Henryk Fantazos: Face of the South

The latest Oxford American (which has been out a while), “Best of the South II”, has a feature on Henryk Fantazos…ohmygosh…looking for Southern Gothic?

He’s quoted in the magazine:

There is urgency attendant with the subject: the South is a disappearing country. Yes: the world I am painting now is being removed, rolled away, and rubbed out with an eraser as big as Sherman’s army of bulldozers. The South is removed every working hour and replaced with generic anonymity…

…I find the South in cotton stubblefield cotton with thorny chinaberries showing their yellow planets, or among the predeluvial cars overgrown with kudzu and on nameless islands in river, so silent about their secrets. Month after month, I painted an abandoned homestead held together by a grapevine, a collapsed floor of an ancient porch with sounds of a rocking chair still in the air…