Her still lifes and landscapes grace In-Town Gallery
One doesn’t have to look far in Chattanooga to find quality realist oil paintings, as is evidenced by some prolific work at In-Town Gallery. Gay Arthur’s latest series examines change and the effects of time with still life and landscape compositions, creatively preserving and celebrating the past.
A sensitive yet rough use of texture and light/shadow causes her work to have an organic painterly quality, while an acute attention to detail creates a nearly photographic level of realism.
Arthur waited to follow her dream of painting full time until she could retire from her career. She then went back to school, and graduated from UTC’s art department in 2003. “I was a late bloomer,” she tells us. “I didn’t go back to school until 1999, after being a dental hygienist for 35 years.”
She has always been artistic and enjoyed art. “I wanted to pursue it,” she says, “to take a four-year program that would build upon itself. I didn’t just want to take an adult class here and there—I wanted a degree in art, a concentration.”
“Over the years,” she continues, “I did take an isolated ceramics, watercolor, or drawing class—I took art classes throughout my adult life but I had never done oil painting until UTC, where I earned my bachelor’s in painting and drawing.”
She has worked as a full-time artist since school, though she still occasionally temps as a hygienist. Her first show was at Gold Leaf Design in 2004, and she became a member of In-Town Gallery in 2007, where, in addition to exhibiting her paintings, she hangs new art and does design work. Her art is displayed there year round, with new pieces being added at least every six months.
Arthur is also represented by JumpstART Artist Services, a creative agency that places art at various locations around town, such as law offices, city buildings, and the Chamber of Commerce.
When she was at school at UTC, in her senior year, the University was tearing down an old house and church to build what is now the engineering building. “I thought it was such a shame,” she says, “because it was a beautiful old home—there were many who lived in it, and it had such history.”
“So, I took some pictures of it—it was across the street from the Fine Arts Building. That is how I got started with my nostalgia.”
Arthur saw in the newspaper that Wheland Foundry and U.S. Pipe were going to be demolished. She got permission to go on the grounds, wearing a hard hat and safety gear, and documented the decaying property with her digital camera. These images became source material for her next series of paintings.
“I became enthralled with the lines and angles and peeling paint and rust. So I painted those for a few years. I started painting articles that aren’t needed anymore, old typewriters, antique toys, things that are made of fabric that we grew up with that we don’t see anymore. I like to call it preserving the past in paint.”
She painted a series in Italy, Spain, and Portugal, and one from a volunteer job in Peru. She does local landscapes of pleasing views of Greenway Farms, pet portraits, house portraits, and takes commissioned work.
“People choose the scene they want, and size of the painting. If someone is moving away, they sometimes want a picture of their old house.”
All of her paintings are done with oil on canvas. A lot of the work is very textural—she uses a palette knife extensively for mixing and for applying color to canvas. Her process involves lots of rubbing and scraping, and she uses many unconventional tools for mark-making—knives, spoons, forks, and even dog collars.
Arthur’s most recent series is entitled “The Fabric of Our Lives”. For this body of work, she used reference photos of clothing and fabric in a variety of situations—an American flag being folded by Marines, an old sewing machine, or clothing drying on a clothesline.
She is currently working on a series of negative space reversals, where the subject of the painting is the space surrounding an object—and is also available for commissions.
See more of her work at gayarthur.com