Red and blue vessels drawn by alcohol-based copic markers run up, down, and across the skeletal outline of a human face bereft of any aesthetically pleasing features. The figure holds a paintbrush, above which an iridescent ball of flame engulfs the upper head space.
“It’s just an explosion of imagination, essentially, and it is sort of spiritual,” said Brian Pearman, the Southern Illinois-based artist in his late thirties who created the image, drawing inspiration from the psychedelic painter Alex Gray. “Sure, you can take psychedelics or you can take drugs. Or you can just meditate while doing art, and you will sort of find enlightenment. … When I’m stressed out or whatnot, I’ll look to art. And then I’m like, ‘Well, I don’t know what I was really worried about,’ because it enlightens you.”
Pearman often has an image in his mind’s eye he feels compelled to convey. “Because the Muse is kind of a real thing, I believe,” he said. “And if the Muse is talking to you, you kind of gotta listen, or you lose it.”
Art enables him to share the experience of those images, in a way.
“If I draw accurately enough, then you can see what is in my head. … It’s one of the few ways that you can actually see into someone else’s mind,” he said.
Whether he’s cultivating an enlightened outlook or engaging in vivid self-expression, Pearman approaches art as a way of life, even as he holds down a full-time job as an operational manager at a CVS drugstore in Greenville, Illinois, located about 80 miles east of the Mississippi River.
Pearman and a handful of other men about his age make a living doing sometimes difficult and draining blue collar and service industry labor in the rural Southern Illinois town, but they also create incredible artwork in their spare time.
As one of the few guys at his job, Pearman usually unloads and organizes big shipments with pallets that go up to the ceiling on the days when trucks come.
Carrying 60-pound totes overhead as needed can be good exercise but physically taxing, while providing customer service makes the job enjoyable even as it can exact a psychological toll.
Helping customers he’s come to know well in the 10-plus years he’s worked at CVS feels rewarding, Pearman said.
Someone might come in after a grandparent passes when they need to print funeral pictures, for example.
“So I’ll go out of my way to help them with that,” he said, “and they’re appreciative of it.”
But especially in the wake of Covid-19, he’s witnessed an epidemic of mental illness firsthand. He said people have expressed ire at workers because they’re the ones present in the moment, despite Pearman and his co-workers having nothing to do with what people are angry about.
“Sometimes dealing with people all day, I’m just brain dead,” he said. “So [art] helps me kind of reinvigorate the synapses a little bit, sitting there focusing and whatnot.”
Pearman isn’t able to fully flex his artistic muscles every single day. But he thinks about art often and he can’t go long without waxing creative.
“Whether it’s a couple minutes or a couple hours, I try to carve out a chunk of most days to work on it,” said Pearman, who’s authored and self-published two novels in a series that details an apocalyptic scenario following the collapse of society as we know it.
T.J. Smith, an artist and musician around the same age as Pearman who also grew up in Greenville, produced a lot of artwork during a creative period in his life a few years ago. At the time, he worked on a golf course digging grave-size holes with a shovel and tending to irrigation. When he wasn’t fixing leaks, he had relative down time.
Although he performed the work of a professional plumber, maintaining pumps and pipes, he only earned $12 per hour. Smith got to spend time outside, however, and enjoy fresh air, exposure to fertilizer – which was sprayed semi-frequently – aside. The contemplation the job afforded, coupled with frequent cannabis use at the time, meant that he didn’t worry too much at work. He often carried around a clipboard and would sketch as he went about his day.
He drew three-dimensional depictions of higher dimensional spaces, called hypercubes, allowing his mind to wander while training it to balance multiple images simultaneously, which informed what he would later do on the canvas.
A lot of his visual art and the music he made with drums and guitar offered an ephemeral exit from addictions developed in response to relationship woes, a rough breakup and socioeconomic realities, like low wage labor and losing a house he bought.
“I had barely enough money to buy art supplies,” Smith said. “Most of my art supplies were given to me by people.”
He also won about $250 at a pool tournament, and that money went toward purchases at a craft supply store.
During that inspired period, Smith painted a piece he initially titled, “Perspective Turbulence,” because he constructed it with no definitive focal point.
As with a lot of his art, the picture contains hidden imagery, like the psilocybin mushrooms you can spot in the ear of the anthropomorphic, scale-bearing individual if you observe from the right angle.
A pointing figure functions as a harbinger of doom, directing the onlooker’s attention to where it otherwise might not be drawn, warning people to escape as an explosion occurs in the distance, which Smith thinks he could’ve depicted a little better by darkening the bottom to clarify that the explosion is occurring celestially.
He attributes some of this darker work to his struggles with addiction, like a piece centering a centipede that he started but never finished.
“You can just tell there’s a lot of agony in it,” he said. “It’s like a cityscape, but the cityscape was eventually going to be empty fifths of vodka and wine bottles and stuff.”
Smith said there’s still some 20 hours of detail missing. While he neglected to complete the critical, symbolic depiction of dependence on alcohol in the artwork, he managed to escape addiction in his personal life, but not without scars.
A few years back, a good friend who appreciated Smith’s artwork had been holed up in his room for a long while. Smith gave some of his recent work to this friend’s mother so she could bring it back and show her son. Then his friend died.
He sobered up a week or two afterward. He also stopped painting.
Smith recalled being miserable while he was drinking and at the time thinking the misery would go away once he got sober. He later learned it doesn’t always work like that, as hard realities remain.
Another artist in town, Blake Weiss, who previously struggled with addiction to hard drugs, used to make music and draw with Smith.
“Most of our sketches weren’t about the sketches,” Smith, who’s just a few years his senior, said. “We were trying to produce ways of escaping reality, pretty much.”
For a while, Weiss worked at a local creamery, located on the outskirts of town past the notorious state prison. It was better than his previous warehouse job, and he got to learn about cheese and acquire new skills.
But he left for a position as a custodian at Greenville University.
“I can listen to music all day and I can listen to podcasts,” said Weiss, who now studies music as an undergraduate at the school. “So I get to listen to creative stuff all day long and I work by myself so I’m constantly writing songs in my head. I’m constantly taking notes. I’m so blessed for the job I have right now because I clean a music center and I go to college there so it’s like I’m surrounded by this music stuff all day.”
The school heavily invests in and supports the arts, and its produced notable bands like Jars of Clay. Nevertheless, the religious orientation of Greenville University – formerly Greenville College – can, at times and from an artist’s perspective, impede creative expression in the small town.
“I don’t have a problem with the Christian undertone,” Weiss said. “But when they try to police things and say that’s not Christian, that just drives me nuts.”
Like the university that exerts preponderant influence in the rural town of about 7,000 residents, and like the work available to men such as Weiss, Smith and Pearman, the Southern Illinois cultural milieu enables and obstructs art as a way of life.
“I notice a lot of people in small towns, there’s some really creative people,” Weiss said. “I think [a small town] breeds that because you’re looking for something. You’re looking for some kind of outlet because you don’t really know what to do. It’s just different from city life.”
One of his friends and a fellow artist and musician, Jeremy Darbyshire, who used to work with Weiss at the local IGA grocery store, understands better than most how the environment can both nourish and strangle the creative spirit.
“Growing up autistic, it was a difficult challenge,” explained Darbyshire, who’s a few years younger than Weiss. “I just found this place to be just a living hellhole because I knew I was different and people would often remind me how different I was. It just kind of threw me into this spiral of depression and anxiety and I kind of acted out in my own way. But now that I know better and I can be who I want to be now, I find the quieter life here to be much more preferable than if I just happened to say, ‘screw it’, and go somewhere else where nobody knows who I am and start on a clean slate. I just find the familiarity of the people and my experiences here to be what drives me the most creatively.”
Similar to Pearman, who said some of his work represents the beauty of the natural world because of Greenville’s abundant trees and verdant topography – and thanks in part to the proximity of the Shawnee National Forest located about 140 miles south of the town – Darbyshire also paints landscapes, fields, and other wide open spaces. He enjoys escapism through artwork, but the people he works with also help make his artistic life possible.
“Currently, I still find a little creativity in how I interact with people, my coworkers over at a pizza joint – the Casey’s General Store – and I’m also thankful for that gig because it’s easier to manage [than previous jobs] and I find myself a lot more mellowed out than I used to be,” he said in 2023. “And some people there are very interesting in the way that they go about things, and that’s kind of been an inspiration, just observing just general people.”
Darbyshire identifies with a bisexual orientation, which contributed to some feelings of estrangement by the time he reached high school. Art provides shared meaning and experience that reflects and transcends those differences.
“One of the most fulfilling things is just having that understanding,” he said. “And you get on the level. You realize you’re not so different from people after all, I guess.”
Working-class art in rural South-Central Illinois can come in the form of social commentary too, as with “The Rise and Fall of Man,” a product of alcohol-based copic markers and Pearman’s Kubric-caliber imagination.
Replete with subconscious influences from 2001: A Space Odyssey, the piece features proto-human silhouettes representing evolutionary change near the top left, and the star baby a little below and to the right within a set of overlapping circles that, taken together, constitute the Tree of Life.
Within the lower, earthly realm, a figure at the bottom in a top hat symbolizes avaricious bankers. Beyond the criticism of financial capitalism, the donkey and the elephant on the banker’s breast pockets says something about the entrenched two-party political system in the United States.
“They’re all owned, bought and sold from the same people,” Pearman said about the Democrats and Republicans.
Influential individuals throughout history – Washington, Hitler, Caesar, Henry VIII and Napoleon – look on at the destruction in disbelief, despite also having done atrocious things, and beneath them, the devil looms over the banker’s shoulder, in case anyone was unsure about who’s really pulling the strings while civilization gets sacrificed for profit.
Consider the context that gives rise to these incisive works: Hot and humid summers, brutally cold, character-building winters, often limited socioeconomic and recreational opportunities, exposure to what some have termed “deaths of despair.”
Perhaps the lived experience of Midwestern artists, as well as the classist contempt and expressions of presumed superiority coming from purported progressives and others in urban coastal areas, can be credited in part for producing the poignant symbolism coming out of rural Illinois.
While Pearman remains prolific and can’t seem to stop creating, his generation is getting older.
Weiss said he knows talented individuals from Greenville who have either moved away or who have had to devote much of their time and energy to family and work at the expense of art.
“Some people have lost some motivation because so many people have tried so long to do something with their art … and after a while you get stuck in a rut,” he said. “You’ll still always have art as an outlet, personally, but it’s like, a lot of people are like, ‘Man, I just want to get out there. I want to be able to survive on my art.’ … And a lot of us have had to settle for something we don’t really want to do to get by.”
There used to be more community among artists and musicians, especially those around his age, in Greenville, he added.
Still, the town continues to produce ways of life that encourage working-class artists to explore the aesthetic dimension, a realm of serious play that can represent the awesomeness of the rustic, quotidian world while simultaneously indicting the forces that both inhibit and compel the kind of creative freedom unique to “flyover country.”
“I can quite literally put anything down on paper that I can think of, and it governs a sense of freedom from that,” Pearman explained. “If I have a bad day at work, or things just don’t seem to be going my way, I can sit down with a pencil and paper and get all of those frustrations out. Creativity cannot be taken away from someone. Even if no one ever sees a single one of my artworks again, I’ll keep doing it because it’s something that no one else can ruin for me.”
Editor’s Note: While growing up, James Anderson was friends with two of the four artists quoted in this piece. In addition, one of the other artists, Blake Weiss, is now the author’s brother-in-law.
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