Carol Myers & Wally Shoup

Garde Rail Gallery presents new mixed media paintings by self-taught artists Carol Myers and Wally Shoup. The show opens, First Thursday, February 4, 1999, from 6 until 9pm. There will be a second Open House on Third Thursday, February 18, 6 until 9pm.

Carol Myers could be regarded as a memory painter. Much of her work draws from her memories of childhood, growing up in a small town in Louisiana. She was particularly moved by Juju, a woman who raised her, and these memories and intense feelings have found their way onto canvas and wood. Carol tends to use found objects and found text in her work, resulting in textured work rich in imagery and written word. She also creates obsessive pen and inks on paper, incessantly repeating a single word, such as "tom" or "boy".

Carol currently lives in New York. Last year she was hand picked by Roger Manley to attend his META Museum in North Carolina (Roger curated the "Visionary Voices/The End Is Near" show most recently at the Bellevue Art Museum last fall). John Maizels, editor of Raw Vision magazine and curator of the current "Love Eros" exhibit at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, has also taken notice of Carol's work, picking her for the Raw Faces section of the magazine, and for the "Love Eros" show.

We met Wally Shoup when he pulled up to our back porch at our space in Belltown and pulled about 25 paintings out of his little Datsun. We couldn't believe it. Wally's work is incredibly rich in texture, and he paints with a mixture that has taken him years to refine. Applying this "paint" to found canvas, wood, and bits of paper, Wally creates characters and his interpretation of "landscapes", applying and removing layers, improvising. His fascination with rock and granite surfaces can easily be seen in his multi-layered work, and his figures reflect more than a hint of Wally's sense of humour.

Born in Charlotte, North Carolina, Wally grew up in the Deep South before moving to Colorado (where, via the Rocky Mountains, he began his relationship with stone surfaces). In the early 1980's Wally moved to Seattle, where he began to work with textiles and silk, but always returning to his paintings. His work was first shown, to great response, at Folk Fest 1998 in Atlanta.