Art of survival

Jim McNeese places a tablet of blank paper on a handmade easel and begins drawing a landscape, ignoring the noise of trucks rattling by on the nearby interstate.

“Do bears share their food?” he wonders aloud, then adds, “These are going to.”

McNeese, 61, a homeless Detroit native who has lived in a wooded area near Chattanooga for two years, adds two bears, each with a fish in its mouth. Animals and landscapes are McNeese’s specialty. He draws his inspiration from the “Holy Spirit” and uses colored pencils and paper to transport himself to a “fantasy world” full of animals and pastoral settings.

After sketching on napkins, McNeese learned perspective and composition from local artist Greg Haynes. McNeese’s work is good enough that he is one of several artists whose works will be featured in the H*Art Gallery TN, scheduled to open Saturday.

“Jim is the sweetest, kindest ... man,” said Ellen Heavilon, gallery founder and executive director. “He has a very strong belief in God and the Bible, and a good sense of right and wrong. There is an innocence about a lot of his work that’s almost childlike. I love his butterflies.”

The gallery, on Main Street in Chattanooga, will feature about 50 of McNeese’s pieces. He will get 60 percent of any profits from the sale of his drawings but plans to give most of the extra money to “Christian causes, orphans and widows.”

Finding a “safe place”

McNeese said he had problems with drinking and drugs, but has been sober since 1988. After a soured relationship, he hitchhiked to Chattanooga from Savannah, Ga., in 2006 and found a roommate. He was familiar with the city because he used to visit relatives over the holidays.

After his roommate moved to California, he spent some time in a mission, slept “all up and down the freeway” and under overpasses but has since found himself a “safe place” in the woods.

McNeese lost both parents as a child and then was passed among relatives before going to live with his aunt and uncle in Georgia. After high school, he joined the Navy as a boiler technician and left the service in 1974. He has worked as a carpenter, roofer, painter, mechanic, bus boy and food server.

Heavilon go to know McNeese earlier this year at the Community Kitchen, where she sponsored art classes in anticipation of her gallery opening.

She already had an appreciation for the talent of homeless artists. Last summer, she and her husband, Jay, stopped on Main Street to look at a project that featured tiles created by homeless artists.

“I was just so amazed at all the talent on those four-by-four tiles,” she said.

They bought a vacant building on Main Street last fall and will open their gallery Saturday. They are paying for it themselves but eventually hope to receive donations.

For now, Ellen Heavilon provides the art materials for several homeless artists. In return, she sees “actual hope and validation that they matter. ... My goal is to raise them up, give them an opportunity. ... That’s all anybody wants to do, is matter.”

Registered art therapist Carrie May Ezell finds art to be a confidence builder and a huge self-esteem booster. Heavilon, she said, is honoring the artists by giving them a voice that wouldn’t otherwise be heard.

“Art is a great equalizer among people, and I think we need that in a community,” Ezell said.

John Dorris, chairman of Chattanooga’s Homeless Blueprint Oversight Committee and Project Homeless Connect, sees art as a way for the homeless to express themselves to others in a different way and “maybe, just for a little while, step outside of their situation.”

Their artwork can serve as a “reminder to the community that homelessness isn’t a personal characteristic; it is their current living situation.”

NATURE, HOLY SPIRIT INSPIRED

McNeese spent a month gathering materials for an easel and considered several design options before building it upright, so it would withstand the rain.

He uses wire and webbing to hold tree branches together, forming the base of the easel. The branches are tied to trees for sturdiness, and a board that McNeese found in a trash pile supports his drawing tablet. An empty bird’s nest adorns the top of the easel.

He used to sit on a five-gallon bucket while drawing, but now he has a green plastic chair — one of a matching set in his camp. Colored pencils in baggies and other art supplies surround the easel.

“I never try to force myself to draw something,” he said. “I try to let whatever is trying to come out come out. I just sit down and whatever the Holy Spirit brings to me, that’s what I do. That way I’m not under any pressure to draw a certain thing. I feel like I’m being commissioned by the spirit whenever I wait on him to give me something to draw. I don’t feel like I’m doing it myself.”

When local landscape artist Haynes met McNeese during a Wednesday night dinner and Bible study at Forrest Avenue United Methodist Church, he saw potential and wanted to share his own skills.

He showed McNeese some different drawing techniques, but mostly “challenged him to look at things differently.”

He also saw that McNeese was prolific.

“It’s not something that he just started and stopped,” Haynes said. “It’s part of him now. It’s something he’s passionate about.”

McNeese’s artwork will be featured on note cards that will be sold at Hart Gallery. Even if he makes money off his art, he has no plans to leave his wooded camp.

“I would probably stay out here if I could,” he said. “I’m not too crazy about money. Money perverts you and if you’ve got enough of it, it puts you on a power thing, you know. You think you’re somebody when you ain’t nothing.”