Cre8tive Works Gallery & Café

IF YOU GO

Cre8tive Works Gallery & Café 79 Colonial Trail East, Surry, VA 23883 757-503-3209 Sunday: 10:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday, Tuesday and Thursday: 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Friday: 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesday and Saturday: Closed

A passion for good art and good food

By Tracy Agnew Editor

One location in Surry allows people to feed their bellies and their artistic appetites in the same place.

Cre8tive Works Gallery & Café is the project of Everett and Sarah Mayo. She’s a native of Surry, while he grew up in Roanoke. The couple met in Richmond, married and had six children before ultimately deciding to move back to Surry a few years ago to be closer to most of their children and the grandchildren. The two have combined their passions for good art and good food in two little spots right in the town of Surry on Colonial Trail East. The two commercial spaces, one formerly a pharmacy and the other a doctor’s office, among other uses, are now connected by a hole in the wall — with the permission of the owner, of course. “I’ve been working on the place for three years,” Everett Mayo said. “We started with the idea that this was going to be a gallery. And we said, ‘Well, when we have shows, people are going to want something to eat.’ So we said, ‘Well, let’s get in next door.’” The doorway connecting the two came later, when they decided people would not want to go outside to go between the two.

For the most part, he runs the gallery with his artwork, and she runs the café. Mayo specializes in driftwood art, which has him constantly on the hunt for new pieces of wood he can paint to become an object or a creature. He rarely modifies the shape of the wood from the state in which he finds it — he merely looks for the eye and then goes from there. Birds, sea creatures and more peer out from the walls of the gallery.

Over on the café side of things, Sarah Mayo serves up food including a pineapple bacon bleu cheeseburger, potato salad (her secret ingredients are pimentos and sour cream) and her famous sweet potato pies.

“They come and get it,” she said. “That’s what’s keeping those doors open. We originally planned only to have a sandwich shop, and then it turned out to be much more than a sandwich shop.”

The gallery and café opened last May, as soon as they could after the initial shutdown occasioned by the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite that inauspicious start, the Mayos see a bright future at their location, catering to locals and tourists alike. He envisions people being able to eat lunch, see the gallery and then take a van tour to see local trees that he has embellished the same way he does the driftwood.

“We do know that this can work, and it can be very successful because of the tourism when the tourists start coming back through here,” she said. “It’s going to be a cool place to hang out.”