At Folk Fest, lots of pictures tell a story

ON VIEW

“An Angel’s Lift; A Devil’s Pull,” paintings by Dorethey Gorham

Through Sept. 3 at Main Street Gallery, 51 N. Main St., Clayton. 10:30 a.m.-5 p.m. daily (except Sundays and Wednesdays). 706-782-2440, www.mainstreetgallery.net.

SOME ARTISTS AT FOLK FEST

Beyond works by Dorethey Gorham and Billy Roper (see main story), storytellers with works on view at Folk Fest this weekend include:

It should be noted that works by some of folk art’s most accomplished and renowned narrative-oriented artists — including the late Clementine Hunter of Louisiana and Georgians Linda Anderson and the late Nellie Mae Rowe — are hard to find at Folk Fest, where the focus (and price point) is more on emerging and midcareer artists.

But works by artists such as these can be found at the twice yearly Slotin Folk Art Auctions (www.slotinfolkart.com) in Buford, run by Folk Fest founders Steve and Amy Slotin, where the finer works quickly hit four and five figures before the gavel falls.

HOWARD POUSNER

In a world where communication is increasingly squashed into 140-character bursts, the tradition of Southern storytelling is surviving surprisingly well, thank you, ma’am.

We're not just talking about the written form, as will be doted over at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Decatur Book Festival over Labor Day weekend, or the verbal variety, to be celebrated at the Southern Order of Storytellers' Tellabration Atlanta in mid-November.

We're also here to elucidate that there will be no shortage of yarns being spun at Folk Fest, the annual three-day explosion of self-taught art that opens at the North Atlanta Trade Center in Norcross on Friday night. The only difference is that, instead of words in black type on white pages, the storytellers whose works overflow more than 90 booths express themselves in vividly hued oils and acrylics (among other media).

When many folks think of folk art, the artist who flashes to mind is Grandma Moses. She painted from her memories of rural life in upstate New York and Virginia: quilting bees and wheat harvesting, trick-or-treating and snowmen-making.

You can find works by many memory painters at Folk Fest, too. They include Alabama artist Bernice Sims, whose canvases range from farm scenes not that far removed from Grandma Moses to the civil rights demonstrations she witnessed, and Marie Elem, a Commerce painter expert at putting viewers beside her in the cotton fields she picked in her youth.

But the storytelling that grabs eyes amid the long aisles isn’t limited to misty memories. Instead, much of it springs from the fertile imaginations of artists such as Dorethey Gorham and Billy Roper, both of Jasper and both with a growing collector following.

Both are, to employ a phrase that is gaining currency in folk art, visual storytellers.

Gorham’s paintings on display in the Main Street Gallery booth — and in that Clayton gallery’s current one-woman exhibit, “An Angel’s Lift; A Devil’s Pull” — are painted from the same bird’s-eye perspective as Grandma Moses. Populated with similar tiny characters amid a bountiful landscape, they appear to be imbued with the same sense of joy at the simple things in life.

But the depictions of kids catching lightning bugs and wedding day scenes and such — the sorts of sweet moments that lead Gorham’s followers to tell her they’d like to live in her paintings — aren’t chapters from her life, she is quick to clarify.

Characterizing herself as reclusive by nature, Gorham said the paintings are more a reflection of the way she’d like things to be than her day-to-day reality.

“It’s my ideal world, where everybody’s friends, and community works together and the angels are winning the battles against the demons,” said Gorham, 64. “That is the way it should be, but it’s most assuredly not the way it is.”

If you don’t fully get the moral messages undergirding Gorham’s compositions, often featuring angels flying above (and, in one recent piece, hellhounds digging below), she usually pens a poem on the back.

“I felt it a necessity for these paintings to be understood,” said the painter, whose works also will be shown at Folk Fest by Marcia Weber Art Objects of Montgomery and Dawsonville’s Around Back at Rocky’s Place. “I want people to know what I mean.”

Coming at things from a different angle, Billy Roper sometimes draws inspiration from his childhood in rural Pickens County, such as in a series of seven paintings he did about the adventures and perils of his late father’s moonshine making.

While his art is not limited to personal history, the 61-year-old artist, who will be represented at Folk Fest by Around Back at Rocky’s Place, heartily embraces his role as a storyteller. That’s how he was raised.

“When I was growing up, where we lived was 50 years behind the time, and we were probably 50 years behind that,” Roper recalled. “We didn’t have the television. We had the radio sometimes, when we had electricity. So storytelling was it.”

Roper fondly recalls his grandmother who could tell a ghost story around a kerosene lamp that “would make you wish your uncle was an only child — scare you to death!”

His other grandma favored stories about “that war.”

“Her grandfather got killed in the Civil War so it was very fresh in her mind, like it happened yesterday,” Roper said. “It was like she was spitting when she said the word ‘Yankee.’ She weren’t overly fond of Lincoln neither.”

With those genes, it’s little surprise that Roper scrawls across every inch of the backs of his paintings with thoughts behind the piece and life in general.

Some are imbued with folksy wit in the vein of his favorite author, Mark Twain, while others burn with the intensity of a Leonard Cohen lyric.

Among the latter is this passage on the back of a seemingly simple 2013 painting of a feline staring warily at a hand reaching out to pet it, “Stray Cat / Learning to Trust.”

“The stray cat in this picture wants to trust and it is trying,” Roper wrote. “But it don’t know if the hand will help or hit. People can be like stray cats too. Trying is hard sometimes. But if you don’t trust you can’t be trusted either. Then you got nothing.”

Main Street Gallery owner Jeanne Kronsnoble, who regularly crosses the region in search of new Southern voices, tried to parse out the output of narrative-driven artists such as Roper and Gorham.

“Visual storytellers aren’t necessarily memory painters,” she said. “Memory painters could be compared to biographers, and visual storytellers could be compared to fiction writers.”