Yard Art and Handmade Places by Jill Nokes

Author:Jill Nokes [Nokes, Jill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2007-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

A small track in the woods leads to the unexpected discovery of Charlie Stagg’s studio. (Photo J. Nokes)

Cajuns are well known for their improvisational skills with food, but this kind of on-the-fly resourcefulness seems to have marked Charlie’s whole life.

In the late forties, Charlie’s dad quit rice-farming and turned instead to raising hogs, setting up the pens for them in the same spot where the studio compound is today. Of those days, Charlie remembers,

I helped to raise the hogs, and we had a lot of hay, and I did all the farm chores. Since my sisters were older, I didn’t have a lot of playmates, and I spent a lot of time out here in the woods alone. I loved this area, even when we had hogs back here. Right in this area is the highest point on the land, and that’s the reason I chose to build back here, because I knew that as a fact. And I did a lot of drawing and stuff too out here, just little scenes of fishing and all kind of cartoonish-looking little drawings.

After high school, Charlie left Vidor for the army and was stationed in Germany. The world was opening up for him. Then, like other young men in southeast Texas, he returned to work in one of the many oil refineries in the area, where reliable salaries could keep your mind off how dangerous and dirty the job really was. In quick succession, he married, divorced, and remarried, all the while growing more and more fed up with refinery work. His second wife encouraged him to quit and attend college on the G.I. Bill. Like his parents, she was a good Baptist, and she wanted him to go to Baylor University, but first he had to go to McClellan Community College to redeem his abysmal high school grades in order to qualify for admission to the university. That’s when he met the first of a series of influential mentors, Robert “Daddy-O” Wade, part of the famous Texas Five artists at that time, in the early sixties.

Charlie describes those days when his life took another direction.

Robert and I were talking about me going on to Baylor and going into commercial art, and he said, “No, you left a place where you can make a living [the refinery]; why do you want to go into commercial art?” I told him I wanted to be creative, and he said, “Forget that! If you really want to be creative, commit yourself. Forget about money or anything else, go for fine art!”

Slowly, the idea of becoming a serious artist was taking shape in Charlie’s mind.

At Baylor, Charlie came under the influence of another mentor, sculptor Italo Scanga, who was visiting Waco during an exhibition. Scanga encouraged Charlie to join him at Tyler School of Art (part of Temple University in Philadelphia), to get his MFA. Charlie decided to start taking himself and his art seriously and move to the East Coast, even though it meant divorcing his wife and leaving Texas behind.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.