Post by JerseyGirl on Mar 24, 2021 10:56:40 GMT -5
Marshall Pyle: coloring outside the lines
By Carol Motsinger Feb 20,2014
To make sense of this world, Marshall Pyle created his own.
The all-consuming creative discovered the planet ThrAwz WoBl in his overdrive mind back in high school. This ancient, massive world is home to robot unicorns, warmed by a range of rainbow-colored orbiting suns.
His imagery travels are a means of escape, said Pyle, who lives in a Candler home populated by psychedelic paintings, piles of sketch books and myriad musical instruments.
“There is this idea of there being more to everything,” he said. “I think it’s that cartoon mind I have. It’s an escape. ... Fantasy just provides an escape, and that feels comfortable. I try to bring out these ideas in my music and my art.”
Like other creatives who reside in the fringe of Asheville’s art scene, Pyle, who is 36 (“in human years,” he said), has pursued personal expression through everything — from greeting cards to a now-defunct Asheville URTV show. Still, he can’t escape the need to create. That’s because it’s internal. It’s his blood.
The son of Artimus Pyle, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame drummer for Lynyrd Skynyrd, “music and art is in our blood,” he said. Art is “how we try to make sense of this wackadoo world.”
After years of otherwordly operations, Pyle aims to make 2014 the year he gets his work out in Asheville in a big way, he said. “It’s not just going to be a conversation,” he said. His number one goal? Releasing an eclectic, kooky double album.
“This is the year of making it work.”
And as he makes it work, Pyle becomes part of a very “out there” — both literally and figuratively — visionary community in Asheville that recognizes art in everything. Art is breakfast. The fallen limb they encounter on a hike. Art is a signature on a restaurant receipt.
These are colorful characters who walk the streets of downtown Asheville with faces painted, wearing wings or bejeweled top hats, looking like they just stepped out of a Tim Burton movie. The neighbor who intricately glued painted seeds in hypnotic swirls across the hoods of her Honda.
“Humans, we have to create,” Pyle said. “There are just creative people who have to create, no matter what it is. Some people can create one type of creation, and that’s good, too. My brain is broken in a way that I can’t do that. That might be why I have a tougher time getting my stuff out there.”
Whether they hang their work in galleries or not, these quintessential Asheville characters are always walking some sort of edge. Kitty Love, head of the Asheville Area Arts Council, said the city does have a creative community of intellectual problem-solvers who are “impoverished.”
“They are somewhat crippled to manifest their best because of pressure to conform to a system that people can’t always adapt to,” Love said.
They’re not always recognized or celebrated by the mainstream. It’s one of the reasons she created the Freaks of Asheville calendar and pageant during her days with Lexington Avenue Arts and Fun Festival, a one-time annual celebration of Asheville’s counterculture creativity (it’s likely to be back this fall).
“Our job in part is to continue to create a vessel for expression,” she said. “That’s what LAAFF was.”
At the same time, Love aims to help these creatives balance unbridled creativity with economy, art with the ability to balance their checkbooks. “I want to help build that bridge,” she said.
At the same time, Love aims to help these creatives balance unbridled creativity with economy, art with the ability to balance their checkbooks. “I want to help build that bridge,” she said.
Phil Cheney, a longtime Asheville painter and poster maker, recently opened a new space to help this group step out. Samovar Arts Lounge, a creative collaboration with whimsical folk artist Robert F. Seven, is a 4,000-square-foot space in Riverview Business Park in Woodfin. (The warehouse was once home to the Burlington Industries textile plant, where Cheney said the company made corduroy.)
Samovar is technically described as an art gallery and studio space, but its identity and uses are totally malleable in Cheney’s and Seven’s hands. There’s a DJ booth, a comfy art-filled lounge area. The space is bright and bold, with Cheney’s massive, thick-stroked paintings occupying corners. Faces peek out from a cupcake tray on another wall. Like in Pyle’s mind, anything and everything can be art at Samovar.
Cheney has worked in this space for 15 years, and like Pyle, he comes from a creative family. He’s a third-generation artist, his mother is a folk painter and “without whom, I wouldn’t be an artist.” He works side-by-side with his father, who is also known for his poster and sign works. He “pretty much keeps the lights on at Samovar.”
In addition to Cheney and Seven’s work, the space hosts works by other artists such as print artist Jason Krekel and recycled fashions by Rhetorical Factory. Cheney noted he wants to expand opportunities for artists at Samovar, and continue to host interactive, creative events for the community. Most recently, they hosted a packed reggae dance party, and Cheney said he hopes to produce similar monthly events.
“We have always wanted to have a stationary place for all of our stuff for making art, and also invited other people to make that work,” he said. “It’s a really amazing place for that.”
This self-described “24/7” creative views his compulsion to create as an honor — and a gift that requires some offerings in return. It’s an obligation, as well.
“You can make art with life,” he said. “You can make toast artistic. You can see art in everything. It seems sad that a lot of people miss it. That’s our jobs, as artists, to help people see it. And maybe turning a warehouse into an art space will help.”
That mission certainly comes with sacrifices. Ask Pyle. He worked as a screen printer for 10 years but then lost his job and has been unemployed for a good stretch. He took a job at Shoe Carnival for $7.25 an hour. “I’ve been able to squeak by and survive and stay creative. ... I didn’t go to college. I am just making it up. I am freelancing my life.”
In the past, he’s successfully sought community support for public projects. He secured online fundraising for a now-painted-over Yoda mural on Chicken Alley. (The “Star Wars” universe as well as other fantasy worlds like “The Lord of the Rings” inspire Pyle’s own intergalactic myths, languages and characters, he said.)
Andrea Desky, creative director at Link’d Video on Depot Street, has lived and worked with “a nice assortment of Granpappy art,” she said, for the last few months. (Pyle also goes by Granpappy.)
“If you know Marshall, his work is as colorful and eccentric as his personality,” she said, noting that their studio/gallery hosts a variety of iconic portraits in spray paint of artistic luminaries like Frank Zappa and Hunter S. Thompson.
“It’s really cool,” she said. “There’s a hip-hop motif with social and political commentary.
“For us to look at it, on a daily basis, it brightens our day,” she said. “It’s also a really great conversation starter” with clients and visitors who come into the gallery space open to the public.
Pyle worked closely with a generous friend to record the demo for his double album, which he aims to release in an installment this spring and another this summer.
The first volume is called “Modern Vintage: Cartoons, UFOs, Revolution and other Modern Fairy Tales.” The second: “Love Songs for the Doomed versus Ecstatic Futurists.”
The demo is dense — and intense. “There are a lot of layers to it,” he said. “I didn’t want to dumb it down. I didn’t want to make it perfect sounding. I wanted it to be loose and organic.”
Some tracks are directly influenced by his family, he said. “My brother and my dad are both drummers,” he explained. The family sometimes jams together in a big open room in the Candler house, which is piled high with drums, mics and other gear, along with signs that read: “Music is the language of the universe.” “We have all played together. I used what I have learned from those guys and put my own weirdo drums on it.”
Every song is “completely different,” he said. It’s a phonic reflection of his heaping influences and experiences. “High Water Marked Blues” is an eerie tribute to his gonzo journalism hero, Hunter S. Thompson. The track is stomping train hobo music, with a maniacal slide guitar. And there’s “Fall to Pieces,” built on lyrics he wrote at age 17.
He always has at least one notebook in his pocket or bag to scribble sketches or store the seeds for idea blossoms. He discovered the “Fall to Pieces” lyrics in a well-worn, frayed notebook he’d saved from his early years.
“Fall to Pieces” sounds like a totally different artist — from a totally different era — than the one who produced “High Water Marked Blues.” It’s got a 1980s school dance vibe to it, Pyle said, with electronic gimmicks punctuating the tune. “The beat is kind of cheesy,” he said. “They are little claps.”
The music is like an audio kaleidoscope, and with each turn of a track, the sound transforms into new colors and shapes. It’s also a reflection of his musical childhood. “We got turned onto Miles Davis, Frank Zappa, King Crimson,” said Pyle, who spent his childhood mostly in Bat Cave but also in South Carolina and Florida. He spent time in the mid-1990s in Asheville as well as New Mexico. He relocated to Florida for a spell in the 1990s before resettling in Asheville in 2001.
He also spent two years abroad, living in Israel. “People from all over the world came through; people from Sweden, France, Germany and Russia. That was my first taste of world music.”
The real world, the galaxy he can see from his backyard, continues to inspire him. He is expanding outward from his Candler home, he said. “There is a lot of room,” he said. “And I watch the stars a lot at night. I’ve been trying to find some space in that. I’ve been meditating for the change in the new year, toward all those energies in life.”
This space has also hosted a collision of worlds; questions about the internal and external. The real versus the imagined. The question about who says what is right or wrong. Who knows if robot unicorns could roam under the light of a purple sun?
“Who knows anything?” Pyle said. “I don’t know anything. A couple months ago, a friend and I were standing in the field (behind my house). And I saw something I have never seen before. I shined a flashlight at it. It looked like what would be a plane, but it totally changed course. And then it did exactly what I did with my flashlight back to us. For me, it wasn’t unique. It has happened before.”
www.citizen-times.com/story/entertainment/events/asheville-scene/2014/02/20/marshall-pyle-coloring-outside-the-lines-/5638915/