2 stories, 1 language

Myers, Blanchard to present ‘Morphogenesis’ at TASI

Anna Myers and Scarlett Blanchard could be twins. Not because they look anything alike — Myers is dressed head to toe in black save for the ornate silver jewelry, Blanchard is a jeans and T-shirt country girl — but in the way that they communicate with each other.

“We’ve always communicated about (art),” Myers says. “She’s the only one I’ll send pictures of my art to, and she will show me what she’s working on. Out of everyone we went to college with, she’s the only one I’ve kept up with — that must count for something. She must like me a little bit.”

“Oh, I love you,” Blanchard quickly says, and the pair fall about laughing. “We’ve fed off each other, especially with the show. Like, nothing will want to come out and she’s pushing me. When you see our stuff, well, you’ll see the similarities, but my stuff is totally different.”

“Telling the same story in two different languages,” Myers interjects.

The pair will tell their artistic story in “Morphogenesis” at The Art Studio, Inc., 720 Franklin St. in downtown Beaumont, beginning with a free reception Oct. 6 and running through Oct. 26.

“Morphogenesis is a biological process, and that’s really the one thing we have in common is that biological-type organisms,” Myers says. “Something had come across that maybe we would do something scientific because that’s what you have with organisms, your genus and species and all that. So it just ended up — thesaurus — with that really nice word.”

The pair are sitting in the printmaking lab at Lamar University, from which the pair had graduated with degrees in printmaking, Myers in 2009 and Blanchard in 2010.

“We met in here, and it just sort of happened,” Blanchard says. “I don’t know how we became friends.”

“Organically,” Myers interjects. “We spent a lot of hours huffing fumes. It was totally toxic in here. We’d, like, leave, still high, in the dawn hours — it was awful.”

The pair’s attention turns to the ventilation now, which meets with their approval. They clearly have a fondness for their time in the room as they wander down memory lane trying to figure out the different teachers they had at different times.

“I think (college) exposed our psychotic-ness to detailed things,” Blanchard says. “Printmaking just pushed that further. Printmaking is such a (“Tedious,” Myers interjects) tedious, yeah, procedure so we bonded over that.”

“You have to be like a machine, which works for me,” Myers says. “I listen to industrial music so it’s like machine, machine, machine. It was great in the middle of the night when there was no one here.”

Myers is the more outgoing of the two, a non-stop, machine-like banter of witty, self-effacing comments, while Blanchard laughs often yet seems uncomfortable with the attention.  Yet Myers says that in class, Blanchard was the one who could clearly express her ideas.

“Scarlett is a tough customer,” Myers said. “I never knew what to say. I still don’t really know — I make art.”

Myers exaggerates her Southern accent as she draws out the word “aaarrrt.”

Myers says spending so much time in the lab had its drawbacks.

“We would always have to clean up because we were always the last ones to leave,” she says. “I made a sign that said, ‘Clean up your mess.’ It stayed up for a long time. It made me so mad because it was always us.”

Once they left school, the pair were forced to abandon printmaking for the want of facilities. Blanchard says she looked into getting a press, but they are too expensive. With printmaking no longer an option, the pair returned to drawing — charcoal and pastel for Myers; graphite, pen and ink and watercolor for Blanchard.

Myers, who is married with a teenage son, creates a fantasy world full of tentacle creatures inspired by H.P. Lovecraft stories that offers an escape from day-to-day reality.

“I hate to say because I love my life, and I love the people I have in my life, but I had to settle down early,” she says. “I have a career. It has retirement, if I can make it that long.

“I live the normal life — as a weirdo — but I live the normal life. I just have a yearning for something more, something weird something paranormal. Nothing weird or paranormal ever happens to me, and I hear about these people who have these out-of-body experiences, and I’m like, ‘That never happens to me! I want my own weirdness.’”

So Myers says she is building a world of her own.

“My dimension,” she said, excitedly. “I’m going to have so many of these hoarded images and sculptures, and I’m going to have them in a room, and I’m going to pretend I’m in an H.P. Lovecraft story and I’m going into a different dimension and it’s fabulous.

“And I want to share it with others.”

Blanchard, who lives in Nome where she is a horse trainer, says she shares Myers’ idea of an alternate world.

“I’ve always drawn, but what probably got me more into it was when my parents divorced,” Blanchard says. “I’m a country kid, and we got shoved into an apartment,  and it was, ‘What are you gonna do with all this energy?’ My outlet was to draw, and it’s just carried on from that.”

Blanchard says her art features a lot of animals and plants, but also imagery of skulls and death. Her drawings are small and intricate with exquisite detail, mostly black and white, but some in color.

“In my stuff there’s drawings that are out there,” Blanchard says. “Tall sticker bushes that are so intricate. Most of my stuff is thorns.”

“And I love pretty flowers,” Myers laughs.

“And dead stuff,” Blanchard says. “In college that’s what I was known for. If I see something on the side of the road, I’m picking it up.”

Aside from sharing a love of obsessive details, Blanchard and Myers feed each other’s creativity, they say.

As well as drawings, Myers will include some soft sculptures in her collection (she placed third at this spring’s TASIMJAE exhibition with her first sculpture). The connection between drawing and sculpture is obvious.

“It’s lines,” she says. “I start with wire, I ‘draw’ the structure. It’s the same (as drawing) because I don’t start with recognizable imagery — it’s either right or wrong, If it’s right I go with it. If it’s wrong, I don’t.”

Myers said the urge to sculpt just came on her.

“I think I was texting you,” she says to Blanchard, “and I said, ‘I want to do a 3-dimensional piece, it’s gnawing inside of me — I just have to do it.’”

Myers is self-effacing when she talks about her drawings.

“Nobody likes my drawings, nobody likes anything else I do — and the fact that placed (in TASIMJAE), I was like ‘Whaat?’ like the universe was telling me, ‘Do more of these stupid, weird things,” she says.

Blanchard says that making art, especially with such tight details, gives her something to fixate on.

“I can’t sit still,” she said. “I can’t watch TV. I don’t care to converse. I don’t go hang out with friends — I don’t do anything else.”

Myers said that making the soft sculpture is even more tedious than printmaking.

“I make everything by hand, and it’s just going over it and over it and over it — there’s layers,” she said. “I’m using synthetic fabric, and it’s not forgiving. My fingers are bleeding and they hurt — I got friggin’ man hands. It’s like penance; you just keep jabbing yourself over and over again.”

Surprisingly, Blanchard listens to much of the same music as Myers, something that seems at odds with her appearance.

“Deep down I would like to look like her, but I’m not that fashionable,” Blanchard says. “As far as fashion goes, I’m like, ‘Don’t look at me.’ Maybe she can pick me something out for the opening.”

Both women have been working hard and say that they have put their lives on hold while they are work on the show. But it’s just what they do.

They have art to make and stories to tell — stories of worlds that revolve around a particularly special friendship.

Story by Andy Coughlan, ISSUE editor