NAVIGATING PENTIMENTO:
The lines, layers and crossroads of the Southern Literary Trail

by William Gantt

Maralyn Wilson, a gifted Birmingham painter and sculptor, works primarily with encaustic techniques: a process that requires the artistic application of layers of wax enhanced by color pigments over images on canvas. Maralyn has chosen American writers for a series of encaustic portraits.

A photograph of the author is transferred to a canvas. Then Maralyn coats the photograph with the wax and pigment - a mixture she adjusts and manipulates to highlight the most intriguing feature of her subjects. For writers, that feature is inevitably a look of mystery, perhaps borne from the self-protective demeanor that seems to find its way onto every great author's face. "The luminosity of the many layers creates an atmosphere of mysterious times," observes Maralyn. "The paintings become interpretations of a place or experience rather than an explicit depiction of reality."

One of Maralyn's subjects, Lillian Hellman, looked behind the layers on her life's canvas "to see what was there for me once, what is there for me now." As paint fades, a canvas reveals the artist's original lines before he repented, or changed his mind, about the images he ultimately chose to depict. The revelation of the original images, as all the colors peel away, is called pentimento.

During March 2009, the events at each destination of the Southern Literary Trail will add layers - while searching for the original lines - to the canvases of the Trail's writers. One recurring theme will be examined at every Trailfest celebration: the unifying impact of the southern landscape. "Fiction depends for its life on place," wrote Eudora Welty. "Location is the crossroads of circumstance." Pour on layers. Tear them away. The presence of place in Southern literature can never be overwhelmed. Its importance is never eliminated.  The crossed roads of circumstance often brought the Trail's writers together - as friends, as rivals, as puzzles to unravel.

Maralyn Wilson has generously shared her talents and her portraits to set the tone of mystery that distinguishes the places and people along the Trail. The Trail's organizers have mapped those haunted crossroads that will enable visitors to add their own layers to interpretations of legendary writing from the South. Or, if they choose, they may rip the layers away and seek to discover the authors' original lines: to navigate pentimento. Maralyn Wilson owns a Birmingham, Alabama, art gallery. She has been the recipient of national awards for her artwork and served as chairperson for Birmingham's Festival of the Arts. Maralyn is a graduate of Sophie Newcomb College in New Orleans. William Gantt, an attorney in Birmingham, is Alabama's project director for the Southern Literary Trail. He dedicates his work for the Trail to the memory of his mother Wynell Gantt, a teacher who shared her love of literature with decades of Demopolis High School students.

Wynell Gantt Teacher

	Lillian Hellman	Flannery O'Connor	Eudora Welty	F. Scott Fitzgerald
	Carson McCullers	Margaret Mitchell	Tennessee Williams	William Faulkner