Cut out for artistry: Resident's exhibit will explore idea of growth

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Crystal Wagner gave herself permission to create art outside the restrictions of art-school rules. So her large three-dimensional sculptures incorporate not only her drawings and printworks but also foam core and lollipop sticks.

The wall pieces are often large, from 29-by-41-inch forms to a 10-by-18-foot "Metamorphosis." One, a 10-by-6-foot work titled "Conversion," was bought by the Knoxville Museum of Art from her University of Tennessee master's show last year and hangs in the museum's entrance.

Amid the curves of these forms can be seen an element, perhaps an inspiration, from this painter/sculptor/printmaker's past. In some ways, in their fluid lines and styles, the pieces relate to her early childhood drawings of imaginary birds.

Now 26, married, pregnant and with a University of Tennessee master's degree in fine art, Wagner is the first recipient of the Betsy Worden Memorial Artist Residency. The six-month Arts & Culture Alliance program gives Wagner an Emporium Center studio and place to display her work. Contributions from Worden's widower, Stuart Worden, offer the artist $200 a month for materials.

As part of the program, Wagner's month-long solo exhibit "The Enigma of Growth" opens at the Emporium March 6. She's uncertain how many pieces she'll make but knows they will "explore the idea of growth."

Two days after her show opens, Wagner's first child, a daughter to be named Gwynivere Odessa Herne, is due. The woman with a "wildly optimistic" nature and the nickname of "Sunshine Girl" seems stress-free at such a timetable.

As an artist, Wagner says she has reached a place where "my work is now more a reflection of who I am as a person."

"I was hindered by my art education for years, by all the rules. It wasn't until I got to (UT ) graduate school that I had the permission to make art as I wanted."

Her drawings and multi-layered forms give the appearance of free-flowing exotic flowers even as they appear as modernist abstracts. She incorporates acrylic paint, drawings and intaglio etchings with metal grommets, cut paper, graphite, craft foam core, craft sticks, quilting pins and mylar. Sometimes smaller pieces jump to the side or flow to the ground from a larger artwork. Her work ranges in price from $600 to $4,000.

Each starts simply.

"It starts with a line; it all goes back to drawing," she says. "I let the line dictate. I want the line to tell me what to do. I follow the flow; you just go with it."

Art has been part of Wagner's life since she picked up a pencil "as a tiny, tiny little girl" and drew fanciful birds. In the first or second grade a teacher told Mark and Emma Wagner that their daughter was "going to be an artist."

Mark Wagner built his daughter a bedroom with a tile floor and adjustable easel across one wall. As a teen, she painted a mural that included "skateboarding aliens" on the loft ceiling of another bedroom.

After high school, where her honors included being "most artistic" and "most likely to succeed," Wagner studied art at Keystone College in La Plume, Pa. There she "became obsessed with clay," adding that medium to her work. With an associate of fine art degree from Keystone, Wagner went to the Atlanta College of Fine Art. There she learned printmaking and graduated in 2004.

At Keystone she met husband Joshua Herne; he's currently finishing an American studies degree at UT. Together since 2000, the couple "have been on a constant adventure for nine years," she says.

Art has taken her across the United States and abroad. She spent four months drawing in the back country of Yellowstone National Park as a college student and a month in a resident artist program in Poland in 2006.

Visual art isn't Wagner's only interest. While she and her husband play guitar and write music for enjoyment, she's also an author. She's self-published the science-fiction "Crimson Sky." And this artist-author is also passionate about education.

Having taught art appreciation at Roane State Community College and various art courses at UT as a graduate student, Wagner wants to teach art perhaps as much as she wants to create it. She is applying for jobs "anywhere" but her "ultimate, 10-year goal" is to teach and work in or around New York.

"I am very introspective in my art; I get so caught up in it. You are in your own universe. With teaching, you can share that universe and explore so much with others. People have different interests and you can learn from that."

"I want to teach. I can't see myself totally absorbed in the art world without sharing it with others."

© 2009, Knoxville News Sentinel Co.
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