Gail Eastland doesn’t paint what she sees with her eyes. Instead she paints through affection, dreams and memory.
A Delta girl through and through, Eastland’s subjects reflect the life she has lived — populated with multiple children and grandchildren and colored by the lore of the place she loves.
Born in Greenwood and a 1969 graduate of Greenwood High School, Eastland lived in Greenville for a time as a child; raised her children at Adair Plantation in Doddsville until the family home burned to the ground in 1997; spent a good deal of time in Washington, D.C., when her husband, Greenwood attorney Hiram Eastland Jr., worked for the U.S. Department of Justice; and is happily settled now in a comfortable old home in North Greenwood.
Eastland, a University of Mississippi graduate with a degree in education, is a former teacher who worked with local children wherever she lived, teaching them to paint and make things as well as how to get along better in school. She has been painting for some 30 years and sells her work at boutiques in Louisiana and Florida, through custom orders and at occasional art fairs. Most recently, Eastland set up shop at the ArtPlace Mississippi Holiday Market in downtown Greenwood.
On a wintry afternoon just before Christmas, Eastland’s home was decked with not just one, but two large Christmas trees — one hers and the other her husband’s, each reflecting a distinct personality and decorating style.
Gail Eastland’s tree was laden with dolls, teddy bears and Ole Miss memorabilia. On a nearby table, an assortment of her painting and mixed media work brightened the warmly cluttered space in the back of the house.
She paints in a small room off the large family room, seated in a low chair covered with burlap bags.
“These two have been very popular,” she said, pointing to two brightly colored acrylic paintings on canvas board, one labeled “Baby Bottles,” the other “Her Last Doll.”
The figures in the works are at once comical and evocative. In “Her Last Doll,” an oversized female figure, primitively rendered, lingers somewhere between childhood and womanhood, hanging onto the arm of a dangling baby doll. “Baby Bottles” depicts four women in motion, each cradling a baby in one arm and swinging a large, nippled baby bottle in the other.
Both paintings are autobiographical but universal, representing unique moments in the artist’s life to which many women can relate.
Eastland keeps a stash of baby dolls in the small side room where she paints. She raised four children and now spends much of her time shuttling back and forth among their homes, tending to the grandchildren.
Another series, lushly textured portraits of mythical kings and queens, could hail from a Mardi Gras tradition, but spring entirely from Eastland’s imagination.
“The idea came from somebody saying, ‘Oh, you’re the queen of this or that, the queen of everything,’” she said. These are kings and queens of the ordinary, not royalty, but rulers of their own inner lives.
Eastland has begun working in a new medium in recent years, mounting antique clothing, treated with a permanent stiffening agent and shaped into a two-dimensional form, on painted canvases. On display are several delicate baby dresses, pure and white, their hand-stitched hems and tucks still visible, laid out on stark black backgrounds.
The result is at once comforting and unexpected – something soft turned stiff, something old preserved as if it were just slipped off the soft skin of the baby who was wearing it.
Eastland and her friend, Jane Boykin, came up with the idea for the mixed-media pieces, and Eastland said they are selling well through custom orders and at a number of boutiques.
“We’ve done this with old silk, like Marilyn Monroe-era dressing gowns. They work wonderfully,” Eastland said.
The canvases on which those items are mounted can be as tall as a door. Eastland and Boykin have preserved wedding gowns in the medium, but baby dresses are a more manageable and marketable form for this labor intensive process.
A large painting on the wall of Eastland’s family room depicts a Delta churchyard scene in thick, impressionistic strokes.
Worshipers throw their arms up to the heavens, blending into the landscape at the edge of a swamp, a ghostly church in the background.
A California man saw a piece of hers, a baptism scene in the Delta, and commissioned 25 of them to give away to friends, Eastland said.
“It came from a memory of a scene I saw many times over the years. When we lived at Adair and were going over to Indianola on Sundays, we passed a creek bed where there was often a baptism going on.”
Those memories, linked to a unique style and imagination, have formed a Delta artist who had to learn in her own way and now creates in her own unique fashion.
“When I was little, they didn’t know what was wrong with me,” Eastland said. “I was dyslexic, but they didn’t have a diagnosis for that back then.
“I had to train myself to turn everything around, and I mastered that.”
Eastland’s 7-year-old grandson in Florida is non-verbal and autistic, and she donates the proceeds from her work to the small school he attends where he can get the help he needs.
Eastland glances around the bedecked room, filled with Christmas treasures, a baby buggy overflowing with wrapped gifts, and a large, shedding Christmas tree.
“I can’t wait for the new year, to de-decorate the house and just paint.”
Contact Kathryn Eastburn at 581-7235 or keastburn@gwcommonwealth.com.
