Author: Elizabeth Derby

For Jack Graves III, art is a family affair.

“My dad started an art gallery in 1978 in Jacksonville, Florida, with a $600 loan from his dad. By the time we moved up [to Gordonsville] in 1992, he had the largest art gallery in northern Florida,” Graves says.

“Before I was old enough to go to school, I would go into the gallery and draw. I grew up around this whole slew of art from established artists, around all those types and different styles, work that covers 400-some-odd years of art.”

That range of art includes engravings by 1500s-era masters such as Albrecht Dürer through contemporary prints and paintings by Roy Lichtenstein and Jim Dine.

In Florida in the ’80s, during Graves’ childhood, he and his family sold more Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg than traditional work. Though they packed away much of the modern art when they moved the gallery to Gordonsville, Graves’ father (along with his brother Alex) recently brought the whole collection back out again.

This unveiling—now joined by a collection of Graves’ own recent work, an exhibition titled “Icons”—is part of Graves International Art’s latest move from Orange County to Charlottesville proper. “My family is very excited,” he says. “We hope to present something new to the community and something of the utmost caliber.”

Art history makes an inescapable context for Graves’ own artistic evolution. He tells the story of returning from a trip overseas at age 16, witnessing scenes from Jacques- Louis David’s 1807 painting “The Coronation of Napoleon” and how, suddenly, his whole perspective shifted.

“Instead of just being around what I was used to, what I was staring at really sunk in,” he says. “I had the background, but now I could grasp what I believe true artists were trying to bring forth from our history. It’s like knowing a different language.”

Just like that, the teenager realized how every aspect of a painting was chosen specifically to conjure emotion. In this way, a painting of a cow standing in front of a barn instantly became so much more, a form of visual language with infinite potential for self-expression.

Graves knew he wanted in. “I figured I would just cover a whole page in design work. As long as it was disciplined and changed and flowed then I was on the right track,” he says.

He began using pen on paper, eschewing pencils and erasers after a very successful artist, a friend of his father’s, told him how his parents broke the eraser of their son’s pencils with the instruction to “just do it right the first time.”

“That stuck with me,” Graves says. “So I thought, okay, I’ll just do pen to paper the first time.”

He began making black and white ink drawings, developing his understanding of depth, perspective and composition through simple lines and abstract shapes. “It’s like subtle architecture. You learn to build it right so it lasts longer.”

Line studies gave way to illustrations with animals such as elephants and cats, flowers and other plants, and finally human faces. “Subconsciously I was following the history of art,” he says. “If you look at any culture anywhere in the world, at their pottery or other art for everyday use, it all started with design.”

After 10 years he allowed himself to use color, marveling at the way just a few dabs of blue could transform a piece. Careful application of color is a hallmark of Graves’ current style, which has morphed into a combination of intricate graphics, bold colors and photorealistic drawings layered in collage-like compositions.

“I began pairing different works together to see what feeling or idea they can give you,” he says. “I want to make something original and timeless, and each and every time it ought to be powerful and beautiful.”

Graves describes this vein of stylistic exploration as eclecticism. “I can connect to other art styles, so it doesn’t sound chaotic or arbitrary, but it’s complete madness at a certain point. You go down the rabbit hole. You’re on your own study, your own path.”

Now, he says, the real effort is maintaining his focus on any one style for long enough to do it justice. The intensity of this effort makes each piece incredibly time-intensive, and, like many artists, he dedicates the majority of his life to it.

“When I went off to college it felt natural to take art classes, so I just did it and didn’t worry about it. I knew I wouldn’t be happy doing anything else. You’re only going to live one time.” Now the trade-off for his commitment is living at home, with full knowledge that he can’t afford to pay for both rent and food.

But Graves, who’s been exposed to the business of art since he was a child, has no illusions about the difficulty of “making it.” And really, that’s not the point.

“If I was more business, I’d go straight for pop surrealism and make glorified cartoons. But I can’t do that,” he says. “So I’m going to wait it out, bring what I think needs to be brought and expand and bring process and show something different and unique.”

When Warren Craghead fills his car at the gas station, he might pause to pull out a pad of Post-its, sketch a quick figure and leave the small square of art affixed to the pump.

For the Charlottesville-based visual artist, inspiration and guerrilla exhibitions aren’t the only purpose of such an act.

“For me, art is a way of interfacing with the world and trying to understand it,” Craghead says. “For example, I’m live-drawing World War I. Every day I draw what happened in the war. I’ll do research and watch shows and draw what I see in my sketchbook. I started last year in June, on the day Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated.”

In addition to sketches of everyday life, like colorful exchanges between his young daughters, he often turns his attention to historical events that are difficult to look at and process, like the chemical gas attack that killed tons of people in Syria two years ago.

“Drawing makes you slow down and actually look at something,” he says. “I’ve found that people will see my work and say, ‘I had no idea that this happened.’ It can be a way of understanding the world.”

After nearly 20 years of peppering the town and local and national galleries with his work, Craghead is expanding the means by which he shares the lens of art with others. On September 14, he became the new executive director of Second Street Gallery.

After showing, curating and working on the board at SSG, Craghead threw his hat into the ring after former executive director Steven Taylor retired last year. As a contemporary artist, Craghead says the gallery has meant different things to him at different times in his life.

“When I first got here in 2003, it meant that, ‘Wow, this is a place I can be.’ I was delighted by the level of work at Second Street. I did not expect that in a city like Charlottesville.” In addition to connecting with fellow artists, he also found a resource for engaging with community.

“It’s free and open to the public five days a week. We bring kids in here, we bring adults in here, and we talk about the work. It’s not just, ‘Look at our awesome stuff,’ it’s ‘We’ll talk to you about why this is important and maybe has some relevance to your life.’”

Now that he’s at the helm, Craghead says he’s seen even more closely how the gallery embeds itself into local culture. “I’m bolstered not only by a great team, the staff and the board, but by supporters who are legion. People are e-mailing me out of the blue who I had no idea were even connected to the gallery, and they are saying their kid was an intern here or their child was in an outreach program at the Boys & Girls Club.”

This mash-up of cutting-edge contemporary art and typical culture sits at the core of Craghead’s own working philosophy, which, like Second Street, has embraced a balance of both worlds. Founded by artists 42 years ago, the gallery is Central Virginia’s oldest contemporary art space. Craghead, for his part, has worked as a designer and creative director for businesses since he graduated from art school.

“People think having an artist in charge can be risky, but creativity and being an artist does not necessarily mean flakiness and wandering around,” he says. “If you think of T. S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams, they had responsible day jobs. A lot of full-time artists are running small businesses.”

As executive director, Craghead has lots of opportunity to put those skills to the test. While Second Street’s curator Tosha Grantham designs the vision for each show, Craghead is responsible for bringing it to life through budgeting, fundraising and pounding nails into walls.

But leading the charge means being flexible, too. “I look at places I admire greatly, like Live Arts and The Bridge PAI,” says Craghead. “I see them being open to what’s to come while remaining true to their core mission. I hope to emulate that.”

He says he wants to continue his predecessors’ legacy of community engagement through partnerships, outreach programs and “just being here and being open and having something cool for people to look at.”

That mission of community service continues with the first exhibit of the gallery’s new season, which plays on a theme of sustainability. “Tosha put together a great season based on what that can be,” says Craghead. “Environmental sustainability, of course, but also cultural sustainability, how we keep local cultures alive in the face of globalism and homogenization.”

That conversation begins with “Labels,” the first show in the season, which presents a large-scale installation by South African artist Siemon Allen of more than 7,000 album labels from 1901 to the present.

Debuted in the Slave Lodge in Cape Town and later presented at the Venice Biennial in 2011 (“It’s a big deal,” Craghead says), “Labels” presents chronologically ordered curtains that tell the story of apartheid through albums from all over the world, many of which could not be published in their artists’ home country due to their anti-apartheid messages. Music became the subversive way to spread the word about what was happening.

“To have a work like that here is special,” Craghead says. “I know I sound like a salesman, but I really believe in the gallery and the vision of our curator and what we can share. Don’t come in and look at the work and bow to it. Come here and let’s talk about what you see.”

“Labels” is on display through October 17. Join Craghead, Grantham, Allen and album collector and music aficionado David Noyes for a discussion of the exhibit on the show’s final evening.

For Lily Erb, art mirrors life—but only to a certain extent.

The Charlottesville-born and -based artist creates large steel sculptures, most lately composed of numerous steel rods bent into gentle, repetitive curves, then spray-painted in bright, jovial colors. She calls her style “abstract organic” because the pieces don’t resemble actual organic objects. Instead she starts with the idea of natural forms, then follows that concept in a non-representational way.

Her work resembles mountain ridges, split seedpods, the (abstracted) contours of human bodies. “My first memory is not being able to sit on my mom’s lap because she was pregnant with my sister,” she says. “Maybe that has something to do with [my fascination with] fullness and space, because I didn’t know what was in her stomach. I was like, ‘Why can’t I sit here?’”

There is a lot of empty space in her 3-D works, which cover walls and fill rooms without smothering them. “I like making space and I like filling space, but I also like being able to see everything. Something about being able to see every section of a piece is helpful to me,” she says.

Erb began sculpting in college after she signed up for what she thought was a sewing class. But Women’s Fabrication turned out to be a toned-down version of shop class, “more of a safe space to first learn the equipment as opposed to being around all the guys who are making cars and taking up a lot of space with their macho attitudes,” she says.

But from those first sparks, Erb was hooked. “I did torch welding, which is just really hot fire. I would start out with these long straight pieces—I was using coat hangers at that point—to make these forms that are very organic and immediate.”

Her first sculptures were pregnant torsos. Then she made one out of steel. Just like that, she created a structure with volume and emptiness, an absent vessel.

For the first time, Erb began to think of herself as an artist. Sculpting steel lines around what wasn’t there turned her attention to other voluminous organic forms—the contour lines of topography, specifically, and what might lie beneath them.

Erb began to wonder what the inside of a mountain might look like after a summer art course in The Burren, Ireland, “which has all this limestone rock that had been eroded away. It’s sort of like looking at a mountain range uncovered, but 6″ tall.” She also began sculpting abstract mountain ranges that reminded her of home.

Welding is a bit of a lonely business for women, as Erb quickly discovered. “There were women who really liked the class but didn’t end up continuing [to go to the shop] because it’s an intimidating space,” she says. “I just happened to be extremely stubborn, like ‘I’m going to show these people.’”

Show them she did. After college, she spent time in an artist’s residency in Tennessee, then came back to Charlottesville to work in Lauren Hanley’s steel fabrication shop in exchange for studio space.

Eventually Erb bought her own machine, and now she bends steel as much as possible. She sold 30 small sculptures through The Bridge PAI’s 2014 Community Supported Art program, and her work has exhibited all over Charlottesville.

She says it’s fun to be a woman who welds, that her craft feels important in part because “it’s not a skill people often think of women having.”

She no longer fields classroom machismo, but the surprise of strangers can get her hackles up. “I’ll go to pick up my steel and they’re like, ‘Oh, you’re going to bring that in? Is someone going to be there to help you unload it when you get back?’” she says. “Like, ‘No. I’ll be okay. I have muscles.’”

But she goes on to quote Tina Fey: “‘If someone’s in between you and where you want to be in your job, just ignore them and keep going.’ I just ignore them and try not to get angry about it. That’s just part of the game, and I’m still making my art.”

In essence, Erb’s role as a female sculptor plays the same part as her work. Both present the question, in abstract: What truths exist beyond what we see?

“There’s a potential for growth in a seedpod,” she says. “Most vessels contain things that have energy. It’s in this little package, like an egg or an acorn, to help something continue on in its life.”

View and purchase Lily Erb’s work currently on display at tavola’s cicchetti bar, 826 Hinton Ave.

Hospitals aren’t exactly known as hubs of creative engagement. Yet the trend of visual art in hospitals is on the rise thanks to studies that show scientific links between patients, art and lowered stress levels.

While Charlottesville may have yet to see the type of full-fledged contemporary art installations as Indiana University School of Medicine at Illinois or the Cleveland Clinic’s Arts & Medicine Institute, UVA Health South Rehabilitation Hospital is changing its clinical aesthetic with the help of local artist and gallery owner Hamid Karimi.

Reinvention is a bit of a theme for Karimi, whose work includes figurative, abstract and landscape paintings rendered in oil, acrylic and pastel (occasionally). Though he recently dove into a rainy days series, which features images depicted through the rain-slicked windshield of a car, the Tehran-born Charlottesvillian rejects the idea of stylistic repetition.

“Being creative means you have to go back to the drawing board over and over,” he says. “A lot of artists believe that if you really want to make a name for yourself you have to find one style and stick to it. But you’re not creative when you’re copying the same thing. Art has to be experimental.”

The philosophy of art seems to weigh more heavily on Karimi’s mind than most—likely because he began his career in, well, you guessed it. “I first studied western philosophy at the University of Oslo,” Karimi says. “Everything is based on logical reasoning. I took a course in art where we asked things like, ‘How can you distinguish beautiful art from ugly art? What is our artistic faculty? How can we tell that one piece of art is different from another?’”

The course, he says, did not involve painting, and he felt like the discussion went way above his head. So he dabbled in visual self-expression for the first time, attempting to experience what his classmates spoke about. “But then I thought that I wasn’t good at it so I left the brush,” he says. Discouraged, he abandoned the craft only to return again years later—then give it up, return and give up once again.

Then, a few years ago, he told a friend that he wished ‘I could do something magic like create art.” When his friend gently suggested he just do it already, Karimi got angry with himself.

“All along I told myself that painting is something I am not good at, it is beyond my skills,” he says. “Why am I telling myself that? I thought, ‘I’ve only tried a couple times. Maybe I’m not trying hard enough.’ After that, all of a sudden, I got better and better and better. I filled my whole house with paintings.”

Eventually, he began selling his work and donating it to friends. Most recently he founded Barboursville Fine Arts Gallery, which features the work of 11 local painters and sculptors, including his own. “I want to share art with the community,” he says.

One of his abstract pieces made it into the hands of Dianna Gomez, who works at UVA Health South Rehabilitation Hospital. She began to collect his art, filling her office and turning it into an impromptu gallery space. Noticing how visitors came to admire it, Gomez invited Karimi to exhibit in the hospital. Now more than 90 of his paintings, all of them landscapes, dot the walls across three different floors.

“Hamid has a good variety of paintings and the vibrant colors catch your attention,” Gomez wrote in an e-mail. “I think having a local artist featured at the hospital adds a personal touch to the décor and it makes the patients smile.”

Like many of UVA Health South Rehabilitation Hospital’s patients, who focus on reclaiming physical function and strength after illness or injury, Karimi says his biggest creative process and source of personal joy has been the recreation he’s done on himself.

“One day I was sitting back and wishing that some magic would change my life, that something fun would happen,” he says. “Then I remembered that I have filled my house with paintings. I’m a self-made artist. If I could do things I couldn’t do before, that is the magic. I have the magic on my walls.”

It took Victor Captain more than 12 months, a brand new birth certificate and his first flight on an airplane to bring his artwork to Charlottesville.

“When I got to New York, my nose was like stuff, stuff, stuff. There was no clean air to breathe,” says Captain. He says it with a smile and sense of humor that belies the improbability of this conversation over iced tea in sunny Belmont.

Captain is a fine artist who lives in Surama, a remote Amazonian village in Guyana. His recent local exhibits materialized thanks to Laura and George Mentore, two UVA anthropology professors who first noticed Captain’s exceptional work in 2011.

“For years, our research has been in his village in Guyana,” Laura Mentore says. “I was so taken by one of his paintings in particular that I wound up purchasing it.”

Captain describes the month-long visits and 24-hour round-trip drives he made to and from Georgetown (the capital of Guyana)—the same route he takes to purchase the acrylics, oils and canvases with which he paints scenes of energy transformation.

“Most of my paintings are based in shamanism and stories of Amerindian people,” he says. “You cannot see with your pure eye the energy that the shaman is using so you paint it in the painting.”

Captain is a member of the indigenous Guyanese tribe the Makushi, whose oral traditions often relate stories of shape shifters called kanaima.

“They’re similar to the people that assassinate people [in the U.S.],” Captain says. “But in those times they had basic bush medicine which they used to transfer the self into a different form: sheeps, animals, whatever. They use this to disguise the self to assassinate people.”

Many of Captain’s paintings feature the subjects of these transformations. “It’s a form which you cannot escape or remove from your body,” he explains. “You just have to live with it and let it pass on through your family line.”

He describes one of his favorite paintings, which shows a mother sitting in a dark open house with her child. “Her baby was really, really sick, and she went to the shaman,” he says. “You find different forms of animals that you cannot see, spiritual animals, within the painting. The Peia man [the Makushi term for shaman], they usually do their work in the night so that nobody sees what is really going on.”

Tradition and modernity find a delicate balance in the lives of the Makushi, Mentore says. “Everyone has family and because of that everyone has somewhere they can call home,” she says. “You go to the capital and people are sleeping on sidewalks. But in Amerindian communities, the lack of money doesn’t translate to hunger and homelessness. At the same time you have young people who have cell phones and Facebook and are training to become doctors and flight attendants. Victor has seen more American movies and music than I have, but at the same time I could trust him with my life in the rainforest. There’s an ability to go between worlds.”

Like the figures in his art, Captain has always been able to move deftly between concrete and ethereal planes.

In secondary school his work was so good his teacher pulled him aside and offered to pay him 3,000 Guyanese dollars ($15) a month to create posters for the school.

After that, he went to a residential two-year program at Bina Hill Institute to study forestry. He was drawing his own portraits for his classroom when “I bump into George Simon, one of the famous Guyanese artists, and he was really interested in my work. He asked if I wanted to keep on doing paintings and artwork, and I said ‘yeah.’ So the community made a project based on Amerindian art and sculpting.”

Captain was 18 when he began to paint in his now signature style. He dropped out of school “because they didn’t like it” and returned to his village, where he alternated between hunting, fishing, logging and painting his vibrant works.

“His father might wake him up one day, say it’s time to go hunting, and he’d be gone for three days,” Mentore says. “He’s doing something that not everyone there does.”

Abandoning the norm is, in fact, a way for Captain to reclaim his roots—on behalf of his entire generation. In Surama, there’s been a rapid loss of indigenous language furthered by the English boarding school system.

“Most of the Amerindian people, they’re losing their culture. And I am one, so it’s the loss of my language,” he says. “What I’m really trying to do is keep the culture going but in art form. The stories and other things. People forget the stories and pretend they are not Amerindian. They want to be someone else.”

When asked why this is important to him, the answer, of course, is obvious. “Because I was born to be that way.”

Conflict is awesome. At least when you’re trying to tell a story. Or find one, as the case may be.

“I like places where there is a lot of social tension. Where there’s conflict, there’s a story,” says Falls Church-based mixed media artist and writer Christine Stoddard. “I mean, I don’t want anyone to suffer. I just find it more interesting to go to a place where there’s more happening.”

The daughter of a first-generation Salvadoran mother and an American father whose “family identifies strongly with their Scottish roots,” Stoddard searches the world around her for issues of personal identity and “all the ways that people negotiate their individual or group identities.”

Those interests are reflected in a cannon that includes writings, collages, comics and films that have appeared in the New York Transit Museum, The Huffington Post, the Science Museum of Virginia and beyond. Stoddard also curates stories told through various media in her online and print publication Quail Bell Magazine. “I’m interested in feminism, in immigrant culture, in cultural and political identity, in what it means to be a woman and an immigrant in different places, especially second generation,” she says.

Stoddard has found that her own life routinely generates the hum of identity conflict. “So many of the personal essays I’ve written have been about those issues. My sister and I have experienced them just by being the children of immigrant and non-immigrant parents. Catholic and non-Catholic parents. I’ve lived in Northern Virginia, which is cosmopolitan, and Richmond, which is not.”

She describes the year she spent as an undergrad at Grinnell College, where she received a full scholarship as a senior in high school. “I never considered myself a brown person, but in Iowa I felt my brownness because it was very homogeneous. I lived in farm country so lots of the people I ran into were not very educated. That led to a couple of conflicts,” she says. “I don’t regret it, but it was not the right place for me. After a year I transferred to VCU where I had access to a huge art department and faculty and a city.”

Stoddard’s travels populate her current exhibit, a roundup of geographically-minded photo collages titled “Little Stories.” “I can point to the individual photos in the composite and tell you where I took them,” she says. “Many of them are objects or landscapes I encounter while I’m walking or traveling. There are also photos from Mexico, Peru, Scotland, New York and Miami. I like places where there are lots of different people and figuring out who they are.”

The works themselves are mash-ups: explorations not unlike the philosophical spaces she visits every day. “I take digital photos and in Photoshop I composite them to create collages,” she says. “I adjust the opacity. I change the colors. I might adjust the saturation or contrast and brightness. I might take one segment from a photo, take a piece out, and overlay into another photo. There’s a piece called city textures that shows the skyline of Richmond, and there’s copper and a purple squiggle with graffiti over it which is a detail shot I took of a mixed media piece I did. That’s why it has this crinkly aspect, it came from doing acrylic on tissue paper.”

Stoddard became drawn to this form in middle school, when a teacher introduced her art class to the work of Romare Bearden, an artist known for collaging events and subjects drawn from his community and the broader culture of black history. “He has this one series where he retold The Odyssey and The Iliad as if the stories took place in Africa. He played with so many items; he took everything—fabric, cellophane, tissue paper, magazine and newspaper clippings—and he would use found photos and paint and draw and cut very fine figures using sewing scissors. His work was so beautiful, and got me thinking of collage in a different way.”

When she learned Photoshop and began taking photos in high school, Stoddard was off to the artistic races. “I’ve been doing [photo collage] ever since,” she says. “I have hundreds.”

It was also in high school that she began making ’zines, an ideal outlet for her twin interests in art and writing. “They’re usually very political,” she says. “I loved that people were using collages to convey political messages. I still read and make them today.”

As a whole, Stoddard says, collage is the perfect art form for those drawn to the uneven edges of life, to the questions so easily raised by the juxtaposition of contrasting worlds.

“There is something transcendent and accessible about it,” she says. “My actual practice—it’s pretty easy to do those. Anyone with a camera and access to Photoshop can do the same thing. You don’t have to draw even well, you don’t even have to take technically great photos. It’s about the composite, how it all comes together. There’s a low barrier to entry and there’s something political about that.