RED BAY | Highway 24 is a very busy road, and it’s incredibly loud all hours of the day and night. Look beyond the traffic, though, and its beauty begins to shine. If you’ve driven east on this road, you may have noticed many things, such as fields of corn, utility poles, bridges, and, if it was early enough, maybe a beautiful sunrise.
Shirley Freeman, a 71-year-old self-taught artist in Red Bay, recently shared her inspiring collection of artwork during an interview about local artists in our community. Upon walking into her art studio, visitors see a beautiful oil painting titled “Sunrise on Highway 24 in Red Bay” standing proudly on an easel.
Freeman captures the essence of such a sunrise in her painting. Using a one-point perspective technique, she embraces the lines of the highway to guide the viewer from their busy life into a calming, warm touch of nature with the sunrise. Her use of orange and yellow, peaking over the horizon, creates a hold on your gaze that makes you feel as if you’re waiting for the sun to pop up and eventually blind you.
Life stands still when you experience art like Freeman’s landscapes. She takes the viewer on a journey from the long gray road of hardships and cold green grass of yesterday into the beginning of a new day.
“After my husband got sick with Aplastic Anemia and a rare lung disease which there was no cure for, I took a Bob Ross class after he passed away,” Freeman said.
She learned the essential skills of creating depth and balance in her paintings. She described her process of sketching the image on the canvas for landscapes, but for difficult portraits, she uses a tracing method to align proportions accurately.
Her favorite medium is oil paint, but she uses watercolor on occasion. Regardless of the medium, Freeman said it doesn’t take her long to complete a painting or any project. She enjoys creating. Besides “Sunrise on Highway 24 in Red Bay,” some of her favorite paintings are those of her grandchildren.
She retired as a sewing instructor for Southern Motion in Pontotoc, Miss., and her love for painting grew; she made a career out of it, selling many paintings over the years and winning awards at county fairs.
“Art is how you see it,” Freeman said. “My mother used to draw for me to keep me still when I was about three years old. She would draw these rabbits sitting under this grapevine with grapes and all this, and I would just be amazed. So that’s how I got started.”
Walking around her studio, she pointed to a painting of a bunny on the wall. She recalled having received a letter with the drawing in it on tissue paper not long before her mother passed away. Longing to preserve the memory, Freeman traced it on canvas and painted it.
Hearing Freeman’s story about her artwork serves as a reminder that too often we look at artwork and merely glance at the artist’s work without thinking about their story or how it influences or affects us.
