Getting Creative

Four Memphis artists invite us into their home studios.

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What does it take to be creative? Author Virginia Woolf famously said one of the requirements was “a room of one’s own.” If you want to pursue art, you need a place to be alone with your thoughts, stocked with all the tools to practice your craft. We reached out to some of Memphis’ most prominent artists, who graciously invited us into the sanctums where they unlock their creativity.

Hamlett Dobbins

If you’ve spent any time in the galleries and studios of Memphis, odds are you’ve seen Hamlett Dobbins’ work. His abstract paintings, which freely combine colors and textures, draw you into the artist’s inner world.

“My daughter, Mila, when she was really little, was a big fan of the Red Hot Chili Peppers,” he says. “One time in the car, we were listening to them, and she said, ‘I want to be in that song.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, you want to be a bass player, like Flea.’

And she said, ‘No, no! I want to be in that song.’ I think we’ve all had that moment. My paintings are, for me, a way to think about those moments, and try and figure it out. Sometimes, those moments can be about the patterns that were happening there — the pattern of the grass versus the pattern of the clouds versus the color of hair. The paintings come from those. Sometimes it can be something really simple. Sometimes it can be something really complicated.”

Dobbins has taught art at Rhodes College, the University of Memphis, Ole Miss, and the University of Iowa. “Part of what I do is teach the craft of image-making,” he says. “Part of what I also teach is trying to get students to ask themselves questions. So I ask questions of them, in the hopes that those questions might later lead them to other questions, or other answers.

“I always tell my students, ‘I can teach anybody to make a really good drawing of a skull, but I cannot teach you to make an interesting drawing of a skull.’ What I’m trying to do is a little bit of both — teach them some of the physical craft, like how to hold their hand, how to make a composition, that kind of thing. But then also expose them to, and allow them to think about, the possibilities of what else they might be able to do.”

Dobbins’ studio is behind his Midtown home, which he shares with his wife, fabric artist Katrina Perdue, and their five children. “It was a garage,” he says, “and then we renovated it and Katrina had her studio out here for a little while — but then she quickly outgrew the space, and got a bigger studio.

“It really helps for me to have a place where I can be where I can just sort of be myself,” he says. “For me, the studio is about trying to figure out the connections between things.”

One wall of the studio is covered by images, objects, and fragments of cloth Dobbins uses to stimulate his visual imagination. “How do these Christmas ornaments relate to these hat tassels my stepdaughters made, or with these pieces of gauze that I used to strain the bubbles out of paint?”

Ultimately, Dobbins says, no one can tell you how to create a room of your own. “Everyone has to find the thing that makes them happy What is it that you need to make art? What is it that you need to be whole? That’s one of the scariest questions to ask a 20-year-old student — but it’s scary for me, too.”

Lawrence Matthews

Known as a multimedia artist, curator, and musician, Lawrence Matthews recently released 325i, his third and final album under the name Don Lifted. But he says he doesn’t consider himself a natural artist. “I think everybody can draw, and everybody starts off drawing,” he says. “It’s just that somebody either tells you that you can draw, or somebody tells you that you can’t.”

Matthews didn’t start taking art classes until he enrolled at the University of Memphis. “When I got to school, I was really struggling,” he says. “All the kids I was in art classes with had been in art programs and AP programs for art. Whereas, I just was a dude that could draw … I didn’t learn to paint until 2012. But I started to excel at it very fast. I went from being at the back of the class hiding to being front row and bringing in the most work and getting really involved in my classes and my critiques.

“I figured out that like, oh, this is something I could do for a living and you know, maybe I’m actually good at this. My professors really looked after me — Beth Edwards, Greeley Myatt, Jed Jackson. I had a team of folks who were really pouring into me as an artist.”

Matthews began incorporating his visual art breakthroughs into his musical performances. “I owe a lot of my fan base now to the arts environment that I got brought up in,” he says. “My shows became more art installation, mixed-media kind of shows that allowed me to tell a fully comprehensive, all-encompassing story, versus one that’s just me getting on stage with a microphone or just showing paintings on the wall.”

After Matthews’ parents divorced and remarried, he took over the Cordova house where he grew up. When he couldn’t get traction in traditional clubs for his unique blend of visual art and music, he started throwing his own shows in his garage. “It was a catalyst for what I started to do with later partners — art shows, fashion, mixed-media kind of things.”

Throughout his twenties, the entire house was devoted to his art and music. But eventually, he found it was crucial to create some separation between workspace and living space. “This was just a place [where] I slept and made art. I had a little music studio in the back of my old bedroom, and I recorded my first album Contour there. I made all the art in the garage or the living room … I got signed [to Fat Possum records] in 2020, so that put a little money in my pocket, and I was able to build a studio in the dining room. Then I thought, I need to make this a space that’s livable for me. I’d felt that all along, but I’d been putting it off, because I’d put everything into my creative life. It’s all about the mission! But you have to take care of yourself.”

Maritza Dávila

Printmaking is an ancient process, believed to originate in China more than 1,800 years ago. Maritza Dávila has dedicated her life to perfecting the art and craft of ink transfer.

“My idea was to become a painter,” she says. “But then when I took my first form of printmaking course, I decided I really loved this. I like the process. I like the time it takes. I like the thinking process. I like the hands-on, building up of layers that creates an image. Painting is more immediate, and you can create layers and stuff. But the response to painting is different to me. I still do both, but now, when I do painting, I’m doing it from a printmaking standpoint.”

Dávila is well known in the Memphis art community, having taught many local artists during her tenure at the now-closed Memphis College of Art. Her work has been shown and sold all over the world. “Contrary to what people think, prints are not copies,” she says. “Prints — because they’re hand-pulled, and the image done by hand, for the most part — are all originals.”

A native of Puerto Rico, she has lived in Memphis since the early 1980s with her husband (and Memphis senior editor) Jon W. Sparks. Like many artists, the space where she works began life as a garage which had already been converted to a small ceramics workshop before the couple bought the house in the Binghampton neighborhood. Recently, a renovation expanded the available space by about a third.

Large windows along one wall of the new construction let in plenty of natural light, and the light fixtures are carefully calibrated to provide a similar spectrum. “Artificial light changes the way the color looks,” Dávila says. “Natural light doesn’t have that problem, depending on what time of the day it is. The first thing that I did was change the lights and paint the ceilings white, to have a good reflection.”

A typical Dávila print begins as an idea she puts down in one of her voluminous sketchbooks. “I don’t call it ‘design,’” she says. “I’m making images. … Design relates more to a practical finality. Image relates to something that you want to say, something that has a story, that has a theme, that has a content. So, I do a lot of research. That’s part of the fun for me — I research and I document it all here. It keeps those ideas from flowing and being forgotten onto the air. When I see them, then I can change them. That’s hard to do just in your mind.”

As the idea develops, the notebooks fill with notes, drawings, and swatches of cloth and paper. Once she feels the idea is fully formed, she will produce a matrix, carving elements of the image into a block of wood or metal that is then covered in ink and pressed against paper or fabric.

Dávila studied printmaking techniques from many cultures, even traveling to Japan to learn how to make her own paper. She has sought out nontoxic alternatives to the noxious inks and chemicals used in industrial scale printing. A final product can include many layers of color, and even elements of collage, all working together ro produce a carefully constructed image.

“Many students doing art, if I may say so, are doing art because they think it’s easier than anything else.” says Dávila. “But it’s not.”

Dale and Brin Baucum

They were both students at the Memphis Academy of Arts (later Memphis College of Art), but Dale and Brin Baucum first met at an art show in Nashville. It was love at first sight, and they soon married.

Brin majored in photography and interior design. “My focus was pottery,” says Dale. “And that’s what I did for 50 years. I hung out with some names that the older people recognize: Dorothy Sturm, Ted Faiers, and Burton Callicott. When I was making pottery, it was always a linear experience with decorating them. And then later on, Brin and I focused on combining both of our elements on the same pots.”

Once out of school, Baucum Pottery set up shop in Cooper-Young. In 1978, they moved into what had been Brin’s grandparents’ house in the Vollintine-Evergreen district. Importantly, the home had a separate garage. “My granddaddy’s Buick would come in over here and hit the wall,” says Brin.

Dale used money he had inherited from the sale of a family farm to build a gas kiln and workshop in the space. “It wasn’t an extraordinary amount of money, but it was enough that we could build this room the way that we wanted it. And so, in a sense, we invested that in our farm, which was here. And we’ve made a living,” says Dale. “Met Crump was our architect, and we traded pots with him for the work. When we later redid our kitchen, Marge Hall was our architect, and we traded pots with her, too. We’ve traded with dentists and surgeons, before you couldn’t do that sort of thing any more.”

Having both parents of two small children make their living as professional artists was always risky, but Brin says it offered many advantages when it came to raising them. “They were never without a parent at home — which I’m sure they were not always thrilled over. But we put them in the van and took them to art fairs all over the place.”

Once Baucum Pottery built up a reputation on the art fair circuit, they inked deals with a number of outlets like Babcock Gifts and reduced their travel schedule. Instead, they held pottery shows out of their custom backyard studio that would attract buyers from all over the Mid-South. “We made stuff as fast as we could,” says Dale, “and we didn’t have to go anywhere except our wonderful studio shows, at that point.”

In 2012, The Dixon Gallery and Gardens surprised the Baucums by asking them to mount an exhibit featuring 40 years of their pottery. For scrappy potters who had worked outside of the fine art gallery and museum system all their lives, getting the full career retrospective treatment from a respected institution was a huge honor. “And boy did we get it! We had all seven galleries,” says Dale.

“It was a wonder,” says Brin. “I’d never been on the inside of a museum show before.”

Since pottery involves hauling and shaping heavy blocks of clay and dealing with the heat of the fiery kiln, it can be a physically demanding pursuit. After decades hunched over the wheel, back injuries and arthritis eventually ended Dale’s pottery days. Now, he spends his creative time in their home’s front room, painting and sketching, while Brin has returned to photography.

“When you go into that third or fourth level, when you’re doing something, the world kind of stops around you. It’s just you in your head and whatever’s going on. Whatever comes out of it, it just always has seemed right. Which is a good, good thing,” says Dale.