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Having made a choice to escape the vast surrealism museum otherwise known as Detroit, I took a position working as a photographer in a city “nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.” It held no small amount of appeal to a man seeking to escape the abnormalities of a derelict industrial city. It was in the South, near the mountains – it had to be comfortable.
So I felt shock upon arriving to discover an equally bizarre world. A world not of the “there’s a crackhead giving birth in my parking lot” variety, but more of the “colliding cultures” variety – namely, the Appalachians and deep South. The taste here is distinct.
To my pleasant surprise, I came across a show at the Fran Hanson Discovery Center at the South Carolina Botanical Gardens and learned this collision inspires Central artist Stephanie Howard.
“South Carolina in particular is this weird mix of those two cultures,” she explained. “Most of my art is based on the South and Southern culture. It’s like everything is pretty but it’s all kind of unsettling at the same time. There’s this undercurrent of everything good being tied to everything bad.”
In this environment came her Carolina Shag Queen series. Pen and ink “posters” promoting a fictitious beauty pageant held in the Carolinas depict Southern women representing their hometown. The women are traditionally beautiful but made bizarre by the extremely busy, almost psychedelic surroundings (scary, not like the dancing bears). It is taken further with patterns drawn on the queens’ faces and a rough delivery.
But the rough delivery is intentional and works well in the context. Howard was trained at the Savannah College of Art and Design, but sought an escape from her formal training and traditional formulas for this series.
“The idea was becoming less important than the technical aspects of my painting,” she said. “It was sort of like chemistry and I thought it was the idea that I wanted to get across, or the narrative, autobiography or symbolism. So I thought I’d only use pen and paper, since the idea is so important.”
In “Anderson Shag,” the Anderson beauty queen flashes a blue ribbon smile and stares off the page with soft, almond eyes. She is framed by borders reading “Carolina Shag Queen,” “Anderson, SC” and “Welcome to the Electric City,” complete with crude lightning bolts. Tiny, crazed birds perched above the queen radiate and utility poles adorn the top banner. The queen is crowned with an electric star tiara. It speaks accurately of Clemson’s lunatic neighbor.
Howard draws additional inspiration from outsider art; the work of untrained artists, commonly the mentally ill.
“I’ve been trained in school on design principles and all that stuff, so basically (with outsider art) you just let go of it all,” she said. “And I can see that sometimes it makes me angry that the training comes through and I’m still trying to obey rules, so I just kind of go.”
Furthering the approach is Howard’s choice of a thick, Italian paper, which she uses to make the pen lines look embroidered. Neutral papers were selected – most of the pieces are devoid of any color – but some possess a slight orange or yellow, which she saved for more “aggressive” pieces.
So far the unorthodox approach has been met with great approval. Several of her pieces have already been sold and those that don’t pan out she must “destroy” — lest they be snatched up by friends.
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