About Me
The Practice of Finding Community
A profile on Abe Devereaux: Artistic Evolution and Approaches to Artifact Making
Biography
"…to make the world a more human dwelling place."
— James Baldwin, "The Creative Process"
My uncle, Paul L. Garner, was a painter out of Chicago's South Side. At a Hyde Park show, someone misspelled his name on the placard: Garnez. He thought it was funny. Every canvas he made still carried his real name, but the misprint stayed with the family, and it stayed with me. I think about it often. Sometimes the misprint is the truth.
Paul was an impressionist, and he gave me my first lessons: how to mix a color, how to hold a brush, how to look at a thing long enough to see it. For years afterward I worked as a realist. I studied Edward Hopper, Edgar Degas and Hughie Lee-Smith, painters who could make an empty street or a quiet room carry the weight of a life. Over time I moved toward light and toward expression. Henry Ossawa Tanner's light feels reverent. Théodore Géricault found dignity in everyone he painted. Willem de Kooning, Francis Bacon and Amedeo Modigliani showed me how far a figure can bend and still be true. Today I am a figurative expressionist with an impressionist's eye for light.
I came to painting sideways and late, by a route I wasn't supposed to take. For decades, I served in other ways: in corporate America, the U.S. Navy and the Army, and federal service. I spent years fluent in a language that was never quite mine. I carry
a self into certain rooms: careful, measured, legible in all the ways that keep the lights on. Abe Devereaux is not that self. This is where I get to be free.
My work lives in corners, kitchens, the geometry of interior life. Each painting begins without a subject. I lay down a vivid, unplanned ground and study it, sometimes for hours, until a shoulder, a turned head, or a pair of eyes comes forward. I paint around what I find. Paintings change direction as I go. A passage fails, the meaning shifts, and I have learned to trust that. I look at the canvas in a mirror, or turn it upside down, to see it the way a stranger would. The anatomy bends when the feeling asks for it. I am not after clarity. I am after truth, which is something else entirely. When I catch myself fussing over small things, the painting is done.
I don't dictate what a painting means; every viewer brings their own life to it. But I know why I make them. I want to show that a person is always more than what we first see. The young do not learn who they are from what we tell them. They learn it from what we are brave enough to show them.
I am still finding my community. I am still learning the language of what I actually believe, and still doing the work I promised my uncle I would before he left, before I fully understood what the promise cost.
If you are here, you may be part of what I'm looking for.
Recognition
Coming Soon…
Awards
MFA, Howard University (2027)
MA, University of Oklahoma
MA, George Mason University
BA, University of the District of Columbia