At Long Last

Jeanne Seagle discusses her journey from commercial illustrator to “Of This Place,” her first solo exhibition at the Dixon.

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Tacked onto the wall behind her easel, handwritten notes of affirmation remind Jeanne Seagle to be disciplined. For three or four hours a day, she draws scenes of nature from photographs she’s taken at Dacus Lake, just a drive across the river from her Midtown studio. Sometimes, she’ll play blues CDs to fill the space with the rhythms of the Delta as she stills her focus on rendering the smallest of details — grooves in tree bark and wisps of grass — with careful marks in charcoal and pencil.


These black-and-white drawings take weeks to complete, sometimes up to two months, and Seagle has been working in this style for the past seven or so years. She’s found commercial success with her distinctive style, attaining representation by L Ross Gallery and now exhibiting her work at The Dixon Gallery and Gardens this spring. The show, entitled “Of This Place,” features several of these detailed drawings, along with a few, bright watercolors — all of the scenery around Dacus Lake. “At long last,” she says, “I’m doing what I’ve always wanted to do, which is have shows in galleries.”

For her entire adult life, Seagle has worked as an artist, whether as a freelance illustrator or a commissioned sculptor. “I have loved my career. I’ve loved being an artist,” she says. “It was kind of a lot of struggle being an artist and being poor, but I was able to save enough money to do what I have always wanted to do — fine art.”

Growing up in Western Arkansas in the Ouachita Mountains, Seagle didn’t have much exposure to art. “My father worked for the forestry department,” she says. “We lived on the rangers’ station there. Western Arkansas is just all about forests, and my only contact with art was really the magazines that my mother got. I wanted to be an illustrator for magazines, which I ended up doing.”

But before Seagle built a career as a commercial illustrator for publications like Memphis magazine, she became “the school artist.” She recalls, “In the second grade, I would draw paper dolls for the girls and I would draw tattoos for the boys. And I’d charge them a dime or something. So I’ve always kind of been a little commercial artist.”

Eventually, her family moved to Mississippi, where Seagle graduated from high school in Jackson before attending Mississippi University for Women in Columbus. “I kind of went crazy there,” she says. “It was just so backwards, and I didn’t have any artist friends. And then [in 1967] I came to Memphis for [the Memphis College of Art] and it was like, ‘Oh, hallelujah,’ going to the art school. I just had such a wonderful time at the art academy,” where she majored in illustration.

During her time at the now-defunct MCA, she took a year off to live in Los Angeles. “It was very hard to live out there,” she says, because everything was so expensive, and she soon moved back to Memphis. “I loved Memphis,” but she admits, “I was kind of dissatisfied here, too, though. Memphis was a different place back then. It was that time when cities were kind of falling apart. This was in the ’70s, and at that time lots of cities were losing money and Downtown was dead. So I’d travel every summer to explore other places.”

“I was a little ahead of my time for this style. Most people thought it was really just too weird. But, as time went by, my illustrations got weirder. I was just right there with a trend somehow.” — Jeanne Seagle

She would take the car she inherited from her father and just drive — stopping anywhere from the deep Delta to the West Coast, always making time to visit her relatives in Colorado. No matter where she went, she always left with inspiration to recreate the scenes she experienced along the way in oil pastels or watercolors once she inevitably returned to Memphis.

“I’d run out of money and I’d come back because that’s the great thing about Memphis: It’s so cheap to live here. And I have made so many friends here. If I go out to a store, I will run into somebody I know. I love that feeling.”

Memphis is where she’s stayed, eventually landing an illustrating job in the late ’70s with Malmo & Associates, at the time one of the city’s largest ad agencies. “I was making a lot of money there, but it was killing my soul,” she says, noting that the deadline-driven work didn’t allow much leeway for creativity. “And then when the computer came along, I lost my job. And that started a period of freelance jobs, [including] drawing caricatures at parties.”


By 1993 Seagle began working with Contemporary Media, Memphis magazine’s parent company, mostly doing small illustrations for this magazine. “I loved doing them,” she says, “but I wanted to do more than a spot illustration.”

In those days, she rented a studio with another artist, who happened to do a lot of Memphis magazine covers and full-page illustrations and would hire her to do the preliminary drawings for the final work that got published. The main difference between the two artists was that he was a man, and she a woman.

“I kind of hit the glass ceiling,” she says. “That was pretty standard, and the male illustrators were the ones that got all the good jobs and the female illustrators got all of the lower-paying and lower-prestige jobs.”

Seagle also began producing work for the Memphis Flyer, another publication of Contemporary Media, often doing full-page features and cover illustrations, and eventually illustrating the popular, syndicated “News of the Weird” column for 20 years. “I have, like, 3,000 of these [‘News of the Weird’ drawings],” she says. “Well, more like 300. Just a little exaggeration.”

“At first,” Seagle says, “I was doing fairly conventional illustrations that were very realistic.” Those early illustrations, though simple line drawings, were grounded in the reality she was trying to convey. She was cautious about perspective and proportions, not diverting too far from the source material.

But after a trip to Europe, where she saw the work of artists who were institutionalized for mental health reasons and would draw and paint compulsively, Seagle was inspired to break the form, in favor of a more abstract and avant-garde style. “I was a little ahead of my time for this style,” she says. “Most people thought it was really just too weird. But, as time went by, my illustrations got weirder. I was just right there with a trend somehow.”

In one of her interior illustrations for the now-defunct Satellite DISH Magazine, a 1985 story titled “The Video Rush of the Eighties,” her work jumps off the page, with exaggerated figures — created with sharp angles and bold lines — bursting from a television in a blaze of bright color. “It got a lot of feedback,” she says, holding back a giggle as the image before her takes on a personality of its own, playful, exciting, and experimental.

In fact, with all her art, Seagle has experimented with different styles and media, from realism to abstraction, from watercolors to oil pastels. She’s even dabbled in mosaics and sculptures, with pieces at the trolley stop platforms on Madison Avenue, Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital, and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Those mosaic and sculpture pieces were commissioned and eventually made her enough money to pursue her own work full-time, but through it all — the commercial illustrations from children’s books like Mickey & The Golem by Steve Stern to local publications like the University of Tennessee Medicine alumni magazine — she made time to pursue her own work.

Of her paintings and drawings, she says, “All of those pictures are just so personal to me.” From the self-portrait at her former studio at Marshall Arts to the watercolor of the car she drove for hundreds of thousands of miles, these pieces are tangible memories, intertwining the sentimental with her artistic fervor, the different styles and media marking different phases of her life.

“I will spend maybe seven years kind of doing one thing and then I’ll do something else for a few years,” Seagle says. “And so right now I’m in this black-and-white drawing phase, which I started doing about seven or eight years ago.”

The landscapes, now on exhibit at the Dixon, show Dacus Lake, across the Mississippi River in Arkansas. “I really have limited my subject matter to this small area in Arkansas,” Seagle says. “It’s this land that floods, and that keeps it wild and that keeps it changing too. It was once part of the Mississippi River. I go over there every couple of weeks, and it’s always different. And I see all kinds of animals over there, too — I saw a panther one time. And people don’t build anything on it.”

The outdoors is where Seagle, a frequent hiker, thrives. She used to visit her older relatives in Colorado and drew inspiration from nature there. Once her family members passed away, though, she stopped going there and needed a new source of inspiration — but one just as meaningful to her. It wasn’t until her forties when she found that spot around Dacus Lake.

Seagle first started going over there to visit her boyfriend — now her husband of 28 years — Fletcher Golden, who lived at a fishing camp in the area. “I never thought I would get married,” she says, but after being set up with Golden by an astrologer friend, she couldn’t resist him. Golden even says, “While we were dating, she — from memory — did a picture of my face, kind of ‘News of the Weird’ style. I love it, and she says she did it from memory because I was kissing her a lot.”

Years later, the two are just as enamored by with each other. “He is pretty cute,” Seagle says. “We’ve had a lot of fun together. He’s very adventurous, and I am, too. We’ve taken some great trips together.” So it’s no wonder that she returns to the place where she first got to know Golden all those years ago — to wander, to paint with watercolors, and to let her surroundings wash over her as she takes photographs to reference later in her drawings.

“I just love going over there. I love these scenes. I love these landscapes. That’s my spot,” Seagle says.


In her Cooper-Young studio are Xerox copies of photos she’s taken. She’s folded them over in some places, making entirely new compositions, adjusting the wilderness to her aesthetic liking. From these gritty images printed on copy paper, Seagle gleans details that an untrained eye would not recognize. She knows this art, inside and out, just like she knows these woods, harvesting their most innate qualities from her memories.

Unlike her prior work that favored stylization, Seagle renders these images realistically, leaving no detail spared. The scenes are still, out of time. A sense of wonder remains in her drawings, inviting the viewer to slip into nature’s serenity, only a few miles from the grit and grind of Memphis.

After decades of working as an artist, Seagle has slipped into a serenity of her own, as if all her prior artistic endeavors have led to this moment. Her experimentation freed and challenged her as she honed her skill and searched for a style to call her own. And it’s these black-and-white drawings that the artist has found to be the most rewarding, cultivating her passion and drive all the while achieving commercial success and drawing attention from the Dixon. At last, Seagle is proud.

As she continues in this phase of her life and art with these landscapes, Seagle can’t help but think of her childhood self, wandering through the woods in Western Arkansas, with her father working in the forests and her mother at home. “I wish they were alive so they could see what I’m doing,” she says.

Though her father urged Seagle to pursue a more “practical” career like teaching, he shared her love of nature. Her mother had her own creative spirit, expressed through domestic arts like scrapbooking and sewing. She was also a talented pianist and an amateur photographer, often taking pictures of the trees surrounding their Arkansas home. “I think it’s almost a genetic thing,” Seagle says, “what I’m doing now. Some of my pictures look like her photographs.”

Certainly, her parents would be proud, but so would the little girl who wanted to illustrate books and magazines. “I just stop myself, and go, ‘Wow,’” Seagle says. “Especially with this show that I have at the Dixon. Gosh, if I had known that would happen. I would just be exuberant. And I pretty much am.”

Jeanne Seagle’s “Of This Place” is on display at The Dixon Gallery and Gardens through April 9th.