They’ve been meeting for coffee and pastries at 9 a.m. sharp every Sunday for at least the past five years. It started in a booth at the Waffle House in Clinton and then moved to the cozy alcove inside the Starbucks down the road.
They call themselves the Coffee Klatch, the Serendipidudes, the Four Mules of the Apocalypse, or even the Clinton Four. But this group of gentlemen is really just a special support group in the truest sense of the word.
Their topics du jour range from current events to pop culture, but the mainstay is always what brought them together in the beginning: art.
Ron Lindsey, Wyatt Waters, Sam Beibers and Paul Fayard are all well-known in the Mississippi art world with a diverse fan base and regular gallery showings. Their skill and passion for art is obvious, but what lies subtly beneath is compassion, not rivalry, and the authentic critiques of one another’s work.
“As artists, we mostly work by ourselves, so it’s great to have honest feedback from other artists and to get opinions from people you trust,” said Fayard, a New Orleans native and the youngest and newest member of the group.
Each usually brings a piece he’s working on and casually passes it around for criticism. The suggestions can range from adding more color here or there to better defining a shadow or highlight.
Their paths have been intertwined for years, and it’s fair to say that fate brought the foursome together.
All four studied fine art at Mississippi College, and all four studied under the same professor, Dr. Sam Gore. Waters and Lindsey met in a college creative writing class. Beibers and Waters met on the street where Waters was painting a cityscape on a drizzly day. Beibers met Fayard while speaking to his class about painting in the mid ’90s. Fayard met Waters at a gallery show and then befriended Lindsey at church, often borrowing books from him about art theory.
While there is an unspoken, but acknowledged, degree of competition among them, they all agree that supporting and critiquing one another only strengthens their bond. “I think of it as a collective conscience,” said Waters. “This is the pure-of-heart painting. We want to perform well for each other. We’re really competing against ourselves, not each other.”
With such immense talent focused in one small space, it would be natural for the ego to win. But this meeting of the minds does just the opposite for these artists. It brings out their honest insecurities.
“The difference between the amateur and the experienced artist is the amateur is timid and afraid of making a mistake,” said Fayard. “The experienced artist wants to make bold mistakes and appreciates the spontaneity in the process.”
“The hardest part about being an artist is knowing when to stop. You want to make it good; when you try to make it perfect, that’s when you kill it. It’s like a dish. When you overcook it you take all the flavor out of it.”
Paul Fayard
Beibers agrees and said such spontaneity usually comes in the middle of the process. The beginning establishes the piece, and the ending finalizes the details.
“If there’s any magic, the middle is when it will happen,” he said. “I don’t mind failing. I fail a lot. But every now and then I get something decent. I do a lot of work that I just don’t like. I appreciate the freedom of being able to rip it up or scrape it off. It’s just paper and paint.”
And truly, even if an artist’s work is hanging in the most famous of galleries, not every piece they create can be considered a masterpiece.
“You have to do a lot of art to get to the ‘good’ art,” said Lindsey.
It’s a rarity for an artist to be able to make a living through painting, but these four have been able to fit in their love for art into their respective “day jobs.”
Lindsey teaches art at Mississippi State Hospital, Beibers is an exhibit designer at the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science, and Fayard is a ceramicist at The Wolfe Studio in Jackson.
“Wyatt is, of course, the exception,” said Fayard of Waters, who has published several books of his work and illustrated numerous pieces by other authors.
The four often meet outside of Starbucks for art shows or drop by one another’s studios or galleries for a short visit and to see the latest works in progress. After all, the lighting inside the coffee shop is not exactly studio-quality.
“Sometimes it looks completely different in the space where it was created,” said Beibers.
Regardless of the locale, this creative rendezvous is really something each of the artists sincerely appreciates and looks forward to each week.
These artists of Clinton are a modest bunch, considering the extraordinary amount of talent they collectively share. Nonetheless, they know that a kind word of encouragement or a pat on the back from a respected colleague in any field is invaluable.
“There’s a quote by Somerset Long that I really like, and it says something to the extent of, ‘We all ask for criticism, but what we really want is praise,’” said Lindsey. “I think that’s about right.”
STORY Elizabeth Grey
PHOTOGRAPHY Melanie Thortis
