On the Cover: Cheri Fry's "Existence"

“EXISTENCE”

Cover image by Cheri Fry

Jordan LaHaye Fontenot

For our 2022 “Arts” issue, we wanted a cover that, somehow, said it all; that spoke to the impact of the visual arts, the storytelling prowess of the performing arts; that posed our region’s creative work as integral to its identity, to our identity. And, as always, we wanted a cover that elicits curiosity, that makes you want to know more.

Cheri Fry's "Existence"

Remarkably, it is through its own restraint that artist Cheri Fry’s figure study, one of many in her series “Existence,” manages to hold all of this and more. Currently on display at the West Feliciana Library’s exhibition Unique Perspectives/A Singular Passion (learn more on page 15), the work emerged from Fry’s practice of figurative expressionism. Painting from a model, Fry stands before an easel and follows her instincts, allowing the watercolors to drip down the standing canvas as they will.

“When I paint these, I never really know what’s gonna happen,” she says. “The idea is that the figures have this internal movement. I try not to include too much information, so that the viewer can enter into the piece and fill in.”

The beauty of such an open-hearted gesture towards the viewer’s own interpretation, for us, is that when we look at the work, we can lay upon it the stories in this issue : of dancers depicting trauma, of artists revisiting their pasts and using them to create something beautiful.

But the fact, reader, is that you’ll see the cover before you read the pages within, allowing you the chance to lay your own stories upon it, first. So, tell us: what do you see?