk potter who saved the family tradition from extinction is to be honored by the governor

Mossy Creek, Ga. - Folk potter Lanier Meaders, the man who made face jugs famous, is battling a bone cancer he thought he'd licked. At 76, the man who saved the state's distinctive glazed stoneware tradition hadn't been able to craft a face jug on the family's old-fashioned wheel in two years. Too weak to work the foot-pedal, he had settled for turning out candleholders on a small electric wheel. "I worked with pottery all my life," he said in a hoarse whisper one recent day. "Now it's time for me to quit."

But later that day — as he talked about tonight's party in his honor at the Governor's Mansion, where he will be cited for "making significant contributions to the arts in America," and mused on how strange it is that people have gone so nuts for face jugs ("I don't understand it, unless they're just crazy to start with") — he found the strength to power his old wheel. Read More…

You may know her name. You may not have seen her face. But after hearing ‘Car Wheels on a Gravel Road,’ you’ll know….

LUCINDA WILLIAMS

The perfect sound can live in your mind like a landscape you know by heart. You can circle around it, tirelessly, until maybe, just maybe, you capture it on tape. When others finally hear it, they will heap praise upon you for getting it so right. Until then, you may be dismissed as a "nutty perfectionist" by band mates or even The New York Times. And instead of talking about your music, every interviewer will want to chat about being obsessive.

Welcome to Lucinda Williams' nightmare.

At 45, she is revered by other musicians, critics and fans for making country blues that are closer to poetry than pop. She's never charted, and every label she's ever signed with has folded, so she's largely unknown to the average consumer of popular entertainment. "Passionate Kisses, " her most famous song, only hit country radio when Mary Chapin Carpenter covered it, winning them both a Grammy in 1994. Read More…

Stalking the Wild Art

Tom Patterson chronicles Howard Finster and other Southern men of vision

PENNVILLE, Ga. — This is the Rev. Howard Finster's territory. Not officially, of course, but for all practical purposes, visitors to this sleepy stretch of Appalachian foothills are almost certainly looking for the 73-year-old Patron Saint of Do-It-Yourself Art, the Baptist preacher who's been a guest at the White House and Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show,'' who can sell a work, sight unseen, for $20,000 over the phone to a New York City art collector, and whose cartoonish paintings grace the cover of rock albums by the Talking Heads and R.E.M. 

In 1980, Tom Patterson became one of those visitors. 

Traveling northwest from Atlanta for a Brown's Guide to Georgia article on self-taught artists, the writer wanted to interview the preacher, whose passion for saving souls inspired him to turn his backyard swamp into something he calls Paradise Garden.Traveling northwest from Atlanta for a Brown's Guide to Georgia article on self-taught artists, the writer wanted to interview the preacher, whose passion for saving souls inspired him to turn his backyard swamp into something he calls Paradise Garden. Read more…

Grand ole hideaways keep string music alive

In the country corners of Gwinnett County, ordinary people still get together every weekend to entertain themselves

This isn't a rural twist on "America's Got Talent" -- though clearly many do.

It's a fellowship of familiar tunes and faces. Call it the church of hand-me-down music, passed through generations from ear to ear.

For more than 30 years, two places in particular have drawn the faithful -- some with guitar or banjo in tow; some just to listen. And not just from North Georgia, but from all over the world.

The bigger bluegrass scene happens Saturday
nights at Everett Brothers Music Barn in Suwanee.
Old-style music at Tanner's Chicken House in Dacula is played for a more intimate crowd on Fridays. Read more…

The Ascension of Thornton Dial

Alabama artist pushes the boundary between folk and contemporary art as works’ prices soar

BESSEMER, Ala.— For the past few months, self-taught artist Thornton Dial has been walking a thin line between two worlds — both professionally and personally. In his career, the 62-year-old Mr. Dial's work is testing the boundaries of folk art and modern art. Just three years ago, his metal assemblages were considered winsome craftings by an unschooled but resourceful folk artist. Now, his wise and witty meditations in paint about the meaning of justice, the strangeness of love and the elusive ways of life are being compared with modern art and fetching sky-high prices: An 8-foot- tall canvas from his "Life Go On" series recently sold for $90,000.

In his life, Mr. Dial is betwixt and between where he comes from and where he's going. He seldom netted more than $700 a month in his 33 years of building boxcars at Pullman Standard, a manufacturing plant in this small industrial town. Whatever else the family needed, he devised ways to build — including a small residence partially constructed of homemade cement that he molded into bricks using soda cans. Read more…

A Place Outside Of Time

Before his death in 1986, Georgia folk artist Eddie Owens Martin created an otherworldy kingdom that museum officials are now trying to preserve

Author Tom Patterson likens turning into the driveway of Pasaquan for the first time to the way Dorothy must have felt walking from her cyclone-snatched, black-and-white house out into the wildly Technicolor world of Oz.

Just a half-hour drive southeast of Columbus, Ga., and a few miles past the city limits of the town of Buena Vista (population 1,500), artist Eddie Owens Martin's home and life's work is set on four acres of farmland. Fifty years before he died in 1986 at age 77, he heard a voice "from the spirit world" tell him, "You're gonna be the start of something new, and you're gonna be called a Pasaquoyan and your name will be St. EOM" (his initials, pronounced like the chant, "om"). Unsure of the meaning of Pasaquoyan at the time, Martin later learned, he said, "pasa means `pass' in Spanish . . . and quoyan is an Oriental word that means bringin' the past and the future together.' " Never one to doubt such spiritual instructions, Martin proceeded to turn the yellow frame house and land he inherited into one of the world's finest personal art environments, which he called Pasaquan. Read more…

Tin Man with a heart of gold

Folk artist's primitive works finding fans in a frantic world

GAINESVILLE - If glaucoma hadn't left folk artist R.A. Miller blind in his left eye and foggy in the right, he'd still be breeding and selling hogs and goats on his 3 acres in North Georgia.

Since it did, the only animals the 78-year-old has raised since he retired are those he's made with his hands: roughly shaped creatures snipped out of surplus tin and painted dinosaur green, devil red and sun yellow; and oddly fanciful beings rendered in raw strokes onto Masonite.

His childlike art is being grabbed up almost as quickly as he can make it by an ever-growing audience that defies labeling. Drawn by the dirt-cheap price ($5 to $20) and whimsical charm of the artist's creations, gallery owners, college students, rock 'n' rollers, housewives and independent collectors routinely descend on Mr. Miller's weather-beaten homestead on the Old Cornelia Highway (Ga. 13). Galleries around the country are selling the work for 10 times his price and more. Read more…

O, The Oprah Magazine

My first appearance in O was -- literally -- the last word in a special section called "Let It Go."

Under Glass | The Manifest-Station | Legacy of Loss | The Last Book | Mr. Imagination | Meaders | Williams
Wild Art | Hideaways | Dial | Outside of Time | Tin Man | Oprah