Floodwaters wash away artist’s works and dreams

By Rosalind Bentley

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Sometimes the best way to make it through a hard patch is to grit your teeth and fake a smile. That’s what Katherine McClure tries to do and, most days, she succeeds.

Like many who live along Peachtree Creek in Buckhead, McClure, 39, watched as a flood gorged her home last month.

Time and money will make the house whole again for McClure, her husband and their two young children. But it’s the flooding of the shed out back that has broken her spirit. Not so long ago, that shed was a place where her spirit found renewal.

Her story starts with a series of choices, the sort of choices people make and hope they won’t end up regretting. First choice: She defied her family, with its deep roots in Georgia’s justice system, and went to art school rather than law school. Painting was her love, not examining precedents.

She took the degree she earned in studio art from Hollins University in Virginia and money from waiting tables and made a go of it interning in New York City galleries and eventually the Museum of Modern Art.

The experience was great, the money was not.

Second choice: McClure, thinking it would be easier to be a starving artist closer to home, moved back to Atlanta and became an elementary school art teacher. She worked out of Fishbone Gallery, painting, selling her work, gaining a small group of collectors of her mixed-media art. She was capturing the attention of some of the city’s small gallery owners. Still, making ends meet was a challenge.

“I decided that, if I wasn’t good enough to make a living off art, I needed an income that was steady,” McClure said.

So she made the third choice, which was to become a real estate assistant. That led to becoming a full-time agent, then wife, then mother, so that one day she looked up and found herself making money but not art.

And no matter how many closings she racked up, the longing to create art would not diminish.

Susan Bridges, owner of Whitespace Gallery in Inman Park, had supported McClure in her early days as an artist and missed her work.

“She’s extremely talented so I kept after her to get back into her work,” Bridges said. “She has a sensitivity in her work that I appreciate and that I thought was valuable. She needed to honor her ability.”

McClure credits Bridges for pushing her, if not relentlessly, enough to make her pick up her paint brushes again and try.

Sensing his wife’s need, Christian McClure converted an old shed in the backyard of their home into a studio for her. Shrouded by trees, it didn’t have the great light artists crave, but it had space and held promise.

Inside it, Katherine McClure stocked all the materials she’d collected for decades and used as a basis for her work: papers, fabrics, photographs taken 
in Europe in the 1950s by her great aunt, photographs McClure herself had taken on her father’s Meriwether County farm in the 1980s.

For the past year, she’d spend a couple of hours each morning in there working on dozens of canvases.

On Sept. 18, McClure was a featured artist at a glittering evening event at Gregg Irby Fine Art gallery near Chastain Park.

Before the night was over, four of the nearly 40 works she had there were sold.

Three days later, the rains came.

The bulk of her work was not at the show, but in the makeshift studio. By nightfall, she and her family had paddled away from their house in a borrowed canoe, right past the shed, swollen with murky water.

Days later, her husband threw away what was left of her collection. He said he didn’t want her to see it like that.

Katherine McClure herself finds it hard to even set foot in the space. The mold reeks and makes her cough. The sight makes her cry. And it seems as though the rains keep coming.

“You have to take what’s given to you at the moment and find some inspiration in the muck,” said Bridges, her old supporter. “Look at the artists in New Orleans after Katrina. You have to find some beauty in that chaos.”

But Katherine McClure is having a hard time getting on with it. It will be a long time, if ever, before she picks up her brushes and oils again.

“The water washed away that desire,” she said.