Maysey Craddock explores themes of transience, impermanence, and memory in the landscape. Her watercolor and gouache paintings on sewn paper bags reflect the strength and promise that can be found in profound change and loss. Based on her own photographs of shifting landscapes, her paintings are intricate renderings of the intersection of humans and nature, conjuring an atmosphere of absence and reclamation.
Self-taught, Memphis-based painter Jared Small’s works have an eerie aura to them—of decay and dilapidation, but also of the remembered traces of a greatness-that-once-was.
On one wall at David Lusk Gallery, accompanying the exhibition “Last Light” by artist Veda Reed, are printed the lines from perhaps Dylan Thomas’ most famous poem: “Do not go gentle into that good night;/Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Yet spending time at this spare, chaste and elegant display of paintings convinces the viewer that what he sees here isn’t rage but acceptance and serenity. The 11 works, rendered in Reed’s impeccable polished manner and fathomless sense of surface, explore the moment when light leaves the sky at twilight, defining the crepuscular gloaming as the end of day and, implicitly, the end of life.