Southern Music Legends Through the Lens of David Holt

Story and photos by Naomi Johnson

David Holt sits at his computer, scrolling through the past. He needs to leave soon: The instrument cases are stacked by the door, the shows are scheduled in Charlotte, then California, and his trademark hat is on his head, but the stark black-and-white photos cast a spell. “Look at that face,” he murmurs, lingering on the close-up portrait he shot in 1989 of Nimrod Workman, a coal miner and ballad singer from Mingo County, West Virginia. “What a great mountain face. He worked in the mines from the time he was 14 years old.”

read more at WNC Magazine

Serious Whimsy

Story and photos by Naomi Johnson

Four years ago, Angelique Tassistro hit bottom. “The ceramics thing was not working, and I was just over it,” she says. Sure, the Asheville-based artist was making beautiful ceramics (in her windowless basement) and selling them (at a grueling circuit of fairs and festivals) — but she was barely making a living, and she was exhausted. So she quit.

But not for long.

read more at Carolina Home + Garden

It’s News to Them

Story and photos by Naomi Johnson

It’s Monday night, and Brooke Priddy and Julie armbruster are up in their clubhouse. It’s the kind of space you always dreamed of as a kid: an alice-in- Wonderland hideaway reached by ladder, furnished with low chairs and club memorabilia, up near the ceiling in armbruster’s River arts District studio, overlooking the train tracks. They’re wearing their club uniforms (matching vests with their names in pink script across the breast) and they’re collaborating on a drawing of a purple squirrel wearing a business suit.

read more at Bold Life Magazine

Author, blogger, and homesteader Ashley English of Small Measure

via Breathe Magazine

— artist & illustrator Maira Kalman

Say Cheese

Story and photos by Naomi Johnson

“Winter is the cheesemaker’s time to try new things,” Jennifer Perkins said one day in mid-February, her hands busily flipping row after row of wheels of cheese.

The aging room at Looking Glass Creamery in Fairview is cool, windowless and profoundly humid, the tile floor wet and the air redolent with the pungent smell of cheeses. They fill the racks and shelves with squares and pyramids, large and small. The basket-textured rounds she’s working on will be turned and rinsed in brine every day for six weeks, then dusted with bitter chocolate, which gives the cheese its name: Chocolate Lab. It’s a mainstay of their business, along with fresh chevres, the brie-like Pack Square and the ash-coated triangles of Ellington. But way in the back, high up, are a few shelves devoted to this year’s experiments. Perkins points out a new cheddar that’s not working out so well; its rind is pocked with defects. Still, she says, “It’s important to keep experimenting. You never know when you might hit on the next big thing.”

read more at Verve Magazine

Local legend — and lovely person — Tucker Cooke, in Carolina Home + Garden.

The amazing Valeria Watson-Doost in this month’s Verve Magazine, looking fabulous (at age 63, if you can believe that?!)

— Steve Jobs

A Cosmic Connection

Selinde Lanier’s cultural journey comes together in the loom

Story and photos by Naomi Johnson

Selinde Lanier still has the photograph that changed her life. It’s a page from a decorating magazine, now a bit tattered with age — she used to read such things, back when she was designing upholstery for high-end furniture. It features a fancy drawing room (gilt, columns, mounted animal heads) and is intended to advertise the artfully draped bits of fabric in the foreground. But what caught Lanier’s eye was an afterthought: the weaving that covers the billiard table in the background, a spare geometric coverlet.

read more at Carolina Home + Garden

Bloom #4, 2011

24” x 36” x 3.5”

Hand-altered archival dye print on paper and panel, with beeswax encaustic

The New Old School

Story and photos by Naomi Johnson

Francesco Lombardo wants you to know that he’s not that kind of artist. The kind that gets in bar fights, that is; last night was just a fluke. “A drunk guy punched me in the face,” he says bashfully, pointing out the swelling around his left eye. “But I don’t want you to think this is normal for me!”

read more at Bold Life Magazine

— Walt Whitman

Some outtakes form last week’s shoot at Urban Arts Institute’s dance practice, for Bold Life magazine.