The Wilson Fellows: John Ruskey, Thad Lee and Danny Broadway, Mallory/Wurtzburger featured artists.

John Rusky

John has been exploring, photographing and painting the Lower Mississippi River over four decades. He is worker bee in the colony of his queen, the Lower Mississippi River. John carves canoes, paints, and guides others into the wildest place remaining in the center of North America, the verdant floodplain of the big river, which reaches fullness in her last thousand miles of free-flowing joy to the Gulf of Mexico. His passion for nature finds expression in music, painting, writing and canoe building.

The canoe is a unique art form that brings together the purest principals of form, function and materials into one integral and elegant vessel. The artist paints canoes, rivers, insects, animals, fish, and wild spirits in scenes depicting the balance between civilization and mother earth. The artist has explored and painted many of the major rivers of North America, including the Mississippi, the Yukon, the Gila, the Yazoo, the Big Sunflower, the Big Black, the Tallahatchie, the Colorado, the Rio Grande, the Arkansas, the Platte, the Columbia, the Missouri, and the Atchafalaya.

John paddles and paints in custom-carved dugout and stripper canoes, in watercolor, using water and sediments drawn from the river as medium. Most paintings are plein aire, but he finds pathways in the wildness of the world and is inspired by the expressions of creation thriving over the levee, in the floodplain of the big river. He seeks balance for humanity with the rest of creation, all ten million species and counting, especially as global overpopulation and thirst for fresh water and energy sources are threatening the fecund forests and islands of the Lower Mississippi Valley.

Thad Lee

Thad Lee is an award-winning filmmaker, a writer of essays, screenplays, and poetry, and a versatile photographer. He earned English and Philosophy degrees from the University of Mississippi and an MFA in Screenwriting from the University of New Orleans. His education includes a poetry workshop in Italy and film studies in Los Angeles, New York, and Spain.

Thad’s current nature photographs are part of a series called Murmurations created in conversation with Carlyle’s paintings about their shared experiences in the landscape. By immersing his lens in layers of growth, Thad examines abstract patterns in the natural world. His photographs record veils and blots of color alongside clear and intricate details. The result is an enchanting marriage of the familiar with the mysterious.

His film October won Best Short Film at the inaugural Oxford Film Festival in 2003. In 2020, his adaptation of a short story by Stephen King called “All That You Love Will Be Carried Away” was selected by 47 film festivals, winning honors at 29 of them. He recently completed a documentary about photographers Maude Schuyler Clay and Langdon Clay called Two Lives in Photography that is currently being aired on Mississippi Public Broadcasting (MPB). His next film will be a music documentary about Blue Mountain called When You’re Not Mine.

Thad initially developed his on-going series of Moon Paintings as props after writing a screenplay set in a glass hotel on the moon. Inspired by Jackson Pollock’s action paintings, the Moon Paintings are photographs painted with light. To make them, Thad sets a long exposure in low-light and moves his camera with bold gestures. The Moon Paintings are varied, colorful, and completely abstract.

Thad was recently honored by the Mississippi Arts Commission with an Artist’s Fellowship in Media Arts. He was also selected by the Dixon Gallery and Gardens to be part of the inaugural group of Artists in Residence in Wilson, Arkansas. He lives with his visual-artist wife Carlyle Wolfe Lee and infant son Luke in Oxford, Mississippi.

Danny Broadway Bio forthcoming.