WATER VALLEY, Miss. — The question nettled Megan Kingery every time she flipped through the old family photo album: “Who is this nerdy guy with the glasses?”
And her mother would reply: “He was the best looking guy in school.”
The young man was “Steve,” her mother’s high school boyfriend and 1967 prom date. Steve faded into the old snapshots, and his best girl — Mary Marbury — married someone else and started a family. When Megan was 14 years old, Mary died. For some reason, Megan couldn’t get the nerdy guy with glasses out of her mind.
After her mom’s death, she went and found him. And then she painted him, combining an oil portrait of a young man lounging in the grass with a laminated love letter he’d written her mother (“typical high school gab”) and a grid of snapshots from a Bethalto, Ill., prom held during the Summer of Love, although Steve looks more like Buddy Holly and Mary like Marlo Thomas than a couple of hippies.
Here, in an old railroad town off of Highway 7, about 20 miles south of Bill Faulkner’s Oxford and the site of an annual watermelon festival, Megan hung “Steve” at a showing of local artists held in a restored, early 20th-century boarding house.
The exhibit was organized by Pati D’Amico and her husband Bill Warren, visual artists who left their home and gallery in New Orleans for this northern Mississippi town after Hurricane Katrina broke their hearts — but not their spirits — and factored in the death of a few of their friends.
D’Amico, Warren and others exhibited work in the show, but there was something about Kingery’s innocent, almost stick-like and pastel depictions of Steve and a second canvas of an older woman that created excitement.
Now 31, with a home in Water Valley — population 3,600 — where good old houses are affordable compared to the Ole Miss college town of Oxford, Kingery says she looks just like her mother did once upon a time.
“I started off by writing him a letter, I didn’t think I’d end up painting him,” said Kingery. “When I finally met him, he told me how great my mother was and he started tearing up . . .”
Once she began “Steve,” Kingery thought of the work constantly while somehow being soothed — she was finally doing something with an image that had lived in her imagination for so long.
“You go to bed thinking about it and you wake up thinking about it,” she said, echoing the experience of many artists. “You can’t shake it.”
“Steve” was the only piece Kingery hung in the exhibit that was not for sale.
Rafael Alvarez can be reached at [email protected].
