BESIDE STILL WATERS THE LIFE AND ART OF JEANNE SEAGLE. C OVE R STO RY BY M I C HAE L D O NAH U E
JEANNE IN FOG BY FLETCHER GOLDEN
August 20-26, 2020
JEANNE SEAGLE’S favorite Bible verse begins, “He leadeth me beside still waters and he restoreth my soul.” “I’m not religious; don’t get me wrong,” Seagle says. “But I had to learn my Bible verses as a kid. And I remember them. I really like that one.” Her own still waters are found at Dacus Lake, the subject of “Beside Still Waters,” Seagle’s first one-person art show at L Ross Gallery. “My subject matter is the land inside the levee right across the Mississippi River from Downtown. Dacus Lake,” she says. “I have a great affinity for that land. I’ve always loved to go across the river, from the time when I first moved to Memphis. It was so much fun to go ride around in the fields and go down to the sandbars. I go over there a lot. It’s just a great getaway from Midtown Memphis. I can drive over the bridge and be over in the wilderness in 20 minutes.” Seagle’s show includes 11 large black-and-white drawings and 11 watercolors of the Dacus Lake area. She takes photographs, which she uses for her drawings. “They’re very precise. Very photo-realistic drawings. It takes 10 me about a month to do each one.” During her art career, Seagle, 72, has
worked as an illustrator for ad agencies and publications, including the Memphis Flyer, where her cartoons illustrated News of the Weird for many years. Her public art can be seen at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital, and Methodist University Hospital. Books that feature her illustrations include Mickey and the Golem by Steve Stern and Mommy Without Hair by Selene Benitone. But Dacus Lake has flowed through her artwork for decades.
IN THE mid-1990s, before they were married, Seagle and Fletcher Golden spent a lot of time at Dacus Lake, where Golden lived for a while in a mobile home. “I’d just go over every Friday night and ride through the bean fields. I really got to know the land over there. I housesat for him, and I would just go down to the river and paint and draw.” The area was a new world for Seagle, who was born in Pueblo, Colorado. “All of my art was about going out to Colorado to visit my family,” she says. “I just did brightly colored paintings of mountains and canyons and mesas and that kind of thing. I’d go out there every year and ride around and paint.”
When her elderly relatives died and she stopped making the trip to Colorado, Seagle was at a loss for subject matter. “I was not all that crazy about the flat Delta land. But little by little I started seeing all the subtle beauty and the surprises you find when you get up close in the swampland and the waterways. And I started making pictures of this Delta land.” It never stays the same, she says. “It floods every year. It’s inside the levee, and that makes the landscape change. The waters rise and recede. It’s a great place for all kinds of water birds and animals to live. And because it floods every year, it’s not developed. It keeps the humans away. Because of that, there are animals that just roam up and down the Mississippi for hundreds and hundreds of miles. “If you go early in the morning, you see these animals. I saw a panther one time when I got up early and was sitting quietly doing some watercolor painting.” And then there are the trees. “Because it floods, the roads are elevated so that trees grow up around them, but the trees take on very strange shapes, too, because of the Delta tornadoes that come through and tear off the limbs of
the trees. They’re all raggedy-looking trees that are so unusual.” The area does attract some eccentric people, Seagle says. “When Fletcher lived there and I was visiting on a regular basis, there was a bait shop on stilts. It was kind of a community gathering place.” And, she says, “There were other people living over there at the fish camp — people who don’t like living in civilization. They were people who are close to the land, people who hunt for beaver tails. Just very earthy, country people who have known all about the country, and the last thing they want to do is live in civilization. We got to know them, and that was really interesting.”
SEAGLE’S LOVE OF nature
began when she was a child. Her family moved from Colorado to Mississippi when she was very young, then they moved to the woods of Arkansas when she was five. “My father worked for the department of forestry, and he got a job as a forest ranger in Western Arkansas in the Ouachita Mountains. As a little child, I was living in this forest. An only child.” Seagle spent time drawing and walking through the woods by herself.
