Louisiana Portrait Project: Sound and Silence by Lisa Qualls
Rauch Gallery at Gaston College, Dallas, North Carolina
September 2016
By Rosemary Poole-Carter
On September 29th, the final day of the Rauch Gallery exhibition of Louisiana Portrait Project: Sound and Silence, I attended the artist’s talk and viewed the exhibit along with a full gallery of art lovers and budding artists. Already a fan of Lisa Qualls’s work and sharing her affinity for the state of Louisiana, I expected to enjoy her exquisitely detailed drawings of human forms and her imaginative installations—and was not disappointed. On one wall, a great swath of canary paper cascaded from ceiling to floor in a multi-layered rendering of camellias, irises, and magnolias, as if these flowers had been pressed among the translucent pages of an enormous book. Then, across the room, voice recordings of Louisianans telling their stories provided sound over silence above a panel drawing of multiple pairs of intriguing eyes. What I had not anticipated was how much the reactions of other attendees would enhance my pleasure in the art of Sound and Silence.
Gallery patrons clustered in front of a large painting of Mr. Charles Robinson in a Louisiana cemetery, paused in his work of painting a tomb with “tombstone white” to offer a smile expressive of his devotion and pride in tending his parents’ grave. Several art students asked Lisa Qualls to pose with them for photographs and selfies beside her work, each one grinning as broadly as the man Lisa had captured on canvas. Patrons discussed and lingered over a wall of graphite portraits of Louisianans, each meticulous drawing as revelatory of a unique personality as of the artist’s consummate skill. The gallery hummed with questions and comments for Lisa and with conversations sparked by her work. I felt the respect that Lisa showed in her portraits for her subjects’ intelligence, humor, heart, and experience crossed the divide that night between art and life. With a nod to Shakespeare’s Prospero, I think Lisa proved to all of us in the gallery that we are such stuff as art is made of. Her choice to celebrate the humanity and beauty of Louisiana is particular, but, like all true artists, she makes the particular universal, drawing us all into her art.
