Say you’re a kid growing up in a smallish town in South Carolina. Your dad sells appliances at Sears, your mom is a housewife, and what you do is draw. Mostly when you’re by yourself, which is a lot of the time. There’s not much around that tells you that drawing is important, except that you notice your aunts make beautiful quilts, your grandfather loves music, and the guy down the street designs textiles. Your mom reads you books with illustrations in them. You see Norman Rockwell covers on The Saturday Evening Post. You go to exhibits at a museum.
Those exposures opened up “a wide world” for Phillip Garrett, the Greenville native whose monotypes, An Itinerant’s Botany, are on exhibit at the Hodges Taylor Gallery Fine Print Room through January 31. Because of them, says Garrett, “I discovered art.”
But a guy has to make a living. At USC, Garrett majored in pharmacy. He eventually dropped out because, he says, “it was so painful — I wanted to go to art school but I didn’t know how to get there.” A common plaint from a kid who’s the only person he knows who does what he does. But as happens to people with strong natural instincts, he began to forge a course toward his vision, however vague, of becoming an artist.
In night classes at the Greenville County Museum of Art, Garrett saw the work of teachers Carl Blair and Tom Flowers. “They inspired me. I also felt very much at home in the studio, so I knew I was doing the right thing.”
Being stationed in Hawaii as a Naval Reservist during the Vietnam War actually furthered his development. At the University of Honolulu, influential teachers like James Koga, Gabor Peterdi and Mary Lou Williams introduced him to printmaking. Monotypes in particular appealed to him because it invited risk-taking and enabled him to explore a variety of ideas in fairly rapid progression.
The scene shifts to San Francisco in the early 1970s, where dynamos such as Deibenkorn, Bacon and Thiebaud were blowing the top off figurative art. Garrett enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute, where “every day was exciting — you never knew what was going to happen.” For a 24-year-old from South Carolina, self-described as “pure and naive,” it was “frustrating and challenging, but it gave me the courage to do that kind of art.”
“That kind of art” was devoting one’s life to producing in the studio and exhibiting in a gallery, as opposed to teaching or commercial work. Outside of school, students had to learn a lot of other, less idealistic, things about being an artist.
“You’ve got to be tough,” says Garrett of his profession. “You’ve got to be persistent and not give up. You have to learn how to handle the downside, like difficult relationships or not making money. Unlike the corporate world, making art is isolating and it doesn’t get the respect in America that it does elsewhere. Art is still considered frivolous here.
“So you learn other skills,” he continues. “Most artists I know are good at marketing and self-promotion, and working with patrons and dealers. But mainly, you have to keep working, to commit. You have to not be afraid, to be willing to screw up, to be ready at all times for the good things to happen, to not get bogged down in the decision-making process.”
Garrett found, however, that making a living managing a framing business gave him less and less time to make art, so he and his wife moved back to South Carolina in 1979. The lower cost of living here afforded him time in the studio, where he painted and continued printmaking. Because most artists can’t afford the presses necessary to produce quality prints, they have to work with master printers who do — difficult, he says, because “it’s like moving your studio out of town. You have to book time with them and have the money to pay them.” The upside of the situation is the collaborative experience of sharing ideas, learning new techniques, and being psychologically refreshed by the peer contact. Several times a year, Garrett journeyed to Cappy Kuhn’s Winstone Press, in Winston-Salem (since closed), where he produced several large color lithographs and some monotype series, and then to Charleston, where working with Art Thomas brought him back to the intensity and energy of black and white. The results can be seen in the bold yet sensitive Botany exhibit, the subjects of which appeared to him while “meandering” on the garden path to his studio or the ridges of the mountains nearby.
In 1998, Garrett finally bought his own intaglio press. King Snake Press is named after the resident reptile who sheds its skin in the rafters. “It’s a regenerative symbol, a talisman,” explains Garrett. The best part of having his own press, he says, is 24-hour-a-day access.
Among other priceless benefits is serving as master printer to other artists. Last year, Garrett guided South Carolina painter Edward Rice, who has a show scheduled at Van Every Gallery in Davidson in January 2004, in re-exploring the monoprint. In 2001, Fine Print curator June Lambla arranged for Garrett to instruct Blowing Rock painter Raymond Chorneau, who’d never before tried the medium, in the joys of printmaking. The fruits of the experience can be seen in the gallery and in their burgeoning friendship, which has also shown Chorneau that, when it comes to passion and commitment, Garrett is “the real thing.”
Wonder what Garrett’s high school art teacher, who used to tear up his homework, would say to that fine compliment…
The exhibit An Itinerant’s Botany, new monotypes by Phillip M. Garrett, is on view in the Fine Print Room through January 31, 2004. Hodges Taylor Gallery, Transamerica Square, 401 N. Tryon Street, 704-334-3799. Hours: 11am-6pm Tuesday-Friday, 11am-3pm Saturday, Monday by appointment. www.hodgestaylor.com.
This article appears in Dec 31, 2003 – Jan 6, 2004.
