Ruin and Beauty: How the South and the larger world influence Danville artist’s work

By Sarah Arkin
Danville Register & Bee
Published: May 28, 2008

Blaring out of a sleek iPod sound system, Amy Winehouse seems anachronistic in the room with a print-making machine and a fireplace.

The speakers are tucked behind a paint-spattered boom box circa 1992. Paper, paints and doodles litter the table. Bay windows allow in a comfortable amount of light.

The front room of the old Victorian house on West Main Street smells like what you would expect an art classroom to smell like: Oil paints, creativity, creaky wood, and faintly of cigarettes, as, expecting company, Robert Marsh had opened the windows to let in a little fresh spring air.

An art professor at Averett University and originally from Muscle Shoals, Ala., Marsh says he has always been inspired by his Southern surroundings.
In 1969, Marsh started working for Reynolds Aluminum in Alabama, becoming intimately familiar with manufacturing culture.

“I just became fascinated with being in a mill town. Everything went through the mill. The mill owned the people,” he said, adding, “that’s not negative… it’s an integral part of the South. I’m honored to be around it.”

“Of course,” he acknowledged, “I’m looking at it from a romantic perspective. What it is to be a loom feeder I don’t know.”

That perspective of Southern living landed one of Marsh’s pieces, “A Day in the Life,” in the permanent collection of the Library of Congress.

“A Day in the Life” was originally crafted for a traveling exhibit of artistic responses to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, organized by the Meridian International Center in Washington, D.C.

The exhibit, “True Colors: Meditations on the American Spirit,” included the works of 64 artists.
Marsh’s piece reflects both the sense of destruction and the feeling of remoteness the attacks had on Marsh and many around him.

“The purpose (of the exhibit) was not to dwell only on the tragic events of that day,” states a release from the organization.

“True Colors” opened at Meridian’s galleries in Washington in mid-February 2002. The exhibit traveled to New York, Berlin and Slovakia before returning to the U.S. in 2005.

In the summer of 2005, “True Colors” was at what was to be its last stop, the Ohr-O’Keefe museum in Biloxi, Miss.
While there, Lake Charles, La., asked to display the collection in conjunction with a World Trade Center memorial being placed in the city, according to the Meridian Center.

As the exhibit was being boxed and packed, Hurricane Katrina swept through Biloxi, leaving the whereabouts of much of the art unknown. When Meridian located the pieces, the crates carrying them had been sitting in two feet of water and there was no electricity to control the climate.

Determined to present the exhibit, people from Lake Charles themselves drove for three hours to retrieve the paintings and prints. Incredibly, as they were unpacking the crates, Hurricane Rita’s eye went right over Lake Charles.

Fortunately, City Hall, now the City Hall Arts and Cultural Center, was not damaged, although surrounding areas were ravaged.
Luckily, Marsh’s “A Day in the Life” wasn’t damaged.

Marsh said he still vividly remembers what happened eight years ago on the Tuesday morning that terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
“I walked out of class and someone told me there was an attack on the towers. It was just so foreign, it was hard to comprehend,” he said.
Marsh said for a while it was still inconceivable.

Other pieces in the exhibit memorializing the terrorist attacks are more literal. Some are gruesome in their reflection of the horror.
Marsh didn’t come from that angle.

“How do you do an image that’s so horrific?” he wondered aloud.

So Marsh chose to focus on the universally understood reactions.

“We have death here in the foreground, life there in the field. All I wanted was a pattern of growing things,” he said. 
Marsh also incorporated his surroundings. 

“The kudzu — a symbol of the South. It kind of reminded me of the towers.”

Contact Sarah Arkin at (434) 791-7983 or .