It comes down on Monday, but if you are near Kingsport TN this weekend, there is still time to see a very good show at the Renaissance Center. The Appalachian Art Show for 2019 was juried by the Art Department curator at ETSU. She likes my work so I kind of expected to get in. But only one of my entries made it. The show this year is strong with a number of examples of really fine regional work. I was heartened that I got even one piece in once I took in all that did get selected.

What is striking in this year’s collection is the number of pieces that are ponderous and dark, with titles like “Premonition Destruction”, “A Blood Black Nothingness” and “Beauty Sleeps”. One landscape was a deep roiling sea with a lone raven searching for land. The best in show winner is Michelle O’Patrick-Ollis’ “Stage 4-Ressurecting Mama”. Her mother’s face is heavy with wistful thought, almost pressed right at yours on the picture plane. This is both honest and true, expressed with fugitive materials (coffee, conte and pastel) while recording the depth of hope that lives beyond this vanishing threshold.

Not all the work spoke so confidently. In fact, there is despair in the room. I feel it also out on the airwaves, and in hearts that I pray for. No wonder the artists are showing us this. Our days are hard and there is a foreboding sense, like a gray fog, which is moving in. Only the brave speak of it. Artists are brave ones. And sometimes they are like weather vanes, sensing the change happening before others can articulate it. Many artists seem to know “that the world is an uninhabitable place, temporary at best, the delicate balance between eternities…” as poet laureate Dana Gioia writes in The End.

Search his work and others who are not afraid to speak what they are pondering carefully while still offering the viewer some thoughtful hope, showing “what still matters”.