MARBURY, Md. — On July 13, the Mattawoman Creek Art Center (MCAC) held a reception to inaugurate shows featuring work by two local artists. Painter Pam Callen’s side of the gallery hosts a collection titled A Retrospective, while author and illustrator Jay Anderson’s side is titled Cartoon World: Pirates, Prisoners, & Plowboys.
Callen and Anderson retired from careers as a foreign service officer and an art teacher, respectively, but both continue to teach art and create new pieces.
“I’m retired, so I can do whatever I please, and what I please to do is art,” Callen said. “And I do like teaching, too.”
“I’m a pottery instructor at Arts Lab in Tracy’s Landing, but much like Pam I’m basically retired,” Anderson said.
Both artists also spent years abroad and find inspiration in the human condition, they said. This humanity is a common thread in Callen’s “Mostar” and Anderson’s “Dumas 1934 County Fair,” the pieces displayed on the MCAC’s brochure for the show.
“Really the common theme for me is the human condition and the need to sort of cooperate with each other better than we sometimes do in regard to cultures, races, religions, that sort of thing,” Callen said. “And that’s why you see on the postcard that painting of the Mostar Bridge.”
The Mostar Bridge, also known as Stari Most, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The original bridge was commissioned by Suleiman the Magnificent of the Ottoman Empire and opened in 1566. In 1993, during the Croat-Bosniak War, the bridge was destroyed to sever military supply lines over the river Neretva. In 2004, UNESCO inaugurated the reconstructed bridge.
“I was there in 2009,” Callen said, “and I had an opportunity to take a photograph upon which that painting is made. But the thing about that is it indicates if we put our minds to it, we can try to understand each other a little better than we do. And we don’t necessarily have to accept everything about each other, but we do have to work together.”
Anderson’s “Dumas 1934 County Fair” was similarly inspired by travel, though the scene it depicts is fictional. During a job delivering horses to breeders in Oklahoma, Anderson stopped at a diner in Dumas, Texas.
“I look up as I pay at the waitress station and there’s a tornado coming down Main Street in the photo of Dumas, and that was one of many they’ve had come down Main Street,” Anderson said. “I never forgot it. For the last 45 or 50 years I’ve been using it as a make-believe place to house my characters, between that and Leavenworth, Kansas, depending on what they do for a living.”
“This piece here is simply celebration by people who have nothing to celebrate,” he said. “It’s joyous.”
“That’s so interesting that you say that,” Callen said, “because in Haiti, on Christmas Day, some of the kids—what they got was a balloon—and they were happy. When there was a rainstorm in Niamey, Niger, when I was there, the kids would get out and jump in the water, and they were happy. They don’t need a lot. If their parents love them and they get the minimal amount to eat and drink and maybe go to school, they’re happy. As you say, celebrating nothing, but they’re just being together and being happy. For no particular reason.”
Among Callen’s Retrospective is an abstract landscape that depicts a Haitian village that struck her with its color and vibrancy.
“I was there for three years in the early 2000s,” Callen said. “I used to drive by this village, which is really a ramshackle slum, but they painted them different colors. So I wanted to represent that on this abstract. I just prayed that they’d get out of there, because I knew we were on a fault line, before there was a major earthquake. As you know, that earthquake happened, but they were fine. It was the downtown area where there was the presidential palace, and unfortunately some beautiful old churches and things like that were destroyed. And of course a lot of people lost their homes.”
Callen also included a trio of landscapes that depict the Sotterley Plantation in Hollywood, Maryland.
“One is the manor house, one is the slave dwelling and on top of both of those is the fields,” she said. “And both the people in the manor house and the people in the slave dwelling depended on what they could reap from those fields, animals and tobacco and whatever else they had in order to survive, in both cases. And I also think it’s important that we remember Maryland has this history.”
In Anderson’s Cartoon World, the character illustrations are divided into three subgenres.
“The way this is divided up, here is Prisoners, my Leavenworth Lifers Ball Club,” Anderson said. “The Pirates on another wall and then my Plowboys.”
Some of Anderson’s larger pieces at MCAC are from his “Leavenworth Lifers Baseball” series, which tells the tale of a team of incarcerated players. In a similar setting are the “Plowboys,” dispossessed farmers who are trying to survive the Great Depression. The “Pirates” were inspired by the real history of piracy in the Chesapeake Bay and around the world. Anderson said that his written work acts as the springboard for his illustration and cartoon work. He’s had little engagement from readers, but he doesn’t let that get him down.
“I just do it for the fun of it. If you sweat the business of it, all the fun would be gone. I had a lot of fun doing this stuff, and I’m really thrilled to have a chance to be in a gallery this big where I put this stuff up.”
Art lovers can see Anderson and Callen’s work at the Mattawoman Creek Art Center in Smallwood State Park in Charles County. MCAC is open Friday to Sunday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. There’s a gate fee for park visitors, but this fee is waived for Art Center visitors. You can also see more from Anderson and Callen at their websites:
Anderson: https://jayandersonphd.com
Callen: https://www.pamelacallenart.com/index.htm
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