In the Hattiesburg area, watercolorist Wyatt Waters is probably best known for his collaborations with local restaurateur Robert St. John, with books such as “Southern Seasons,” “A Mississippi Palate” and “An Italian Palate,” which was done during a 2012 tour of Italy and its restaurants.
For his latest book, “The Watercolor Road: Painting and Writing Through America’s South,” the Clinton resident returns to his roots of the southern United States – in particular, the states of Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. The book – which features 133 paintings, 21 essays and several adages of Waters’ adages of the south – is the result of a two-year journey with his wife Kristi through that region in a 16-foot Casita travel trailer known as “The Pastormobile.”
“The motivation (for the book) has been there a long time; some people call it a ‘bucket list,’ but I’d like to think I’ve got more miles left in me than a bucket,” Waters said. “I’ve always worked on location, and I remember driving around (Mississippi) painting and wanting to do a larger view of the southeast.
“It had been in my craw for a long time, and when things stay there, you kind of need to do it after a while. I wanted to paint a more three-dimensional picture of what it means to be Southern … so it’s really about painting, but it uses the South, so I talk about painting.”
Waters’ plein air watercolors depict rural and urban roads, country roads and highways, forests and eateries such as barbeque joints and other local diners. “The Watercolor Road: Painting and Writing Through America’s South,” which was edited by Kristi, features paintings from the Louisiana bayous to the Blue Ridge Mountains, the marshes of South Carolina and the Florida Keys.
For Mississippi in particular, Waters visited locations such as Hal & Mal’s in Jackson, his gallery in Clinton, and towns like Oxford and Homewood.
“There’s also the place where I grew up: Florence, Mississippi, the lady’s home who taught me,” Waters said. “I started art really, really early … and I went on and got my master’s (degree) and stuff like that. I’ve been going to Learned, Mississippi, for a long time. Jackson Colony in Pass Christian, that was a place I used to spend summers, and Biloxi, the same thing.
“Ocean Springs, which I really love, (is in the book), and Natchez, that’s where we spent our honeymoon. So there are things that are just personal, historic (places). One of the things that kind of formed this thing is that my dad was a history teacher … and he really loved Mississippi history, and that was on a teacher’s salary. So a good bit of my vacation was traveling around looking at Indian mounds and mansions and battlefields – all these things that make up Mississippi.”
Near the end of the book is a painting titled “Coming Home to Roost,” which depicts a group of chickens that was painted in Hattiesburg.
“It’s a bunch of chickens around the yard, because that’s kind of a Southern thing,” Waters said. “(Throughout the book), what I was really trying to do was discover – there are all these ideas about being Southern, and I’d done a good bit of traveling, and I enjoyed that. But every time I traveled, they would talk to me about the South – wherever I was visiting, people wanted to know about the South.
“That was the impetus for me just to do something to help figure out what it meant to be Southern. People have this idea about the South that’s usually based on a movie they saw … and I wanted to get out and figure out what things are today, and discover. I did find that people are pretty much the same all over.”
The book is currently available at local bookstores – including Main Street Books in Hattiesburg – and online at www.wyattwaters.com. Waters will hold a book signing on August 23 at Main Street Books.
“I hope people get the idea of what it means to travel to these places,” Waters said. “It’s always different when you see a photograph of it, or a movie or something, but when you’re there, things just take on a completely different meaning.
“You get some authenticity, and that’s what I like about it. I enjoyed the work.”
