The bold simplicity of Charlie Ellis's "Heaven's Door"
Readers who have attended SLAM, the once or twice-yearly Savannah Local Artists Market, will be familiar with its founder Charlie Ellis who greets attendees entering the main gate and, upon their departure, delights in taking their picture as they proudly hold up their art purchases. Savannah-born Ellis is a bon-vivant, artist, junk-o-phile, arts supporter, and creator who, at age 85, seems to have the energy and enthusiasm of a man six or seven decades younger.
On the occasion of our most recent interview, the indefatigable octogenarian had flown in the night before from a duck hunting trip in eastern Alberta, Canada, and had recently been hoisted up in a bosun’s chair for a multi-night stay at the Frying Pan Tower, a decommissioned Coast Guard lighthouse station turned B&B situated 32 miles off the coast of North Carolina. His adventures and his stories are boundless. Typically, Ellis creates art (and promotional furniture and signs for SLAM) from his collection of found objects, driftwood, and various knickknacks collected at garage sales, flea markets and junk stores.
Most recently, he has been creating dramatic sculptures from parts of old ships, docks, and wharves that all contain, and are anchored by, metal. Always a scavenger of river-borne flotsam and jetsam, he has made 30 creations with these found wooden pieces, which were all garnered this year from a spot on Hutchinson Island situated across the river from Savannah. “I went over there one day at low tide, and saw one of these pieces, all muddy and nasty. I picked it up and brought it home, put the high-pressure water hose on it, cleaned it, and varnished it, and I said, 'This thing is neat. I like it!' And I went back and got more and more.”
Charlie Ellis's "Scorpio" features twisted, oyster-encrusted metal cable
Ellis meets me in the Downstairs Gallery, an almost two-decade old cooperative art gallery situated in the garden level of artist Morgan Kuhn’s West Gordon Street row house. Current members of the cozy and warren-like gallery include Kuhn, Bonnie Grieco, Joy Schwartz, Margie Sone, Fran Thomas and Catharine Varnedoe. We are joined by Ellis’ good friend and maritime landscape painter, Robert Clairborne Morris. Over 20 years his junior, Morris shares Ellis’s enthusiasm for all things marsh and Savannah River-related, and together, they will present a show at the gallery in early December.
Morris grew up in Washington, D.C. and studied painting at the Sidwell Friends School before double-majoring in art and English literature at Tulane in New Orleans. Always continuing to paint and mount exhibitions, Morris was a staff writer for the Atlanta Journal Constitution and editor for Creative Loafing Atlanta and Atlanta Magazine before becoming a speech writer for former Georgia governor Roy Barnes.
He later worked for more than 20 years as “the token creative” in the communications department of the Georgia Ports Authority. Since his retirement as chief communications officer, he has dedicated himself to raising his two young children while painting from his home on Tybee Island and from a studio aboard his classic Swedish cruiser Grace. Grace did not fare well in the winds generated by Hurricane Helene and is soon to be shipped back to Sweden for maintenance, but with a European art dealer already in place, Morris tells me he will have “a floating studio in the Stockholm archipelago where I will paint the rock formations and water there.”
Charlie Ellis's deconstructed-by-nature sculpture, "Mirage"
Morris recalls, “I met Charlie [Ellis] when I was first learning about the Savannah River and finding objects for a mixed-media series I was working on. We became fast friends and off we went on numerous journeys. He even sold me my first boat. Charlie would always call his art 'stuff,' but I’ve noticed over the years how he has become very interested in art around the world and has become something of an art aficionado.” [Indeed, in addition to founding SLAM, Ellis’ arts advocacy and support has extended to nonprofit Arts Southeast, where the main gallery was renamed in his honor.] Morris is excited by his friend’s latest sculptures, saying, “I see Calder in them... I see this refinement…It’s no longer 'stuff.' There is something magnificent in them. He has evolved as an artist in his 70s and 80s.”
In 2012 Morris mounted an artifacts-based solo exhibition at Telfair Museums’ Academy that was inspired by his reading of Douglas A. Blackmon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning "Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II," which explored the little-known practice of convict leasing in the post-Reconstruction South. Most recently, Morris was honored with a 2023 solo exhibition, “Outward Bound,” at the Ships of the Sea Maritime Museum, curated by renowned Savannah creative Katherine Sandoz.
Robert Morris' "Rising From Yellow"
Robert Morris's "Slow Steaming"
These vibrant paintings focused on the gargantuan container ships which ply their way past Savannah’s River Street before seemingly floating over the marsh on their way to the mouth of the river. In collaborating with his fellow river-rat Ellis, Morris will present similar subject matter along with a few new landscapes. He tells me that his paintings reference his studies of Impressionism, Pointillism, Color Field, and Abstract Expressionism. These influences are easy to detect, and while his work employs a variety of styles, his vibrant color palette remains a constant.
Robert Morris's oil painting "Crown Marsh" is as vibrant as a Van Gogh.
Downstairs Gallery owner Kuhn explains that in addition to the majority of pieces by Ellis and Morris, all the artists in the cooperative will display work with river or water-based themes. For example, Bonnie Grieco, Kuhn’s daughter, is a certified scuba diver and will show art pieces displaying fossilized shark teeth, inner ear bones of whales, Native American pottery shards, sea glass, and other marine artifacts she has retrieved from diving spots in local riverbeds, the location of which she is understandably reticent to divulge. Kuhn is herself an accomplished self-taught artist whose work covers many genres and subject matters. Married at 16 by eloping to Beaufort, S.C. with Carl “Bunky” Helfrich, she says, “I never fit in anywhere. I just became an artist.” To me, her strength lies in her impressionistic paintings which are becoming increasingly abstract, exciting, and innovative.
Interestingly, “Savannah River Ebb and Flow” marks Ellis and Morris’s second collaborative exhibition. In 2015 they presented “Savannah Calling” at the Ships of the Sea Maritime Museum, a show that displayed the former’s mixed media/found object creations and the latter’s maritime paintings created along the 30 miles between the port terminal and the sea. Almost a decade later, the Savannah River continues to call to both men, inspiring them to sail, explore, scavenge, and create.
Featuring works by Charlie Ellis, Robert Morris, the gallery coop members, and by special guest Julie McIntosh (Ellis’ longtime love), “Savannah River Ebb and Flow” opens 5 to 7:30 p.m., Thursday, Dec. 5, at the Downstairs Gallery, 19½ W. Gordon St. The gallery is open Wednesday through Saturday and more information is available at thedownstairsgallery.com. Robert Morris’s website is robertmorrisart.com and Charlie Ellis’s next SLAM is scheduled for April 12, 2025.
This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Savannah River Ebb and Flow gallery exhibition opens first week December 2024