At 81, artist Freddie Styles has seen his share of hardships. In 2009, he lost his partner of 44 years, Leroy W. O’Quinn.
And as a child growing up in Madison, Styles was often on the receiving end of his mother’s savage criticisms.
“My mother told me I would never have any friends and no one ever liked me,” said Styles, who moved with his mother and sister to Atlanta when he was 7.
Factor in being gay and Black and growing up in the Jim Crow South, and lesser men might have crumbled. But not Styles.
“He has a huge heart,” said Atlanta art collector Mike Harris of the renowned abstract artist, whose work has been shown at the High Museum, Savannah’s Telfair Museum, and embassies in Sierra Leone, South Africa and Trinidad and Tobago and featured in an Absolut Vodka ad.
“Freddie is a part of the Atlanta art community’s heartbeat,” said artist Shanequa Gay. “Freddie’s very being is the art.”
Sadly, heartbreak came calling again on Feb. 28 when a sudden fire engulfed the historic East Lake home on Candler Road he owned since 2013. He was painting when he discovered smoke filling his wood-frame house, and he barely made it out.
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
“A blast of hot air singed some of my hair, and I ran out of the house,” said Styles, recalling that awful day. The only item he was able to salvage was a black leather bag, puckered from the heat.
A passerby saw the smoke and called 911. The fire was ruled accidental, according to an Atlanta Fire Rescue Department official. The shell of the home remains, but the interior is gutted.
Style lost everything he owned, including $6,000 in cash from a recent painting sale, as well as jewelry, mementos, several hundred of his own paintings and his collection of works by other artists, including Sam Gilliam, Ed Clark, Joseph Delaney and Donald Locke. Neither the home nor his possessions were insured.
“If I made a list of all I lost, it would destroy me,” Styles said. “I haven’t had the strength to go back.”
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Arts community steps up
The fire has been life-changing for Styles. But it has also created a movement within the arts community to help not only Styles but also other artists who fall on hard times. Atlanta art collector Mike Harris is leading an effort to build a new home on Styles’ East Lake plot of land but also create a nonprofit that would provide housing on the property for other working artists.
Describing Styles as a “master abstractionist,” Harris started a GoFundMe effort to raise money for housing and to replace necessities Styles lost in the fire.
“We want Freddie in a safe place,” Harris said.
In June, Harris organized a fundraiser at Hammonds House Museum featuring the sale of works by more than 30 artists, including Gay, Fahamu Pecou, Eleanor Neal, Tina Dunkley, and Lynn Marshall-Linnemeier. It raised more than $30,000.
And along with Dwight D. Andrews, a composer, musician and music professor at Emory University, Harris is planning a jazz concert fundraiser in October at the First Congregational Church of Atlanta, where Andrews is pastor.
“We want (Styles) to be in a place where he can see the garden, smell the roses, go downstairs and paint,” said Harris.
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Life can be challenging for many artists who struggle without regular employment, lack of health care and the safety net that many of us take for granted. A disaster like a fire or an illness can have devastating consequences. Styles’ tragedy has driven that point home for Harris.
“We also want to protect other artists or help other artists who fall in a similar state,” he said. “Being a collector over the years, I’ve had many artist friends who find themselves literally penniless, homeless, without health insurance, without grocery money.”
To provide relief, Harris envisions establishing the Freddie Styles House nonprofit. He wants to raise $700,000-$800,000 to rebuild Styles’ house and create additional housing and studio space — perhaps exhibition space, too — where artists can live when they fall on hard times.
Gay considers supporting artists in times of hardship as part of her obligation to the Atlanta arts community that has nurtured her career. “I would be remiss not to run toward opportunities to help artists and organizations when they are in need.”
“These are the gems in our community. They add great life to our community, and we should support them,” said Harris.
Credit: Reis Birdwhistell 2023
Credit: Reis Birdwhistell 2023
A friend in need
For now, Styles lives a stone’s throw away from the charred wreckage of his home. He’s staying at his artist friend Carl Christian’s cozy art-filled bungalow, where the walls in one room are dominated by Styles’ intensely colored red abstractions from 2011. Christian has been collecting Styles’ paintings for more than 30 years. He said Styles may be the last living artist who participated in the Atlanta University Annual juried competition that Hale Woodruff instituted in 1942. Before it ended in 1970, he had shown five times in the exhibition.
“He’s rather legendary around the city. He’s been here for a while, and he knows everybody,” said Christian. He noted that in addition to his outsize presence in the Atlanta art world, “he’s a very kind person.”
Without a studio, Styles no longer paints every day, and when he does, it is on a far smaller scale.
In addition to his reputation as an abstract artist and curator at the now-shuttered City Gallery East, Styles is an award-winning gardener who has been featured in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and on a 2002 episode of the HGTV series “A Gardener’s Diary.”
In appreciation of Christian’s kindness, Styles works in his friend’s garden, planting lilies, balloon flowers and bellflowers, often in Christian’s fraternity colors of blue and white.
Styles’ abstract paintings are often nonrepresentational riots of light and form, but other works are inspired by the natural world, incorporating trees, delphiniums, owls, leaves, sunrises and a joyously sun-filled, verdant vision.
Credit: Reis Birdwhistell 2023
Credit: Reis Birdwhistell 2023
Nature has also been a tool in his work. He did a series of paintings in the 1990s he called “Working Roots Series” that combined his love of abstraction and gardening, using azalea roots he employed as tools to apply paint to canvas.
Styles is an inventive artist who sees artistic possibility everywhere, in frozen condensation on a windowpane or the weathered, unpainted wood walls he remembers from his childhood home. Growing up, he was a sickly kid mesmerized by the world’s smallest details.
“I just started drawing my surroundings — we lived in a house with no paint anywhere. So, the texture of the weathered wood, the texture of stone,” those were the things that transported him. He’s driven by that same fascination even today, currently obsessed with the beguiling surface of intersecting fissures in Christian’s driveway that he is longing to paint. “There are interesting cracks out there,” Styles said, mentally cataloging a future series.
A great storyteller with a remarkable recall of glancing details, Styles possesses an incandescent personality. Over his many decades living in Atlanta, he has endeared himself to a vast swath of Atlanta’s creative community, who have rallied around him in his time of need.
Credit: Reis Birdwhistell 2023
Credit: Reis Birdwhistell 2023
“I have — I sometimes refer to them as a band of angels who are working on my behalf to rebuild my house,” said Styles.
He might have a little luck in his corner, too.
In a stroke of good fortune, Atlanta art collector Kerry Davis had recently curated a retrospective of Styles’ career for an exhibition at the University of Maryland. Two weeks before the fire, a large cache of paintings from Styles’ East Lake home was shipped to the gallery for the opening of “Uncommon Nature: The Abstractions of Freddie Styles,” which closed July 13. It will next travel to Clark Atlanta University in 2026.
“I’m much better than I thought I would be on the evening of Feb. 28,” said Styles, “because I’m surrounded by, and I’ve had to accept that, so many people love me.”
About the Author
Keep Reading
The Latest
Featured
