Southside Art Gallery’s current exhibit features work that captures the beauty of change over time.
“Full Circle: A Progression of Color through the Year” is a collection of the work of Carlyle Wolfe, a local artist with a passion for nature.
Wolfe grew up in Canton and is now an adjunct assistant professor of art here at the University of Mississippi. After completing her BFA in painting at UM, she received her MFA in painting and drawing from Louisiana State University. Additionally, Wolfe received the Mississippi Arts Commission Visual Arts Fellowship in 2005 and 2010, as well as the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Visual Arts Award in 2008.
“It’s difficult to say when I became an artist,” Wolfe said. “I remember recognizing that there was something about making pictures that really worked for me when I was in the second grade at St. Andrew’s in Jackson. My parents and my school gave me wonderful opportunities to be creative at an early age.”
The drawings featured in her exhibit were made over the last 15 years, beginning in 2001 when Wolfe was in graduate school at LSU. Wolfe said she believes the drawings mark the maturation of her work.
“Over the last 15 years, I have learned a lot about subjects, forms, processes, materials, ideas and how they work together,” Wolfe said. “That said, I look back and value and even draw from early aspirations.”
Wolfe’s work is a reflection of her love for nature and wild, natural growth. The gardens she cultivated in her paintings allow her to create scenes with imagination, relating the realities of season and zone to imagined places and images from stories.
The drawings— which fit together in chronological order, even though they were made over many years— feature patterns of flowers and branches through layers of light and color.
“Flowers are pretty easy to love, and I enjoy finding particulars to enjoy in distinct species and individuals,” she said. “For example, zinnias are structured in fascinatingly similar but varied ways. The delicate fragrance of magnolia fuscata carries in the spring breezes. Ornate passion flowers grow wild along roadsides.”
She credits her love of landscape as one of the reasons she spends a good bit of time in woods and pastures riding horses.
“I also appreciate plants that require maintenance,” Wolfe said. “There would be a necessary balance between wildness and order.”
Wolfe draws her inspiration from various sources, from arranging wedding flowers for friends and riding horses to looking at landscape painting at art museums. Wolfe especially treasures the imagery that she is capable of deriving from reading.
“There are a number of movies, especially movies based on children’s books, that I wouldn’t see because I wouldn’t want to dilute my impressions based on words,” she said.
The work on display at Southside Art Gallery mostly focuses on either Stonehenge or arches on watercolor paper, with some pieces gaining an aged look with time. Virtually none of the drawings on display feature a background, which makes some of them, such as “Camellias,” appear to be floating on a lake. From afar “Cedar Branch” looks a little like a nerve tract. The zinnia drawings, slightly faded with time, look like patches of shading from a distance. Only when one gets close to the group of drawings can you see the reality depicted on paper.
For Wolfe, being able to see so many of her drawing at one time is a first.
“I had a sense of how they fell into chronological positions,” she said. “But seeing the installation, the repeating cycle, has me pondering and will influence my future work.
Wolfe’s artist reception will be held on Thursday, November 5 from 6 – 8 p.m. Her collection, which went on display October 13, will be available for viewing and purchase at Southside Gallery until November 14.
