In his poem, “Extra Innings” Arthur Smith describes the memory of a baseball game from his distant past. It’s the ninth inning, there are two outs, and the opposing pitcher is Tom Seaver. The game is a no-hitter as the poem’s narrator takes the bat and makes a mighty swing that connects and soars. I asked Smith once if he really played that game, and, with a sly grin, he said, “read it again.”
Like many of the poems in Smith’s collection, Elegy on Independence Day, this beautiful bit of verse is not about baseball – it’s 
about memory. Smith writes, “He’ll remember his no hitter as precisely/And firmly as I remember spoiling it, and neither of us is wrong.”
Memory is an unreliable witness.
Memory is a powerful tool that shapes our experience and often reshapes it. Sometimes these reformations merely suit our ego, sometimes they are born of fantasy and imagination to let us live life as we wish we had, and sometimes they are protective adaptations that shield us from the reliving of terrible recollections.
The work of our featured artist in Market Square this month, Evelyn Forester is deeply rooted in these exigencies of memory. Hers is a moody world of experience and impression rooted in a strange interlude spent in Katy Texas where she spent time with an Aunt who read her palm and read with her from the Book of Enoch.
I don’t know that Forester’s memories contain any of the little fictions that memory often creates as it reshapes time – Evelyn is a reticent character who is reluctant to share too much information about her past. And even when she does share one is left to wonder, as one often is when speaking to anybody, and artists in particular, which parts of the story are untouched by creativity.
Born to a comfortable, even an affluent life, Forester dropped out of school at 16 and abandoned material comfort to move to Valley Forge, Tennessee where she took up residence with a Great Aunt, whom she declines to name. During this time Forester learned the hard lessons taught by subsistence farming and life lived in close quarters – in this instance a small cabin.
Still, despite the poverty, the house was filled with books, including a veritable library of art history, criticism and the like. Even with so much reading material at hand, Evelyn says she was much more affected by the time she spent with dirt under her fingernails: “I got a great appreciation of the masters, but I think I was more influenced by the hands-on experiences on the homestead. It certainly gave me a love of a self-taught method of learning and creating work.”
Forester’s life experience is reflected in a formal flexibility, she says, as her “pieces are sometimes abstract – reflecting emotion or experiences with others I may have had, and sometimes illustrative – reflecting memories and experiences with others I may have had. “
But in all cases, the subjects that demand her attention are her memories: “The illustrative works are quite autonomous. I’m not 
too worried about scale or proportion. In fact, I’m not very good with either. That allows me to pursue the idea of memory. The paint is, of course, the vehicle – so, that’s what really drives it. It is the act of painting that tends to reveal a memory for me.”
The paintings in this exhibit are mostly oil on wood panels of varied sizes that are drawn from a very particular part of Forester’s life: “they come from a period I spent there [Katy, Texas] with father in 1987 on one of his many trips planned for the expansion of his finances. While he courted refineries, I was left with his sister (a palm reading Christian) from March to November.” These experiences (along with the absence of school) were what she remembers as the pivotal and spiritual enlightenment of her 9-year-old self.
The images are painted through the very powerful filter of time – the scenes are dated in 1987, but the act of painting seems to have occurred this year, 2017. Though the images are mostly recognizable, they live in a nearly ethereal haze of quiet colors. Though in the instance of an impending twister, the painting is set in an almost sepia tinted landscape that, for me at least, evoked memories of Dorothy and Toto. The subjects are varied and include, among others, a missing child, an attentive jack rabbit, and a tilting flying saucer.
When asked which comes first, form or content, Forester says, “Content rules in abstraction. Those pieces are very illustrative to me as well, and probably only me. They are very internal and are never ‘happy’ works of art. Abstractions have stemmed from traumatic events in my life. There is trauma connected to the illustrative work as well, but it is a foggy mix of a happy and fearful memory.”
The opening verse in Elegy on Independence Day is a poem called “Tarantulas,” and, perhaps ironically, I learned its opening lines in 1987 – the same year that Forester was living the memories depicted in this exhibit:
If you fear them, you can find them
Everywhere in the early autumn evening
“Katy, Texas”, new paintings by Evelyn Forester will be on view at the downtown Tomato Head on Market Square from November 6th thru December 3rd. The exhibit will move to the West Knoxville Gallery Tomato Head on December 5th, 2017 thru January 7th, 2018.