The hard life of a May River oysterman is captured on tin by artist D. Pierce Giltner.

Choppy water, cold air, wet feet, sore hands, bent back. It’s not easy being an oysterman working the tides. The effort is backbreaking, the hours long, the nights all too short. And the culture is fading faster than winter daylight.

Such images are starkly depicted by Bluffton artist D. Pierce Giltner in his latest collection called “Drack,” aseries of paintings about aMay River oysterman by the same name who has followed generations of his family who worked the oyster beds. The 18 images rise out of acrylic on tin gleaned from abandoned and dismantled old South Carolina slave and tenant cabins. Feeling the edge of one of the paintings, he pointed out the appearance of what he called “cold, rolled steel.” It was a rough texture like old canvas that looked as if it had rusted, but in touching it, the fingers came away clean. The old tin roof had aged naturally and what remained behind was a surface that lent itself well to raw painting, palette knife-strokes … hard-edged lives portrayed with admiration.

“I try to preserve the past to present to the present,” Giltner explained at his series’ opening at the Club at Shell Hall on Friday night. Those who buy the art receive a brief writeup about the origins of their painting’s surface.

Giltner does the dismantling himself. His background was and still is woodworking. He scrambles in and around collapsing buildings looking for recyclable boards, beams and remnants of the past. He seeks out the structures looking for salvageable materials —wood, tin and personal items left behind and long forgotten — that he turns into either visual art or unique structures under his other business, Cedarstacker Rustic Installations.

At the same time, he researches and documents the history of the houses, some- times even speaking with neighbors or former residents.

“I talked with a man who said his father’s father’s father lived in the house I was work- ing on,” Giltner recalled. “That meant his great-grandfather had been aslave.”

Giltner grew up poor in rural Chester County, not far from the North Carolina line. Every day he saw white and black neighbors from whom he came to appreciate a p a passing heritage. He began painting at an early age, painting what he saw in his own way. The art world calls him an “outsider” artist because he has never had any formal training. That’s just fine with him. “I don’t paint colorful Gullah art or pretty blue sky paint- ings,” he said. Nor does he use canvas or have a traditional raditional studio.

Instead, he paints life-size full- body portraits, sticks a field of stars on a slab of bead board or paints blues musicians on corrugated tin roofing. Art afi- cionados can find him in his outside studio in Old Town Bluffton, artwork for sale hanging on recovered planks and beams.

Painting Drack came about from what Giltner called “preparation meets opportunity.” “The project came out so well because I always wanted to document a black man who lived and grew up on the May River, who spent his whole life there,” he said. “He’s a hard worker, got about three percent body fat, muscular, ripped. My wife took about 2,000 photographs of him working the oyster beds and these images are composites of those photos.”

Pressly Hall, Giltner’s wife, is a professional freelance photographer — an artist in her own right who spent several years working in New York City after earning degrees in photography and English. She met Giltner when she returned to South Carolina to open her own business. It was Hall who first met Drack.

“I was working for a caterer last fall,” she recalled. “It was me, Drack and some other people at this large function and he and I hit it off. He was a hard worker and a good guy and we talked that night about me going out taking pictures. We talked more later and finally got together. He became our model.”

It was the first time Giltner and Hall had collaborated on a project and the results more than satisfied both of them. “I think we’ll do more of this in the future. I was totally in the zone. Drack had to pull me out of the pluff mud about three times, I was so wrapped up, laying down on the ground to get the shot. It was an awesome shoot one morning,” Hall said. “We thought about doing it again, but we got so many perfect images that we didn’t need to.” The series, some of which have already sold, shows Drack as he moves through a day harvesting the mollusks. Many of the paintings are monochrome or have shades of gray, giving the images a feeling of the sky just before sunrise or as daylight wanes. Others are more colorful, the soft Carolina sky offering light but little warmth on awinter’s day. The portraits are more suggestive silhouettes than precision paintings. For those who know of life on the waters, one can sense the roughness of those who make a hardscrabble living from it. Yet even without prior knowledge of a waterman’s life, there’s a feeling of sympathy the artist has given his subject.

You can feel that Giltner has more art inside him. He’s never still, always looking for more people to capture forever. The unique surfaces on which he paints and the manner in which he portrays his subjects make his work truly original while preserving both materials and afading heritage.

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Outsider Artist Goes Solo

D. Pierce Giltner will exhibit 30 of his unique and rare paintings in a solo show May 15 at Shell Hall in Bluffton, South Carolina. An opening reception honoring him will be held from 6-9pm, and is free and open to the public.
     Pierce strives to capture southern heritage, preserving the past and presenting the future. His artwork is bold and powerful, telling the lives of black tenant farmers, bluesmen, and locals. His new paintings are done on rare salvaged tin from a derelict tenant house to create his first one-subject body of artwork. The subject is known as "Drack," who hand selects the East's most pristine oysters from the banks of the May River.
     This show is Giltner’s first exhibit, kicking off six solo shows, including Charleston's 2009 Spoleto. The show at Shell Hall will include food, drinks and live music.

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Five Minutes With: Bluffton artist D. Pierce Giltner

When you get to The Gallery Without Walls, feel free to step inside. Or maybe that should be "outside."

D. Pierce Giltner operates his art studio on a shaded plot of land next to The Store in old town Bluffton.

Giltner is an outsider artist, a painter with no formal training. The Upstate native paints Southern heritage with images of sharecroppers and bluesmen. His canvas is the wood and tin salvaged from abandoned tenant houses.

His latest series is titled "Drack," and it's based on an oysterman of the May River. An opening reception is held from 6 to 9 p.m. todayat Shell Hall.

Giltner talks about art in the great outdoors.

Question. How did you come across Drack?

Answer. My wife met him. He'd go out and pick oysters and sell them back to the Bluffton Oyster Co. No two front teeth, that's why they call him Drack -- short for Dracula. I just met him, and we got to know each other pretty well. I've been thinking about doing a one-subject series of artwork. It worked out great because my wife took photos. It was 23 degrees that morning. Freezing cold. What I do is look at her photographs and study them. Each (painting) is not an actual photograph, but a combination of all of them.

Q. Where'd you get the tin for the canvas?

A. I got it on a house in Chester. It's 16-by-24 feet. It fools a lot of people. They're like, "What the hell kind of canvas is this?"

Q. What is it about oystering that captured your interest?

A. My artwork is based on tenant farmers and blues musicians. It sort of goes along with that. It has more of a Lowcountry feel.

Q. How long have you been in your outdoor studio?

A. A year in January. It's great. I'm an outsider artist. So, I'm outside.

Q. Makes sense.

A. I love it. It has an effect on people. They're staring like, "What the heck is this?"

Q. What do you do if it rains?

A. Well, everything goes in my truck.

Q. How has the "Drack" exhibit worked out?

A. This worked out great. It's about how the past relates to the present. Like I said, I always wanted to do a real-life person. It happened by luck. Preparation meets opportunity. Something like that.

News Happenings & Updates - Engard Real Estate Co.
Updated June 2008

Bluffton Breeze May 2008

Written by Pressly Giltner

May is the month we celebrate Mother's Day, so I asked our featured artist, Introducing D. Pierce Giltner, if I could ask his absolutely adorable wife, Pressly, and mother of his equally adorable daughter, Pearl, to interview him for the Breeze. He agreed and I think you will find this fun and a bit different. So let's get up close and personal with Introducing D. Pierce Giltner.

What brought us to Bluffton?
A new chapter in life . . . and Babbie Guscio. We decided that life was too short not to live in a great place, especially when you have a beautiful daughter like Pearl. It is a shock being here and we're stunned at how awesome everyone is in Bluffton. Sorry we're not local, but we're grateful to be here. Good Karma and good people are in Bluffton.

businesses full time. So my educational background is BYU, "back yard university.�

You have changed and progressed quickly in so many positive ways since we met as adults six years ago. What are some of the catalysts for these leaps in learning?
Yes, one of the biggest changes was when I met Tom Hall. He opened my eyes to a different meaning in life and he is one of my greatest inspirations. We opened a bluegrass venue in Chester County, one of the best venues in the southeast and that is when I was introduced to Panther's Breath (moonshine). Near the closing of the venue, I met his sister and my biggest inspiration, Pressly. It was the night of Acoustic Syndicate and we had a half gallon bottle of Panther's Breath. It all went on from there. We were in love, deep love. We were immediately inseparable and started our life together living in a cedar structure on the South Fork of Fishing Creek in the middle of nowhere in the woods. The structure had no walls, only a roof. It was like a house because we had the kitchen, dining room, living room, and a loft as a bedroom. It was great! We took baths in the creek; enjoyed mother nature. I had no job at that time and Pressly would drive to New York City to work on photo shoots for a week at a time and drive right back to the shelter by the creek. We were in love and we didn't care about a thing. Because things must come to an end, even really good things, the rain drove us out of there. We kept getting stuck driving in and out.

Thank you, love. You inspire me daily. When we moved to the Ponderosa that was wonderful too.
Oh God...that place was magical! We moved out there when Pressly and I eloped on top of the Morris Island Lighthouse. Like Fishing Creek, it was very secluded, but the Ponderosa did have running water (you run outside and get it), walls and an outhouse. It was 576 square feet with a wood stove. The house was too small, so I built an outdoor studio behind the house. We lived there for about 3 years and they were the best years of our life. We had to move because Pep was pregnant with Pearl and a pregnant wife with an outhouse does not combine well.

True. Let's get on the subject of art. I refer to you often as a gifted child of art. You received no formal training, except one year of after school art class when you were twelve taught by my Mom. You are the most creative person I've ever met, and you are making a career as an artist. Tell how your career began.
I remember I was so broke at one time that I started off with renderings of people's homes in Rock Hill, going from door to door to sell. Didn't sell one. Then when we were living at Fishing Creek, there was a show in Columbia, so I sat by a lantern and created three watercolors and two pen and inks. Didn't sell those either. A year later when we were living at the Ponderosa, I made an outdoor studio and created 5 paintings of 3 blues musicians, a slave lady and Curtis Cherry painted on old wood with house paint for the same show in Columbia and sold out. That's where it all began.

You always seem to come across luck, especially when you met Pat Kabore.
Yes, She is a wonderful lady, a well-known black printmaker in the U.S. I was lucky to meet her and absorb all of the energy and knowledge she has. She's about 70 years old and grew up across the street from Miles Davis, and the list goes on.

That was wild, eh?
Yes, I met her at my first outdoor festival and that's when our relationship began. She introduced me to the so-called "Art World,� teaching me how to run a business as an artist, the dos and the don'ts. She was a mentor and more of a mother figure to me and very strict. She would call me up on Sunday while Pep and I were watching a movie and ask "Whatcha doin?� I would say, "Watching a movie.� "WELL GIT UP AND START PAINTIN' NOW!!!!�

Not knowing any better, I had been painting with house paint on old tenant house wood and then she introduced me to the fundamentals of art, and what paint to use, such as golden acrylic. She knew everything, because she had already "been there and done that.�

Around this same time, you were painting blues musicians, but then you started on a new subject. What made you switch subject matters?
I was painting nothing but blues musicians. Though I always wanted to paint something that was relative to the tenant houses where I got the wood to paint on and that's when the series of paintings "Life of a Tenant Farmer� started.

You've been to festivals and shows where black people walk up and connect that it's a white artist creating black art. Then they've asked what do you know as a young white artist about slaves and tenant houses that lived in that period. What is your reply?
It's pretty bizarre, but there is a connection. Hopefully the people who read this can come to my show at Shell Hall Plantation and hear about it and see the series. To sum it up, I save the wood from derelict structures, document and record the history, and paint on the wood. I'm preserving the past to present to the present.

Joe Adams called you a visionary artist. People call you an outsider artist, and still more call you a folk artist. Which label is most accurate to you? Visionary, folk or outsider?
Well, on my first interview when Dan Huntley asked me if I'm an outsider artist, I said, "Yeah, I paint outside. I have an outdoor studio behind my house.� I didn't know what the real definition was at the time.

What is this talk about a gallery without walls on Calhoun Street?
Over the years the prices of the "Life of a Tenant Farmer� series have increased highly due to obvious reasons. That series is targeted to private investors and collectors. On the other hand, I began my career as a folk artist creating the blues so I'm going to head back in that direction.

So what will you sell in the gallery without walls on Calhoun Street if not the "Life of a Tenant Farmer�?
The Gallery is called "Bluffton Blues, Folk Art and Fishing Lures� or "Lures and Landmarks�. I'm going to start painting Bluffton landmarks.

Tell me more about these fishing lures.
We'll see you on May 10th.

www.dpiercegiltner.com is the website for his art. www.cedarstacker.com is the website for the rustic installation business called Cedarstacker. Please look up these websites to learn more about Pierce's art and life and wood works of art.

Introducing D. Pierce Giltner
May Art Schedule
May 10, 2008 - Village Art Festival, Bluffton
May 23-25, 2008 - Piccolo Spoleto, Charleston
May 30, 2008 - One Man Show Artist's Reception,
The Club At Shell Hall, Bluffton

JANUARY 23, 2008

RESTAURANT REVIEW | Virginia's

A Coastal Classic: Virginia's on King does right by its homegrown cuisine

   "In all the celebration of mythic Southern food...I miss the sharecropper who scrapped by on salt pork, cornmeal, and molasses. I miss the slave who brought the okra and rice from West African shores. I miss the hardscrabble Southerners who lived on such cuisine before motherly matrons appropriated it as their own." For images that inspire this theme, take a look at the gallery of award winning southern artist D. Pierce Giltner and let the images slowly roll through http://www.dpiercegiltner.com/gallery/gallery.html

Tommy Lark, Folly Beach

1/28/2008 - 9:33am

 

THE CHARLOTTE OBSERVER

HE'S GOT STORIES TO TELL,
NO MATTER THE CANVAS
`SCRAPS OF THE PAST' COME ALIVE AS
ARTIST ILLUSTRATES LIVES OF BLACK PEOPLE
 

Sunday, November 6, 2005
Section: YORK
Edition: THREE
Page: 1Y
DAN HUNTLEY, Staff Writer
Column: DAN HUNTLEY - IN MY OPINION

Illustration: PHOTO:4

Caption: 1. LAYNE BAILEY - STAFF PHOTOS. Pierce Giltner takes apart old tenant shacks, reassembles them and creates paintings.; 2. "I am collecting and preserving the past to present to the future," Giltner says. His open air studio is south of Rock Hill.; 3. LAYNE BAILEY - STAFF PHOTOS. The muted paintings of singers such as Ray Charles, John Lee Hooker, Buddy Guy and Mississippi John Hurt appear as if burned into the wood and then darkened with wood smoke. ; 4. "I've been around talented artists, Pierce is a natural. He's a woodworker who is also a painter," says his wife, Pressly.

Midway down a meandering dirt road, a weathered sign askew appears in the wilderness. Farther into the woods, other oddities surface: In the branches of cedar trees, large metal letters hang randomly like alphabet fruit; a mounted deer head is bolted to a tree trunk with a rusted tin roof over its antlers; a stylish, outdoor bar is fashioned from a junkyard hit by a hurricane.

Juke joint words feverishly slapped upon weathered boards appear on sheds and even on a sculpted out house: "Some got six months, some got a solid year. But me and my buddy we got a lifetime here." - Robert Pete Williams



What these signs say does not matter, what they announce, does: Emerging artist plying his muse.

Like some of his art, Pierce Giltner is a work in progress.

Asked to describe himself and his work, the Chester County native hesitates and then rambles into myriad abstractions: "I am collecting and preserving the past to present to the future," he says in his open air studio of twisted tin and funk. "I paint what I see from the old shoes, quilts and photos in the cabins I'm trying to tell the story of the people I grew up with, I work with, people who worked the land, people who played the blues because they lived the blues."

Who Giltner is: An outsider artist, someone not formally trained in art but who has an obsession to create. His "canvas" is often on objects found by the side of the road - scrap wood, leftover construction supplies, the woods, cardboard boxes, etc.

What Giltner does: He's a carpenter by day who takes apart old tenant shacks - tin roofs, exterior clapboard, interior beaded boards, floorboards and even dovetailed logs. He reassembles them and paints black people - farmers, sharecroppers, children and blues singers on these "scraps of the past."

His friend/adviser/mentor/agent Pat Kabore says Giltner is a rare talent.

"He's raw and naive with something powerful to deliver. but he needs some ripening," said the Spartanburg artist who discovered Giltner's work at an art-in-the-park exhibit. "He's much more than just a young white Southern male who paints black people. In the art world, he's like a country boy who has come to the city and seen his first traffic jam."

She says few things in the art world today are truly original and that Giltner's strength is his originality. He benefits, she says, from not having been exposed to a formal art school.

Giltner's work is not pretty landscapes and still lifes of fruit.

His wooden canvas is as rough-hewn and beaten as the people he paints. On one splintered board, you can still smell the kerosene that once heated the shack. But in another portrait, the planed wood fits like fine tongue-in-groove paneling.

The muted paintings of blues singers such as John Lee Hooker, Buddy Guy and Mississippi John Hurt appear as if Giltner burned the acrylic colors into the wood and then darkened it with wood smoke. In the life-sized Hurt piece, you can almost smell the cigarette smoke and taste the raw, burning sweetness of Mason jar whiskey.

"The blues speak to me," says Giltner as he thumbs through a portfolio (with a rough wood cover) of his work. "I grew up with blacks like this, I know their poverty, their pain."

Giltner and his wife, Pressly, live in a sparse cabin (576 square feet) heated by a wood stove south of Rock Hill. The walls are decorated with old bottles, hawk wings and art history books on Matisse.

Pressly Hall Giltner, a New York City-trained photographer with a master's in fine arts, teases that she is her husband's "interpreter."

"I've been around talented artists, Pierce is a natural," she said. "He's a woodworker who is also a painter. He would not be able to create the art that he does unless he had the skills to salvage those tenant houses."

Giltner met his wife three years ago while he was working with bluegrass impresario and brother-in-law Tom Hall at Chester's "avant-garde performance palace," otherwise known as Campbell's Truck Stop. The Giltners also starred as the twin leads in Hall's hillbilly opera, "The Sharecropper's Daughter."

"Let's see what can I tell you about Pierce," said Hall, a Columbia lawyer and artist who encouraged Giltner to "follow his bliss" into art. "He's a folk artist that paints on the recycled boards of slave cabins. He's capable of massive bursts of creative energy while remaining grounded in the agrarian black culture of the Carolinas. How's that?"

*

Call Dan Huntley with story ideas at (803) 327-8508 or e-mail dhuntley@charlotteobserver.com.

Want to know more about Pierce Giltner's work? Please contact Pierce.


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Charlotte Observer, The (NC)
2007-06-18
Section: METRO
Edition: ONE-THREE
Page: 1B
 

USING SCRAPS TO TELL STORIES
CAROLINA PEOPLE
THEIR FACES, THEIR STORIES
LAYNE BAILEY, LBAILEY@CHARLOTTEOBSERVER.COM

Chester County, S.C., native Pierce Giltner is a carpenter by day and "outdoor artist" for life. Though not formally trained in art, he is driven to create. For his canvases he takes apart old abandoned tenant farm houses and outbuildings in the Chester County countryside. He then uses these "scraps of the past" - tin roofs, clapboard siding, dovetailed logs - to tell stories of the black tenant farmers who once lived in these tumble-down structures. "I'm on a mission to show how (they) lived," Giltner says. "How much more we need to respect that dark and dull time." You can view his work at www.dpiercegiltner.com. Photo by Layne Bailey lbailey@charlotteobserver.com STORY BEHIND THE STORY: "I was drawn to Pierce Giltner's work because something about it touched me. I'm not sure if it was the material he was painting on or the subject matter. He's an example of why I got into visual journalism - to meet and photograph interesting people."