August 31, 2006

Artist Pierre Nagley has created many murals in Yellow Springs over the past 20 years. He is currently working on a Keith's Alley mural celebrating the village's children.

By Diane Chiddister

Pierre Nagley was down to his last dollar last week, but he wasn’t too worried. While he wondered where exactly his next meal would come from, he knew he would somehow survive. And rather than Nagley feeling poor, he felt rich with blessings, he said in a recent interview. After all, he still had his studio, his paints and his life’s work — creating beautiful murals in and for Yellow Springs.

Nagley’s studio is the whole village. Over the past 15 years he’s painted a fantastical view of downtown on the outside wall of Ha Ha Pizza, a dreamlike woman surrounded by stars on the Yellow Springs News building, and a vision of Eastern mysticism beneath the marquee of the Little Art Theatre. But his most frequent canvas is the back of buildings on Keith’s Alley, where on the rear wall of The Emporium he is finishing up his latest mural, a celebration of Yellow Springs children.

While he doesn’t usually end up with cash in his pocket, he gains tremendous satisfaction from painting the murals.

“If public art is all I ever do, I’ll be happy,” Nagley said.

But he doesn’t want to do public art just anywhere. Nagley wants to do his work here, in the town he has grown to love. He moved here 20 years ago as a young person after spending his childhood first in Cedarville, then a small town in Texas. Some of those growing up experiences battered his spirit, he said, and in Yellow Springs he feels he has healed.

“One thing this town has taught me is how to be a whole person,” he said. “I feel that people here treat each other better than they do in most places.”

Especially, Nagley said he has been touched by watching how Yellow Springs children grow up. He sees local parents valuing their children for who they are as individuals, not for who the parents want them to be. In his Emporium mural, he wants to honor the lively spirit of local children, which he believes is the result of such parenting.

“I wanted to capture what makes children happy,” he said, and those things include “being paid attention to and also their wildness, having the freedom and safety to be themselves.”

The mural features a dancing Sulayman Chappelle, an upside-down Romy Farrer, the smiling baby Camila Dallas-Gonzales, a chalk-drawing Zenya Miyazaki, and Bianca Stone listening to her little girl, Sumaya, along with other local children. It also includes items of childlike wonder, such as butterflies, rabbits, birds and a seahorse, drawings by children, and a ceramic angel watching over all.

Nagley believes that the creative process can be similar to moments of childlike wonder, and feels that he experiences such moments as he paints outside.

“It’s hard to describe what that moment is, some sort of memory,” he said. “Especially when I hear the sounds of the wind and the insects and people walking by, it takes me to another place, somewhere timeless.”

While he worked on his mural last week, several passersby stopped to talk about the painting. Nagley enjoys such interaction, he said; in fact, being able to converse with people while he works is one of the joys of making public art.

“This is everyone’s space,” he said of his mural. “I feel I’m making something for everyone. It’s free. You can walk up and touch it.”

He especially loves talking with villagers because they tend to be people rich in experience and travels to other parts of the world, Nagley said.

“I’ve grown because of the people of this town,” he said. “People here are from everywhere and have so many different histories. When I first came here, my world became huge. I started to see the world from so many people’s perspectives and it made me know how much I didn’t know.”.

A self-taught artist, Nagley learned his craft from practicing all the time, he said, and also from reading biographies of artists. The late Anna Gregor, herself a local artist, was one of the first people to encourage him as a painter, he said. Now, he makes his living doing creative work for local businesses and nonprofits, including set designs for the YS Kids Playhouse.

His commission for that project supported him the past several months, Nagley said, and his living expenses are small, especially since he has no telephone or car. Still, living expenses in Yellow Springs can be high and he never knows where his next paycheck will come from. But he’s aware that the price he pays for his artistic freedom is financial insecurity, and he’s willing to pay it to live in the town that he loves and do the work that sustains him.

Nagley has an idea for his next project, and it’s an ambitious one. For his current mural, he asked local parents for photos of their children, and he ended up receiving far too many to use. But saying no to the parents was hard, he said, and his dilemma got him to thinking: why not paint a mural of all of the children of Yellow Springs?

He has his eye on the large space behind Dark Star Books, and he also feels a passion for the project’s message. As well as honoring local children, he wants, after seeing the documentary An Inconvenient Truth, to remind villagers about the need to make sustainable energy choices.

“Maybe that would be the perfect reminder for all of us, seeing the kids,” he said. “They’re going to inherit this world.”

Contact: dchiddister@ysnews.com