Artwork by Gerald DeLoach, photographed by Marshall Blevins.
Artwork by Gerald DeLoach
Artwork by Gerald DeLoach
The thing about any road trip to the Mississippi Delta—you won’t get there fast. From Baton Rouge to New Orleans, from the old river road, even from Jackson, you’re going to have a lot of time to think or listen to books. It’s almost like a ritual thought cleanse to prepare you for what you’re liable to encounter in the Delta. The sky becomes big once you come out of Yazoo City or Vicksburg, and it’s big enough for all of your thoughts, worries, dreams. It’s the ultimate backroad trip, if you let yourself have the time to explore.
The same goes for when you arrive. There are side roads galore and the levee road never gets old. The mysteries and magic can remain hidden if you don’t go out looking for them.
I really came here for the people, for the stories, for the new revelations. There is still mystery in the human heart and it feels a little bit like unlocking a new level to make new friends and hear their stories. Gerald DeLoach is one of those medals of a well-explored life in the Delta. For the decade I’ve been coming here, I’ve passed within feet of his house again and again and never shook his hand until a few years ago. Then the door opened.
In the last forty years, if you were heading north on 61 and turned right off of the highway across from Alligator, you’d pass a big house owned by a country legend’s granddaughter. You’d pass by hundreds of ghost houses plowed down and tilled over for more than fifty years. The spirit of Robert Johnson would be walking to another version of the crossroads, singing and crying old blues. There are bright stories and dark stories and a lot of “there used to be” on this true rural road. If you’re not careful, you’ll scrape the bottom of your car off. But in the last forty years, you might have seen a mural being painted of a bayou, as big as the side of the house, just out in the yard. Traffic used to stop on the road for people coming by to look at it. You might have seen the lights on in the old pig-barn-turned-studio at three in the morning. You might have seen a maze of multicolored zinnias, or a fence built in a day for visiting horses. You might have seen herds of guineas, chickens, and turkeys, or even people dressed up as ducks, if you were there on the right day. The curiosity on DeLoach’s square of land hasn’t ceased in all of that time, if only you knew where to look. He keeps his place green and grown up. He can name every tree that grows. There’s asparagus in the early spring, greens in the winter, persimmons and pawpaws, and fish in the pond. He keeps frog’s tongue succulents and a myriad of helter-skelter planted roses. He’s made an Eden for himself in the middle of an industrially agricultural landscape.
Artwork by Gerald DeLoach, photographed by Marshall Blevins.
Artwork by Gerald DeLoach.
Artwork by Gerald DeLoach.
Out there on the county line, he keeps his paradise to himself—one of the many on a roster of artists that graduated from Delta State in the sixties and seventies, although he never made art as a child. The closest thing to it in the house might have been the annual calendar. He went to school to be an accountant, like his oldest brother. By chance, he took a design class and the professor remarked, “You have a natural sense of design.” And that was all it took to change his major. At a time when the school was moving toward abstract expressionism, he decided, “it was better to have control over my medium—to be able to illustrate what I chose to by learning how to draw in nature and mix colors.” And so, he signed up for classes under Sammy Britt, who led the challenging, impressionistic faction of the arts school. Britt was a sharp and witty teacher, who was such a friend to the students it was more like he was a student himself. He dedicated his teaching to form, color, light.
“The Delta is my home. I like it because it’s wide-open, expansive, and for the big skies. It has a universal quality to it, and my work isn’t meant to define the Delta, but rather to define sunlight.” —Gerald DeLoach
The thing about impressionists, you’re familiar with their names—Monet, Pissarro, Cezanne, Degas—they were able to go out and paint in the fields because of a brand-new technology: paint in tubes. DeLoach’s work follows them out to the bayous and fields, and sometimes into the realm of imagination. However, the true delineation of an impressionist lies in their eyes. Like a vinyl record just sounds better than a CD, like a film photo just has something about it compared to a digital image, the naked eye can see and carry over more color and that something that nothing else can compare to.
[Read this: Margie Tate - The Louisiana landscape artist prefers to paint from life]
The magic of the world we live in is found by noticing, in the natural world above all—the sunrise, the sunset, the colors of the night woods, the beauty of a cold night full of stars, the full moon, the belt of Venus, the crepuscular glow, the atmosphere of a thunderstorm, the portal of a foggy day. You can’t do these things inside; you can’t really capture how beautiful the sunset is, with even the best cameras. The value of traveling is found in new experiences, in noticing deeply because we are somewhere new, and so everything is worthy of our attention.
DeLoach has perfected this idea down to the ideal of living it every day, noting the changes over an evening sky, the shades of green in a morning bayou scene, the colors of the door frame as the lights go off in the house. He is not interested in making things beautiful or sell-able; he is interested in understanding what he sees, in noticing. He began studying under Cape Cod artist Henry Hensche, who had studied under the acclaimed portraitist Charles Hawthorn. Their first exercises were finding the color notes in a white block on a white table. Nothing in nature is ever really white or black but made up of colors reflecting off of each other.
Photo by Marshall Blevins.
Gerald DeLoach, photographed by Marshall Blevins.
Gerald DeLoach, photographed by Marshall Blevins.
When I first met DeLoach, we went out to a bridge so I could see him paint. He scratched in the general shapes in charcoal, and then began painting with his palette knife—a method favored by Britt and Hensche as a way to discourage linear drawing and invite the study of color, compelling the artist to lay down a color note instead of racing toward a finished image. Palette knives are also easier to clean than brushes; one swipe of a paint rag and you can start again without muddying the colors. DeLoach doesn’t paint the typical Delta—the long horizontal lined fields, cotton patches, cypress trees. Instead, he is concerned with interpreting the colors in the time of day or light key. “The Delta is my home. I like it because it’s wide-open, expansive, and for the big skies. It has a universal quality to it, and my work isn’t meant to define the Delta, but rather to define sunlight.”
The further you dig, the more you find. When you drive to the Delta you receive what you are looking for. If you go looking for hate, you will find it. If you go looking for love, you will find it in bounty, the same with stories, the same with art. If you pay attention to the world, it will seek you, too.
