But I’ve been immersed to varying degrees in O’Connor’s life and work for I guess about a decade now, maybe longer. I’m still on the board of the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home in Savannah (please like the Home on Facebook) and was president of the board for three years just after a major restoration of the museum house on Lafayette Square. My personal thanks to Linda Bruckheimer, Rena Patton, and others who were critical in making that restoration happen.

While I was president, we also hired our first — and still only — employee, launched the Ursrey Memorial Lecture Series (Alan Gurganus, Michael Cunningham, Jaimy Gordon, and Robert Olen Butler have appeared), and helped with the local launch of Brad Gooch’s biography Flannery, which was published by Little Brown.

And I’ve routinely taught O’Connor’s stories in my intro lit classes at Armstrong and presented a paper on criminality in her stories at a literary conference here a couple of years ago. I’ve given at least a couple of talks at the Childhood Home in the ongoing series of free Sunday lectures.

I was also involved a couple of years ago in launching Southern Discomfort, an exhibition and silent auction of works — almost all by Savannah area artists — inspired by Flannery O’Connor. I wrote about that first exhibit here, and Southern Discomfort 2 is now hanging at ThincSavannah at 35 Barnard St., just south of Ellis Square. The free reception and silent auction is Friday, Jan. 31 from 6 to 9 p.m. (silent auction ends at 8:30). Click here for the Facebook invitation.

I’ve worked on both Southern Discomfort shows with my Armstrong colleague Beth Howells, but the real work has been done by the artists. We’re offering all the invited artists a 50/50 split of the proceeds, by the way. That was something I insisted on from the very beginning; artists in Savannah are far too often asked to donate works in their entirety to nonprofit organizations, which can have the effect of devaluing the work.

But our offer to share the proceeds is only a small part of the reason that virtually everyone we ask decides to take part in the exhibit.

For many artists in this area, and around the world, O’Connor is a constant source of inspiration. Some find images in her short, intense life — her battle with lupus, the easy satire and irony of both her fiction and her early cartoons, the worlds of the farm and of the mind so fully chronicled in her letters, her love of peacocks and other fowl. Other artists turn to the stories themselves — the details of the hat in “Everything That Rises Must Converge”, a particular line in “The River”, the eerie presence of the hogs in “Revelation”.

Still other artists consider their creations so influenced by O’Connor that they’ve submitted pieces that are part of ongoing bodies of work.

Have any of these dealings with O’Connor’s legacy brought me closer to O’Connor herself? I don’t know.

On the one hand, I’d have to say no. Given the complexities of her fiction and her mind, and the simple fact that she died before I was born, I can never be sure that I know anything about her definitively.

But part of me desires to say yes. And I find myself looking past the easy interpretations of her work that rely so heavily on the concept of grace. Increasingly, I find myself fascinated by some of the darkest elements in O’Connor’s fiction — the tension between spirituality and sexuality, the omnipresence of criminals and the looming threat of sexual violence, the abyss of nihilism that her characters are so often on verge of falling into.

Cheery stuff.

Of course, it is cheery stuff. There’s nothing that can brighten a day more than O’Connor’s incisive wit.

The works in Southern Discomfort 2 encompass all those elements. Here’s a sampling:

“Revelation” by Curtis Bartone:

“Habit of Being” by Jack Metcalf:

“Young Horse” by Marcus Kenney:

“The Meanest of Them Sparkled” by Christine Sajecki:

“Finding Flannery” by Katherine Sandoz:

“Seven dollar hat” by Melinda Borysevicz:

Ray Ellis, whose oil and watercolor paintings hang in world famous museums, the White House, local galleries, and many Martha’s Vineyard homes, died Friday evening at the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital. He was 92.

The prolific artist first knew the Island as a visitor. He first showed his work here 43 years ago. In the 1970’s, he moved to Savannah, Georgia, where he established a successful gallery. In 1991 he came to live in Edgartown permanently.

“There’s no place as beautiful as here,” he told The Times in a 2011 interview. “Harbors, beaches, farmland, and light — I never run out of ideas. I see compositions every time I go out.”

Ray Ellis Gallery has struck a note of quiet elegance on bustling West Congress Street since it’s founding in 1987.

The Telfair launched a major exhibit of Ellis’ work in 2004.

In 2011, Savannah writer Allison Hersh checked in with the then-89-year-old artist as he was about to debut his 24th annual spring exhibition at the gallery.

Ellis told Hersh: “My big break came in 1980, when I got a call about doing a book about the South. From then on, my career bloomed.”

Ellis would have been about 60 when that big break came.

The news was also released this morning by the Ray Ellis Gallery Facebook page.

An image embedded from that page:

MLK was of course the old West Broad Street — the western border of downtown. The magnificent Union Station once stood a few blocks south of the SCAD MOA location, and the museum for years was housed entirely in old railway company offices in Kiah Hall. It was a nice space, but confining.

So some visiting artist friends who had already made several trips to Savannah were in town a couple of weeks ago. My old friend Kora had read something about Ursula von Rydingsvard’s massive sculptures on display at the museum, so we made that one of our stops during their short stay.

From the SCAD MOA website:

The SCAD Museum of Art presents a selection of cedar sculptures by artist Ursula von Rydingsvard. “Shadows Remain” consists of wall reliefs and monumental freestanding floor pieces that are at once abstract and referential, evoking forces of nature, anthropomorphic forms and utilitarian objects.

We also enjoyed “Rehearsals: The Practice and Influence of Sound and Movement”, which pairs various multimedia pieces with works from the Walter O. Evans Collection and “Reconstruction,” a site-specific painting by Adam Cvijanovic. From the museum website:

Deeply inspired by the museum as well as the history and landscapes of Savannah during his numerous trips to the area, Cvijanovic has created a surrealistic representation of an extruded “old Savannah” house.

Three partial landscapes—a cotton field, railroad tracks and the night sky—appear through the distorted rooms collectively combined and reconstructed into what the artist calls “a memory house.”

Other exhibitions included “Francisco Costa for Calvin Klein Collection” in the Andre Leon Talley Gallery and “Streaming Spirits” by Valerie Hammond and Kiki Smith.

Quite a nice mix of shows. Photography without flash is allowed at the SCAD Museum of Art, so I suppose it’s OK for me to post these to my blog . . .

Enjoy:

Cain will be selling the last of Connatser’s work from Cobitz’s private collection and also showcasing some of Cobitz’s prints, paintings, and drawings that Cain has stewarded since Joan’s 2005 death.

In email, Cain noted that all the works are being offered at “exceptional” prices.

When I moved to Savannah in 1995, I was Joan’s neighbor on East Gwinnett Street, but I didn’t see much of her those first months. Her longtime partner Larry Connatser was ill and dying. After his death in 1996, I saw a lot more of Joan and have many good memories of her, including the fascinating stories she told me of her life while I helped paint the edges of her living room ceiling. Sometime during this period, I first met Betsy as well.

When I bought my current house in late ’96, Joan gave me a housewarming gift: a particularly nice rock. I have it on the floor in the living room to this day.

I continued to see Joan regularly, especially in the early years of The Sentient Bean.

In 2002, Joan co-curated a retrospective of Larry’s work: sSouthern Melodies at the Telfair Museum of Art. Check out this 2002 feature piece in the Savannah Morning News. Click here to read Joan’s reflections on Larry’s work.

All the contact info is on the postcard embedded here (again, please note that the hours are from 9 a.m. till noon, not till midnight).

I’m sure I’ll be dropping by Cain’s studio one morning this weekend.

Those of us outside the SCAD community have a hard time keeping up with the various shows and venues — and I think many of those within that community have a hard time too.

So here are the key details about two shows about which I learned only after writing today’s column (my Do columns are typically finished by Monday morning).

The show “Syntax” will be at The Porch at 17 East 31st St. on May 10 and 11. The opening reception is Friday from 5 to 10 p.m. The Saturday hours are 12-5 p.m. The Porch is inside the college annex of Bull Street Baptist Church, between Bull and Drayton streets. Click here for the Facebook event page.

“Syntax” includes the work of six graduating SCAD seniors: Lomaho Colton Kretzmann, Justin Lee Harris, Shelby Suzanne Corbett, Carolyn Hepler-Smith, Casey Danielle Caulley, and Sunyong Kali Moon. I’m embedding images of both the postcard here and a lovely piece by Corbett.

by Shelby Corbett

Nearby at 125 West Duffy St., Sicky Nar Nar hosts a show by Tyler Giordano. From the Facebook event invitation:

Sicky Nar Nar is proud to present Tyler Giordano’s solo show, F I L E . // An accumulation of old collages and drawings combined with recent oil paintings that relate to a personal view of everyday life.

That event was just listed publicly on Facebook on Tuesday (too late for my Unplugged column today).

Click here for the Facebook event for “Into the Fold”, a photo show at S.P.A.C.E. that I did mention in today’s column.

It’s a remarkable trip through the sketchbooks of 122 artists — mostly quite young ones, primarily including some SCAD students or recent graduates, along with artists and illustrators from around the world and around the country.

Given the course work at SCAD, I’m sure there are many sketchbooks out there filled with perspective studies, gesture drawings, and other more academic work, but most of the Sketchbook Show!!! doesn’t fit neatly into those categories.

Some are subtle, some bawdy, some vulgar, some finely detailed, some obviously created roughly and quickly, some striking in incomplete ways — like one would expect from ideas being worked out playfully and informally.

I ended up buying pieces by Xavier Robles de Medina, Jon Taylor, and Emily Quintero.

Highly recommended.

But we’ve seen some great energy in the visual arts too, epitomized by a new venue like The Porch — a gallery space in the Bull Street Baptist Church’s college annex at 17 East 31st St. That’s between Drayton and Bull.

From the press release for Cherchez La Vérité:

On view at The Porch this Friday will be Cherchez La Vérité an exhibition of multimedia work of six seniors from the fine arts department of the Savannah College of Art and Design. The artwork explores divergent perspectives that comprise an underlying vision dealing with truth as it relates to sociopolitical, natural, and universal forces.

Alexandra Olivier is working with industrial materials, clay and video installations to convey a fundamental spiritual connection to truth. Candace Whittemore paints with traditional media and fibers to reflect on intimacy, interpersonal relationships and cultural interactions. Isaac McCaslin’s paintings convey a philosophical nervousness toward the acceptance or rejection of technology and simulations in light of a deteriorating environment. Lacey Fuquea paints and works with video installation to spark a dialogue about suppression, expression, and censorship. Rhett Scott fills his drawings, and paintings with mixed media and complex imagery that invite the viewer to question the instability of the human condition. And Xavier Robles de Medinaâ€s work exhibits spatial deconstruction through line and circuitry.

click for a larger image

Individual artists — including many SCAD students and SCAD professors — have often rented it to mount their own shows, and the gallery directors have mounted some excellent group shows there too.

The final group show — Last Beast — will have its closing reception on Friday, June 22nd, from 6 to 9 p.m.

From the press release:

The show explores the range of human experience, and through the variety of mediums, offers a look into the multitude of ways in which people observe and reconstruct their reality using different material and incorporeal components. These works augment reality through recontexualized imagery, forming fantastic new scenarios and possibilities for the relationships between entities.

a piece by Aniela Sobieski

Featured Artists: Eun Lee, Henry Dean, Fran Miaku (Argentina), Debora Oden, Paige Renee Russell, Melinda Borysevicz, Bryce Lankard (New Orleans, LA), Michael Younker, Lauren Kochavi (Austin,TX), Porter Mitchell, Augustus Muller, Jahmad Balugo, Rachael Perisho, Addison Adams (Athens, GA), Aniela Sobieski (Syracuse, NY), Morgan Santander, Wenjin Zhou, Alycia L. Linke (Philadelphia, PA), Xavier Robles de Medina, Taylor Doyle Gillespie, Michael Younker

After this show, Little Beasts will shut down, but it will reopen in the coming weeks under a different name and under somewhat different leadership. I don’t really know all the details, but I know enough to trust that the space will remain a vibrant and important one for the Savannah art community, especially the younger members.

There are some established artists of note in Last Beast, including but by no means limited to SCAD profs Henry Dean, Morgan Santander, Eun Lee, and Debora Oden. I particularly liked a couple of unusual prints by Jahmad Balugo, a student whose work is entirely new to me.

It’s not a daring or shocking show in any respect — just a strong collection of varied, high-quality work.