Art History

I ran an art gallery in rural South Carolina for several years. It started with an antique shop I opened in my early 20s during the height of the 2008 recession. The building was a former dry goods store and restaurant from 1908 and had been abandoned for over a decade, so was affordably priced. My parents had sold antiques since the early 1990s and I grew up learning the trade, which auctions were lucrative, which auctioneers were unscrupulous, how to spot reproductions, how to refinish and reupholster when needed, and all the minutiae of retail sales and bookkeeping. This was all pre-social media, and the very early days of the internet, so markets were regional and business was cultivated rather than quarried.

The market was full of high quality antiques as the last of the greatest generation passed away and their estates were being sold, and prices were at the lowest they’d ever been. But the sudden influx of supply coincided with a steep drop in demand as aging boomers were beginning to sell off their collections. Reality TV shows like American Pickers and Pawn Stars were among the most popular on television (we still watched syndicated television back then) and the DIY movement and minimalist design trends gained momentum. By the 2010s shops like mine were all closing or being subsumed by antique malls with rent based business models.

Seeing the writing on the wall, I made one last go of retail shopkeeping in 2015 but Hobby Lobby and Amazon were firing more salvos across the prow of Main Street’s sinking ship. So, I decided I’d go down fiddling like Nero...and opened an art gallery. Ironically half of our town actually burned down the year after. The charred rubble remained out front for our first exhibition. I organized yearly Halloween art shows with my friends. It never amounted to much, but looking back we really did our best and I was proud of what we accomplished. Nonetheless, like the antique shop before it, I accepted that the gallery was a lost cause, too.

In 2019, I reopened as a gift shop, intending to offer paintings alongside antiques, and modern manufactured goods. It seemed a great idea to me at the time. I remembered all the shops I’d grown up seeing in Charleston and Charlotte. Curiosity shops with antiques, candles, and interesting books. To tell the truth, I really wanted to open an occult bookshop but was told that would likely get me tarred and feathered. I’m not sure that it would’ve been any more socially aberrant than an art gallery, but I took the advice to heart and curbed my enthusiasm. The shop had a lukewarm reception. Most of the people in the community were polite and visited to show support. But the out-of-town traffic I once relied on was gone completely. And, of course, there was a global health crisis the year after. Since then, it’s been a working studio.

The religious mystics of the Middle Ages, like Teresa of Ávila, Nachmanides, and Ibn Arabi wrote about spiritual kingdoms. There is the idea of the divine being spatially oriented in the psyche, even among modern mystics like Jung. For me, my studio and this town have been that way. When I was young, the town was vibrant and bustling with activity. We had several department stores, two large supermarkets, a dozen restaurants, several small shops, shoe stores, etc. The 2008 recession saw everything shuttered, and by the time I opened the art gallery there were only a few restaurants and thrift shops left. I’ve lived here for nearly forty years and it’s been my universe. Ironically, when I do travel I compare cities to my little town...and they’re not so dissimilar.

The studio itself was never perfect. The gilded age in the Carolina Sandhills wasn’t exactly cosmopolitan. It was doubtlessly a very nice shop in its halcyon days, but its floors were trodden by more than ballroom dance shoes. There were the heavy brogues of laborers during the Depression, likely dragging from fatigue. The newspapers of the time recorded bootlegging arrests nearly every week, and even occasional daring smugglers of hashish. Who knows what strange smoke stained its tin ceilings with soot of the coal stove and the pipe tobacco of those who sat around and passed the time when there was so much time to pass. By the time the old building reached me, it had been reincarnated many times as all manner of businesses.

Me shopkeeping in 2016

I was still young when I started, and my hair was as long as my patience. It was exciting at first, and I enjoyed learning about antiques and the history behind them. The fun wore off over the years as it became more a matter of commerce and finance than art. Likewise, I came to understand history very differently as I experienced and lived its consequences. So, I moved the old cafe benches from the front room and used it to display antiques. It was the most finished part of the building. The back half contained crudely built shelving from the days when it had been a grocery store. I slowly renovated it over the years, disassembling each shelf individually, and sorting through all the odd mementos left behind. I’m not sure when I realized the symbolic relevance of it all.

Maybe it dawned on me gradually. I distinctly remember joking to a friend that I was tidying up the rafters first, because it represented my mind as above the body of the studio. The back of the building had always been storage and where I would paint, so it was never as organized as the front. I’ve written before about how I enjoyed painting the back lots of small towns because they have such an honest and frank character. The studio area was that way, and diametrically opposed to the order I tried to maintain on the sales floor. The past decade or so has been a slow process of merging and reconciling the two. Along the way I discovered a boarded up skylight and broke through it to walk on the roof. That resulted in it leaking every time it rained...but that’s another story…

The spaces we inhabit are shaped by our lives and shape them in turn. I know people who have never lived in one place for more than a few years, but they usually remember one place in particular as home. I talk about dreams a lot, more than I think most people are comfortable with. I enjoy hearing other people describe their dreams, and I notice most of them say that they dream about their home the way it was in childhood. For me, I dream about this town and other neighboring towns, but much larger and more elaborate with castles and stone walls. It’s my psyche’s way of processing the importance of this town in this life of mine.

The building itself likewise looms large in my dreams, and it reminds me how much time and effort I’ve put into something which is so temporary. I think often of our hunter-gatherer ancestors who never built cities or permanent houses. They maintained seasonal shelters, and I’m sure they put tremendous time and effort into them. Maybe they dreamed of particular thatched huts that they’d long since rebuilt elsewhere, or maybe they didn’t dream of them at all because they spent most of their time outdoors. But in modern America, our hunt isn’t on the open plain but the cash register and now on the world wide web.

Ancient people painted totemic icons, buffalo, deer, wolves, pregnant women. Images of important elements of their lives that they sought to explore, understand, and maybe in a sense subdue. There was a time in the 17th and 18th centuries when landowners commissioned paintings of their livestock with absurdly exaggerated proportions to demonstrate their wealth. Andy Warhol did that for modern America with his portraits of Marilyn Monroe and advertising propaganda. Lucien Freud treated the portrait psychologically, and tried to separate the image from the imago. My process has followed a similar course, starting with an attempt to depict the ideal as a tangible external object and learning to seek the essence of that ideal through art.

My work has grown with me the same way that I’ve grown with the studio. Art evolves slowly, through style and substance. The environment, both material and psycho-spiritual, in which a painting is made shapes its nature. In the same way a tree grows according to its climate and surroundings, art grows with the artist. All the years I spent ostensibly working on a gallery I was really working on a studio. The years I worked on a studio, I was really working on my art. The life I spend working on art will really be working on something more. The quintessence of form and color, as of sound, fragrance, and taste. Art isn’t truth, but the truth is in art.