ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT

Jackie Pepper in concert.

Fabled crooner Jackie Pepper
sets up rare holiday run at Ray's

By STERRY BUTCHER

MARFA – Jackie Pepper sat at a corner table at Jett’s and pensively stirred his drink. Without his trademark black-framed glasses, the entertainer and lounge singer was unobtrusive and bore an uncanny resemblance to Marfa resident Vance Knowles. No furtive looks of recognition were thrown his way from fellow diners. No one approached for autographs. It was a few moments of quiet, hard-won anonymity for Pepper, who will appear for two nearly sold-out shows in Marfa on December 28 and 29 at Ray’s.

“I’m going to give it my all,” he said of the upcoming gigs. “I just expect to get a little back, and I’m told this is the place to do it.”

These are benefit concerts. The Jackie Pepper Foundation will distribute the nights’ proceeds to the Marfa Community Health Clinic.

The chapters of Pepper’s life are like that of a well-thumbed pulp novel. Born the illegitimate son of country great Earl Pepper, Jackie was first in the public eye as the child spokesman for a tobacco firm. Later came a near-fatal motorcycle accident in Belize, his infamous gaffe during a Jerry Lewis telethon, and the purchase of a floating casino near Lake Charles. The tabloid stories about plastic surgery and rehab he bypasses with a dismissive wave. For him, now, it’s all about the show and the music that sustains him.

“I heard from my friend Boyd Elder that this is the next Branson, and I don’t want to miss out,” he said. “I’m on my way to Port Lavaca, where my family is from. I rarely leave the casino in Lake Charles. I headline there seven nights a week, so this is a rare thing.”

His regular band had to stay behind – “they can’t leave the state of Louisiana,” Pepper explained – but he’s recruited local musicians for the Marfa performances, including Adam Bork, David Beebe, Ross Cashiola, and out-of-towners Jim Hinkle on piano and Sam Wagster on pedal steel. His musical influences range from Sinatra to Kenny Rogers, Conway Twitty, and Neil Diamond. What Jackie knows, he knows. He’s a master of the interpretative, karaoke re-styling of other people’s music.

“I take other people’s work and I make it my own,” he said simply.

Every Jackie Pepper show is different. Expect a little glamour, a little sophistication, and a dose of holiday cheer. Expect surprise. 

“People will not see the same show twice,” said Pepper. “I try to give the people what they want and then some more and some more after that.”

After long days in rehearsal and dancer auditions, Pepper looks world weary, his face careworn. He’s taken knocks. He’s been called a joke and some have rightly wondered at the real level of commitment Pepper has to his craft. His voice is a delicate instrument, and the holiday shows are appropriately non-smoking.

He’s a private man in a public life, and as the restaurant began to fill, Pepper glanced at his watch, took a phone call, and was evasive about his dinner date. He appeared distracted, his inner focus riveted on the upcoming concerts.

“I’ll be doing originals, holiday numbers, costume changes, and a salute to old Marfa, new Marfa and those who came in between,” he said just before he exited. He paused, and reflected on his past.  “When I started out, I had a real showbiz mom and for years I rejected it. At some point I realized – why keep this from people? When you have that gift, share it. And the spotlight shines nowhere brighter than in Marfa.”

Golliver's drawings included in San Francisco show, catalogue 

SAN FRANCISCO, Ca. – The work of Gary Oliver, a political cartoonist and artist from Marfa, was included in “Insights 2007,” an exhibition of art by artists who are blind or visually impaired.

A catalogue of the exhibition has also been published. The show concluded on December 7.

Three of Oliver’s drawings were chosen for the show, which featured artists from across the country.

One of the works was a poster for a musical benefit; another was a drawing of an octopus first published in a video magazine; and the third was a panel from an epic, unpublished travelogue of Oliver’s multi-year trek through South America.

“I have been legally blind since birth due to nystagmus and am also red/green color blind,” Oliver wrote for the show’s catalogue. “In public school I used binoculars to see the blackboard. I have to keep my face close to the well-lighted drawing board. I do black and white drawings in a cartoon style that, like my vision, isn’t big on detail. I’ve always liked cartoons – I started drawing them at five or six years old.”

Oliver’s cartoons have been seen in The Big Bend Sentinel since 1983.

Jurors for the Insights 2007 exhibition were Jack Fischer, director of the Jack Fischer Gallery; Gay Outlaw, a practicing artist; and Melissa Rinne, the assistant curator of Japanese art in the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.

MARFA - The Chinati Foundation will host an opening and reception for artist in residence Claudia Hinsch next Thursday, December 27, from 6-8pm at the Locker Plant on East Oak Street.

Please come by and see the show.

Hinsch is an artist from Germany who makes sculptures, collages, and drawings. Hinsch is interested in the idea of landscape, and how our understanding of it has changed over time. Her work modestly and playfully asks questions about “nature”—what we think is nature, what we think is not. Her collages and assemblages sometimes feature images of landscapes clipped from magazines or brochures combined with other, “unnatural” elements: a glob or swath of brightly-colored paint, a silver-leafed branch.

In her approach to sculpture, Hinsch isolates a particular landscape feature—branch, puddle, thicket, shrub—and then tries to recreate it in the studio using commercial materials such as plaster, house paint, fiberboard, and jute. The resulting forms are teasingly paradoxical: blunt but graceful, clumsy yet delicate. The works nimbly elide or skip back and forth between such traditional dualisms. Are the sculptures nature, or do they just represent it? Is nature out there or is it in here, and where do you draw the line? (For her exhibitions the artist sometimes paints such a line on the wall, perhaps furnishing a clue.) Hinsch’s works are generally constructed from a few spare elements: they are simply and elegantly configured. They quietly inhabit the room. But they have their impish side too, with some impish questions to ask. Does Hinsch’s work (or any work) portray nature, or make it? Realize it, or fake it? Sometimes, the work seems to suggest, we’re maybe too quick to know the difference.

Hinsch was born in Ahrensburg, Germany, in 1966. She studied fine arts at the HFK Bremen and the Kunstakadamie Düsseldorf. She has received a scholarship from the Kulturstiftung Stormarn (2004) and an award from the Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven, which led to a solo exhibition at that venue in 2006. Hinsch has participated in many group shows in Germany and has had solo shows at Center gallery in Berlin and the Neues Museum Weserburg in Bremen. She lives in Hamburg with her family.