A Night with the Bedford Arts Collective
Brady Flanigan
Editor
“If you’re really going to be great at anything—art, music, writing—you have to really focus on that in your life. Nothing else,” George said, standing beneath his paintings.
A gentle-looking man wrapped in an oversize sport coat, with a bio longer than him: art teacher, mathematics professor emeritus, commander, NASA writer, Eastern Delaware Nations elder, Native American dancer, musician.
“Unequivocally,” I agreed.
“It’s a price to pay…”
“Yes—” I cut in abruptly, adamantly, eager to speak, itching to confess.
It could be that Mr. Clever noticed the certitude in my tone. Because his voice softened a little, almost to a laugh.
“So I dabble,” he said. “I have 17 books on Amazon.”
George’s reflection was one of the peaks in a mountain range I began climbing on Thursday, Sept. 25. It started in the evening as the sun was setting on a cool drive to the Bedford County Ag Center.
The Bedford Arts Collective was hosting its second annual arts showcase at 6 p.m. Local artists gathered to display their works and mingle about a long white room, speaking to patrons and other artists and sipping grape juice (unfermented) to the hum of the crowd and the shy patter of a live electric piano.
Everything happening that night can be traced back to two women—two local artists named Clover Honey and Heather Fry, who felt that Bedford County was a mountain of untapped jewels the county government wasn’t using to full potential. So in 2023, they founded the Bedford Arts Collective, hoping to create a culture that fostered fine arts in Bedford County.
“A few years back, there wasn’t much support for visual artists here. Even though there was the arts council, they just weren’t really doing a lot,” Clover said.
“Our goal through the Collective is, a), to give local artists somewhere to exhibit and, b), to give the public fine art in Shelbyville. Yes, you can go to Nashville and go to the museums, but we want to have something here.”
The Ag Center’s white walls were breathing in color Thursday night. The motion of the crowd around the room carried onto the walls in colored pencil drawings of birds motionless on a branch, a sculpture of a skeleton’s hands playing the mandolin, portraits of a family bird dog and Tinkerbell, wandering down the street on Halloween.
Heather later told me 26 artists brought over 120 pieces. Even before the event began, they were having to pull out stand-up displays to position in the middle of the room. It worked well at funneling the crowd along one side of the space and down the other. The only empty wall was on the far end beside a small stage, where the piano man tapped quietly away on his keys, guiding the crowd like the flow of water at the tap.
Clover’s paintings captured Shelbyville with a warm nostalgia. A sort of wholesome realism but stripped of reality’s harsh edges. She pointed towards paintings of the courthouse skyline draped against the autumn trees, the streetlights glowing in the evening above Highway 41. A painting of the late town dog, Bear, resting outside a gas station. Everything she painted carried a familiar homeliness to it, an inviting-you-in feeling.
Likening any artist’s work to another’s is an act of betting the farm. Comparisons are dangerous things to make with artists. What might be meant as praise can be taken for insult. Say Van Gogh and you might mean visionary, and they might hear unhinged, sick.
So when my mind became snagged on the parallels between Clover’s work and the late Norman Rockwell’s, I felt nothing but horror.
“You’ve probably been, been told this, but they—to me, they’re evocative, and it might be cliché, to me they’re evocative of Norman Rockwell.”
After some stumbling, I was finally able to spit it out.
“I get compared there a lot,” she said with a level voice.
Relief.
“And I appreciate the comparison, but I think I fail. Because he was painting to have access to a world he didn’t have. He had a pretty rough life. So I feel like it’s really not fair to give me that compliment. Because I get to live in the world that he wanted to live in.”
Then she zoomed out.
“I feel like this idea that since we’re a small town, we’re rural, a lot of farming around, that we’re not the type of people who would enjoy fine art. It’s almost like if you’re not of a certain type of lifestyle then you’re not entitled to fine art, and I disagree with that. Because I grew up in the country. I grew up in a farming family. So I just want to break that stereotype. To just make art easily, readily available here.”
Just down the wall from Clover’s work, Heather Fry’s paintings stood out for being a bright mixed-media collage of flowers and neon Ferris wheels. The most eye-catching piece was a large single rose called Free Spirit painted atop a collage of paper clippings, the petals bursting orange and red as if cut from sunset. Heather, the other half of the Collective, described her style as, “a little bit of collage, some beading. I did some hand-stitched stuff on canvas last year.”
“This year I kind of expanded into more traditional painting, also some more collage but with painting combined. I think the rose is where my work is going,” she said, gesturing toward Free Spirit. “I think that’s the kind of direction I’m heading in.”
Evidently she chose a good direction. Later that night, Free Spirit won the artists’ vote for favorite piece. Anyone attending was offered a slip to vote for their favorite work in a number of categories. Clover later explained it wasn’t designed to make people compete. It was just a sneaky tactic to make patrons really look at the art with a critic’s eye, to engage with it rather than glimpse and move on.
Alongside her husband David Fry, Heather runs The Artist’s Hoard, an art supplies and stationery shop on the northside of Shelbyville. The shop’s mission is no different than the Collective’s:
“To nurture creativity, build community, and make art accessible to all. We believe everyone is an artist at heart—sometimes you just need the right space (and supplies!) to bring it out,” the website says.
It’s become a springboard and a salon for the Bedford Arts Collective as the organization has grown, offering classes, displaying the works of new members, and using it as a meeting place.
George said if you want to be great at anything, you’ve got to focus on that and nothing else.
“It’s a price to pay,” he said.
With all the attention the Bedford Arts Collective puts into fostering a community that can dabble, that’s its own greatness.
