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I am and artist, and I've had an interesting life, I might tell you when....... I was at a ball game and had to pee so
bad my bladder was about to burst as I was heading to the bathroom and ran into, and I mean literally ran into Joe Namath,
who grabbed and picked me up...but I am sure you'd rather hear about my roots and how I came to be the woman I am today...
| Eslye through the 60's, 70's, 90's and 2007! |
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I was born in 1939 at the close of the Great Depression to poor working parents who made
their living selling peaches by the side of the road near the sleepy little southern town of Macon Georgia. My mother named
me Eslye Lee and I was the first daughter and the second child of seven children to Mildred and Roy Moate.
Mildred and Roy were stoic people tempered by the times, a product of the society in which they lived. Their world was a lean
agricultural world where fortunes were built by the sweat of hard labor, land and luck. Swedish, English and Scot by ancestry,
Mildred's people had settled in Crawford County, Georgia in the late 1700's. No doubt part of the flotsam and jetsam of human
debris cast off by England as Georgia was originally founded as an English prison colony. Eslye's mother, Mildred Eslye Dixon
was the daughter of Charles Thomas Dixon, a farmer and the son of Thomas T. Dixon, a Confederate private who had returned
home after his service to settle down and make a life for himself and his family.
No one really knows where Roy, Eslye's father, came from. He never talked about it. He, like many men of the times, just
ended up in a new place looking to make a new start.
A wisp of a girl growing up in rural Georgia, Little Miss Eslye began her calling at the tender age of ten. A child of proud
and quiet people, she saw a simple beauty in the world that she felt she could only express through color and canvas. Nurtured
by her teachers Mrs. Ida Jones Brown and Nina Childs, Eslye refined her brush and her confidence and struck out to become
the artist she is today.
Through the years she has studied the lives and works of other great artists like Cassatt, Casoni, Chagall, Degas, Gauguin,
Goya, Homer, Manet, Matisse, Millet, Monet, O'Keefe, Renior, Sargent, Toulouse-Lautrec, Tropp, Van Gogh, Windkos, Whistler
and Wyeth. Along the way she has supplemented herself as a graphic artist and architectural draughtswoman.
Today her patrons come from as far away as California, New York and England. One of her pieces titled "Macon Cherry Blossom
Festival" is part of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother's private collection. It is her dream to one day hang her
paintings in some of the same great hallowed halls and museums that exhibit the works of the Masters. However, regardless
of her fame as an artist she has never forgotten her roots. She is always quick to point out that anyone who knows a bare-footed
little girl who liked to chase grandma's chickens in the red Georgia clay, knows her.
Everyone is gone now but each one of these memories find rebirth with this deep rooted love for the South. No matter where
she resides the red clay will always be between her toes. And whenever the South gives up one of Her stories to her paintings:
in the people residing here, Her floral splendor, or Her panorama of landscapes that fill Her countryside, Eslye is grateful.
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