Timna Lyons
(Editor's note: one of LOGO's aims is to keep up with department alumni. This piece, by Timna Lyons, who visited the Dpeartment as an exchange student from Bristol University, is part of that effort. Maggie McEleney was an undergraduate student in the Philosophy Department from 1982 to 1985. She now has her own art gallery, Gallery Gorgon , in New Orleans.)
Naturally when I was assigned the story, I attempted to wrangle a trip down south to meet Maggie McEleney in person at her New Orleans studio. However, times being hard, and the department not being inclined to buy me a plane ticket, a phone call had to suffice. A gentle voice answered, with what sounded to my foreign ears to be a slight southern drawl (but then to my foreign ears it seems everyone in this country drawls). As we chat I form a picture of a woman sufficiently incongruous to seem sane; who would rather wear a Neanderthal style bearskin than a product of '80's fashion. She considers her artistic influences to include, at each extreme, Van Gogh and Dr. Seuss. She claims to be in the process of selling her soul, despite having completed the best part of a philosophy degree.
Reflecting on the long-term influence of this philosophical training on her life and art, she concludes simply that "the predisposition to be a philosopher and a painter come from the same place. I don't really remember what I studied now, to be honest some French existentialists, Heidegger was pretty right on. I read some Nietzsche, but I'm still trying to figure that one out." Maggie studied philosophy at UM until she'd had enough of it. "I look at school as a tool to get me somewhere else,' she says. "The way my life has turned out it seems that painting and art is always what I've had to fall back on, I never had to make a decision about what I wanted to do. I have a strong pull and natural stubbornness to do what I wanted and to make it work at any cost." During her only semester living on campus, she went through three roommates in a month. Why? "I'll just say I'm not that easy to live with, and leave it at that."
Being of adventurous spirit, she traveled some when she finished in Maryland. Initially, she found a job through a friend of a friend on a goat farm in Rhode Island. "I like being around animals and I wasn't doing anything else at the time that was keeping me anywhere, so I said 'what the heck.' It's great having a lot of open space around me. It was a goat dairy operation; I milked goats, made cheese It was really fun." But we all know working on farms is more work than it is play, and after a year she threw in the proverbial towel and hit the metaphorical road. She got to New Orleans via Canada and Mexico, to name but a few, and has been living there for thirteen years. She stayed because it felt like a good place to call home, though she describes it as "a city full of drunks." Her gallery has been open for two years and she is also currently working on various advertising projects; illustrating catalogues, and creating her first billboard, about which she has "mixed feelings. I feel a bit like I'm selling my soul to Satan, so I'm experiencing some feelings of guilt. But not enough, obviously, to prevent me."
"I spend my time in the studio and working for my other clients. I have no children that I know of. ['I guess you'd be pretty likely to know,' I said. "Yes," she replied. "I was joking."] I would love to study some more philosophy again, but I haven't the time," she told me.
Asked what was the funniest thing anyone had said to her she replied "A guy came up to me in a bar once and said 'Do you wanna see something really weird?' That was a pick-up line. It was pretty funny. I don't even know what he had to show me." Asked what was the nicest thing anyone had said to her, she hedged the question, "well the nicest thing I ever did was hold a new born baby not even a day old." Her musical taste extends to "anything except country." But where was all this trivial life information getting me? Sure, I could throw it in to pad out the article, but here I was talking to a philosophizing artist and I wanted insight, answers, the Truth. Then it came to me that this was the perfect opportunity to clear up that age-old question: What Is Art? "I think art is something that people have a tendency not to throw away for a really long time, for whatever reason - just because they like it."
You can see Maggie McEleney's art online at www.gallerygorgon.com.
For another work, not found at the gallery site, click HERE
