David Stewart, whose works are on exhibition at the Southwest Arkansas Arts Council gallery until May 19, stands next to his painting "Deep Blue Jester."
As seen at the Southwest Arkansas Arts Council gallery, starting yesterday evening and remaining until May 19, David Stewart’s paintings ranged from his earlier folk art chalk renderings to his most recent, more abstract expressionist works that allow one into his wondrously imaginative, wry and lively inner world.
Sunday afternoon at 3:00 p.m. the gallery on 200 East Division, which used to be the depot of the Cairo & Fulton Railroad, opened to celebrate the start of the Stewart exhibition. Members of the SWAAC board and supporters brought food items and arranged them around a bouquet set in the middle of the central room for family and guests to sample as they feasted on over 100 paintings. The artist was present, too.
Asked which of his works he most wanted to pose next to, Stewart led us to "Deep Blue Jester," a mildly cubist painting of a figure with two faces in a hooded raincoat, shrouded in night blue, one face feminine and peering down, the other masculine and regarding the viewer. The lips of the feminine face a heart shape. The lips of the male more strawberry shaped. We’re reminded of the two masks displayed at theaters, the comic and the tragic, but these faces are more ambiguous, reminding us that in life the tragic and the comic more often visit us in the same forms.
About his paintings, SWAAC executive director Jennifer Block said, “Expression, that’s definitely the term for everything he paints. Everything has a story to it. And you can tell he definitely has a story to tell.”
Block also noted the diversity of his work both as a whole and within a single painting. “He is so versatile that he can switch genres in the same painting and is still able to pull off everything he wants. And he takes so much time. He’s very detail oriented. You wouldn’t really think that of a lot of his paintings. He is so precise in everything put into his paintings, from color to line. It’s just amazing.”
While Stewart did paint a bit when he was younger—his wife Cherry identified the first pieces one sees at the gallery entrance as samples of these—the impetus for his more recent explosion of paintings came about 20 years ago when Cherry took an art class at what is now University of Arkansas Hope-Texarkana under Lisa Pennington. “I took art at the college,” Cherry said. “Then he started getting into the art room and just dabbling. The art teacher saw what he was. She just ran with it. She challenged him to no end.”  Then a carriage house next to the Stewart’s home proved the perfect studio for how it lets in the light.
What David Stewart does with it is on display for all who come to the SWAAC offices and gallery from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. weekdays until May 19th. Â Many are on sale. And you can buy tickets for a raffle to be drawn for one of his earlier landscapes on May 15th.
This landscape is on raffle, with tickets available at the SWAAC gallery.
