Farewell

This is Figure Painting's last post. The voice behind the blog is reclaiming her Southern roots and returning to Birmingham, Alabama for a spell before taking off for Greece and Spain and, ultimately, trading her auction catalogues and Gallery Guides for the life of a 1L (which is law school speak for a first year student).

Will she miss the New York art scene? Of course. Who wouldn't. But — and this seems to come as a surprise to many people — Alabama has a thriving community of artists, galleries, museums, and collectors. (It's no New York, but that may not be a bad thing.)

Today, Carol Vogel reports that the Birmingham Museum of Art has a secured a loan of Leonardo da Vinci drawings from the Biblioteca Reale in Turin, Italy, including a sketch of an angel the Renaissance master did in preparation for his first version of Madonna of the Rocks and Codex on the Flight of Birds, a notebook holding Leonardo's thoughts on how to replicate the movement of these winged creatures in a machine. (The drawings go on view in September.)

Last night at Sotheby's glitzy charity auction, Angus Fairhurst's bronze sculpture of a donkey with a bird perched atop its shoulder fetched $35,200. (It's one of the works featured in Fairhurst's forthcoming show at Sadie Coles HQ in London.) The piece is reminiscent of the work of Alabamian artist Frank Fleming, whose phantasmagorical sculptures in bronze and textured "bisque" porcelain — walking catfish, penguins carrying walking sticks, and so-called goat men — has been described as a synthesis of Beatrix Potter and Stephen King. Most people in Birmingham know Fleming for his fountain in the Five Points neighborhood that features a "ram-man" telling a story to a group of animals circled around him. Two of his works — Desert Landscape and Southern Catfish Plate — are in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. Fleming is represented by Monty Stabler Galleries.

Alabama is also home to myriad other artists, each unique. Murray "Muff" Johnston, who Figure Painting profiled in September 2004 for Portico Birmingham, makes "art quilts," images of forests and mountains and bodies of water that emerge from bits of fabric stitched together with exquisite artistry. Lonnie Holley, affectionately known as "The Sandman," carves sandstone and creates sculptures with found objects. By now, the whole country has heard of the quilters of Gee's Bend, a group of women from tiny, rural Gee's Bend, Alabama (just outside of Selma) whose bold, even modernist take on this traditional craft has been the subject of exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

And lest you think all of the major collectors are living in New York, London, and Switzerland, let me tell you that one of ARTnews' top 200 collectors of 2007 — Jack Warner, who has a taste for "19th-century American and European art, especially Impressionism" — resides in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Thank you, everyone who has read Figure Painting. It's been an excellent venture into the "opaque and rarefied" art world, which is sometimes about truth and beauty, sometimes about money, and always good for a story.

Angus Fairhurst, Untitled, Courtesy Angus Fairhurst and Sadie Coles HQ, London

Frank Fleming

Frank Fleming

Watch Lonnie Holley talk about his work: