LEPANTO — To the passing eye, there’s little in the landscape of the Arkansas Delta’s northeastern reaches to spark any burst of artistic creativity.
No snow-capped mountains. No rock-rimmed canyons. No wave-washed seashores. Mostly the seeming monotony of table flat terrain stretching to the horizon.
But Norwood Creech has turned the Delta canvas, blank as it may appear to an outsider, into a panoply of evocative images. A selection of the Lepanto artist’s work - 16 paintings in a half-dozen media from oil to walnut ink, along with 13 digital photographs - is now featured in a Butler Center for Arkansas Studies exhibition at the Arkansas Studies Institute in Little Rock.
“Norwood’s art looks deceptively simple, but she is actually very sophisticated in her handling of color and composition,” says Colin Thompson, the Butler Center’s art administrator and gallery manager. “Her work shows a wonderful combination of creative energy and technical skill that allows her to create these resonant images of the Arkansas Delta.”
Jeannie Whayne, a University of Arkansas at Fayetteville history professor well versed on the Delta, told the audience at the show’s opening in March that Creech’s art “captures the Delta’s 21st-century landscape with acute sensitivity, not only to the beauty of bountiful fields but also to the implications of burning rice, a practice that leads to air pollution. Her unflinching vision captures both the beauty and the danger of today’s Arkansas Delta.”
In Whayne’s words, “Arkansas is lucky to have someone of Norwood’s caliber working in Deltaart.”
A rat-a-tat-tat talker whose sentences sometimes spatter like a Jackson Pollock painting, the 47-year-old Creech calls herself “a pot-stirrer, an instigator.” Blessed as well with a ripe sense of humor, she adds, “We got ‘instigator’ down to seven letters,” then spells them out on a piece of paper: “instig8r.”
More seriously, showing a visitor around her aluminum roofed studio three miles north of Lepanto, she cites the aim of “using my painting as an opportunity to start a discussion about the virtues of the Delta. Some days, the low landscape and the big sky just seem to hold my heartstrings.”
A statement posted by Creech at the Little Rock show elaborates on her Delta vision: “For me, this rural landscape represents a piece of the myth of the South, Southern agriculture and its heritage, with stories of small lost communities, the history of cotton and the apparent effect that the evolution of technology has had on the agricultural community, the landowners and the farmers who still work this land.”
SCHOOLED IN ART
This down-on-its-luck region of Arkansas was terra incognita to the Kansas City, Mo., native when she moved to Memphis in 1994 as a recently divorced 30-year-old.
Having grown up in Kentucky and South Carolina as the only child of an artist mother, Millicent Ford Creech, with a grandmother who painted professionally as K. Doyle Ford, she was schooled in the classical traditions of art.
She earned a bachelor’s degree in studio art in 1985 from Skidmore College in Sarasota Springs, N.Y. Later she studied in Santa Fe, N.M., with Wayne Thiebaud and Gregory Kondos, the former known for his paintings of diner food in the Pop Art vein, the latter a California artist of note.
Her move to Memphis happened in large part “because my grandmother there had passed away, and I’m the only child of two only children. I figured I’d ride her vapor trails. But after living in idyllic places like Bisbee [N.M.], Laguna Beach [Calif.], Hilton Head Island [S.C.] and Sarasota Springs [N.Y.], Memphis was tough. It was really hard on me, and I didn’t last long.”
Life took a serendipitous turn one day when she went with a date across the Mississippi River to play softball inLepanto. The game’s venue was the front yard of a house belonging to the parents of Henry Grady “Tri” Watkins, a lawyer and businessman with fourth-generation roots in Poinsett County. Romance between Norwood and Tri ensued, leading to marriage in January 2000 in New Mexico under a total lunar eclipse.
“Tri once told me, ‘You know, you need a lot of space,’” she says, adding with a grin, “He smiled when he said it, with love in his heart. So I let him live.”
In a less joking vein, she credits her husband with “profound effects on the ways I approach my life and my art.I had lived alone for so long that I had no idea how relatively fast my mind and voice would race. So in a way, he rescued me from the worst of myself. I still have idea-fests going on in my head. I am just managing myself a bit differently - a constant work in progress. But I am a lot better at harnessing the energy rather than letting it harness me.”
Their distinctive house with its galvanized aluminum roof, on which her adjoining studio was modeled, sits on 13 acres. Sharing the property is a menagerie of 18 dogs, more than 40 cats, several goats, two quarter horses named Jo-Jo and The Goose, and Amos the donkey.
Occupying a prominent place among the array of art that fills the walls of the home is a painting by Creech’s grandmother. It portrays 5-year-old Norwood and her mother.
“Take a close look at the painting,” Creech says. “Grandmother Kitty was really upset with me about something I’d done. She pointed out that since I did not behave, she gave me a piggy’s nose.”
Creech credits her husband, who manages 22,000 acres of farmland and other interests for his extended family, with one very practical shift in her creative mindset:
“I’m blessed to be married to a guy who feels great pride in giving me the opportunity to paint and to continue with the path I’m on, without the eternal pressure so many artists feel of, ‘I’ve got to make a sale today.’”
RISING PRICES
In fact, prices for her paintings continue to rise. One of her dealers is her mother, proprietor these days of M. Ford Creech Antiques & Fine Arts gallery in Memphis.
Some of the works in the Butler Center show are pleinair paintings, done or begun on levees and other rural sites where Creech sets up her easel.
“Working on location is often a place to start for me,” she says. “I picture it, draw it, photograph it, paint it, until I can own it. Then I can take my work back into the studio and push it further to see how I want to ‘develop’ the image. Let’s say I have been haunting a place for a week. I have painted it, have pictures of it at different times of day, in different weather.
“It is when I feel that I truly know a place that I can return to the studio with confidence. Once back in the studio, I may decide to switch media from what I used on location to something else. And often the size changes, too. I like working big. And I like working small. Full spectrum, many media.”
A burgeoning enthusiasm, on display in the Little Rock exhibition, is digital photography.
“I just got the newest Lumix FZ100 digital camera with a Leica lens,” she says. “I also have an Epson ProStylus 4880 printer, 17 inches wide. I play with images a lot. I now have 40,000 of them on a laptop. I would like to move on to digital video. The photography is a great complement to my painting and drawing.”
Creech has become a devotee of the social networking site Facebook, which she uses professionally as well as personally.
“I joke that Facebook was made for rural women,” she says. “Women are often about connecting. Out here in the sticks, I have less chance to connect in person than if I lived in the suburbs. Facebook has filled that vacuum for me. I also have a Facebook page for my art [facebook.com/norwood.creech.art]. It is by far the cheapest and quickest way to get the word out for an artist or anyone selling a product or service.”
A DELTA ADVOCATE
As a Delta transplant, Creech has become a proselytizer for the not-always-soobvious virtues of the region and for her adopted state as a whole.
“I’m recruiting people to move to Arkansas whenever I can,” she says. “I had never lived in a state that was so loyal. I had never lived in a state that had such gregarious people. I have come to love Arkansas for being Arkansas. I am waiting for the tourism people to come out with the bumper sticker: ‘Arkansas is a great town.’”
Regarding the Delta’s economic and social woes, she hopes that creative work like hers “might lead folks to begin seeing it for something else.”
She alludes to a conversation of some years ago with Christo, the artist famous for wrapping structures in vastswathes of fabric.
“I asked Christo what was the most important thing he could teach people through his art,” she remembers. “His response, in essence, was to get people to see things not for what they are, but for what they could be.”
Norwood Creech: Selected Works From the Northeastern Arkansas Delta Through June 25,
Arkansas Studies Institute Mezzanine Gallery, 401 President Clinton Ave., Little Rock
Hours:
9 a.m.-6 p.m. Monday-Saturday
Admission:
Free
(501) 320-5791 arstudies.org
Style, Pages 49 on 05/22/2011