A Feast for the Senses
The restaurant is well-loved for its delicious food (every local person has a favorite Café dish – for me, it’s Tomatillo Shrimp), friendly staff (the Current’s Jenny Scarborough is part of the crew), and lovely atmosphere. A big part of that atmosphere is the original artwork all around.
Mary Bassell’s paintings are hanging in the downstairs dining section of the Café. This is her first year as a Café artist.
“I really feel honored to have my work here,” she said. “The simple elegance of the wood walls, the big windows with lots of light – it’s a beautiful setting.”
Owner Ruth Toth says she feels fortunate to have such beautiful artwork adorning the Café’s walls.
“Mary’s art is so colorful and local, and it adds to the experience of eating here. And I enjoy looking at it myself,” she said.
In this, their 24th season with the restaurant, Ruth and her husband, Bob, were happy to invite Mary to show her work.
“We’ve had Ann Ehringhaus’s photos since we first opened, but now she’s doing other things,” Ruth said. “We’ve had Debbie’s paintings upstairs for years, and now we have Mary’s work.”
In the first month the Café was open this spring, Mary sold two paintings right off the wall.
One couple came for dinner one night, left the island, then drove back the next day to purchase the painting they realized they couldn’t live without. It was a Tuesday, though, and, as everyone knows, the Café is closed on Tuesday. But Bob was willing to come down to the restaurant on his day off and make the sale for Mary.
All of the artwork money goes to the artist; the restaurant doesn’t take a cut. Bob says that he and Ruth enjoy having a place where the artists can show their work, and they’re “glad to support them.”
For Mary, having her paintings appreciated and displayed is a lifelong dream come true.
As a little girl, Mary Bassell said she wanted to be an artist. She was advised by her parents to consider being a teacher, nurse or nun instead. (Her mother was a nurse and her only aunt was a teacher and a Dominican nun!) Mary went to college for liberal arts, worked in restaurants and offices, then raised a family, and then earned a Master’s degree in clinical psychology. After moving to Ocracoke, she opened a small gallery called Heart’s Desire, where she sold crafts by American artisans, including herself. Her own creations were in papier-mache, stained glass, copper work, and jewelry.
Those crafts allowed her to explore her creativity, but she still always longed to work “on paper.”
“I still carried the dream of painting,” she said. “And then one day, when I turned fifty, I got in my old turquoise truck, went to Molasses Creek, and started pencil sketching.”
She began by painting Ocracoke’s many little creeks, and says the form and shape of them are always a great subject for her artwork.
“I like to paint things I want to experience and explore,” she said. Mary enjoys getting outdoors for plein aire painting (that’s French for painting outside), but if she can’t be there in person, she works in her studio from photographs she takes.
“I started at Molasses Creek, and I paint it every year. And I love to paint Southpoint Road,” she said. “It’s constantly changing – the sky color and light, the grasses growing, then blooming in the late summer.”
Mary took basic art courses in college and has attended some workshops with nationally-known artists, but she is mostly self-taught, especially in pastels. She now works in soft pastels, acrylics and watercolors. She favors big pastel paintings and small watercolor studies. She dabbles in gyotaku (Japanese-style fish prints) and has recently added pet portraits to her repertoire. Send her a photo of Fido and she’ll send you a 6 x 6 ready-to-hang canvas with his likeness in acrylics.
“It’s fun to diversify,” she said. “Trying something new like the pet portraits gives me something new to enjoy, something fun that has aesthetic value for me.”
Mary has designed t-shirts for the Community Store and Ocrafolk Festival, and created an album cover for local fiddler David Tweedie. She’s shared her love of soft pastels by teaching a few workshops to aspiring artists. She sells notecards and small prints of her paintings in several local shops, and has some small original watercolors for sale at Books to Be Red and some small original pastels at Bella Fiore.
Mary’s paintings also hang in Down Creek Gallery, where she’ll be having an art opening reception (free wine and snacks; live music, too!) on July 19th from 5 – 8 p.m.
“I like creating with my hands,” she said. “It’s satisfaction for me. I’m just so grateful others like and appreciate what I do.”
Mary works fulltime as an artist now, although she also frequently babysits for her adorable 3 year-old granddaughter, Emma, who lives in Kill Devil Hills.
For over a decade, Debbie Wells has provided artwork for the café’s upstairs dining room. In the paintings and boxes now hanging, you can see some different styles and materials that Debbie has worked with over the years.
Debbie’s been painting for about twenty years, ever since a wonderful trip to Santa Fe inspired her. She started off with watercolors, then started working with gouache (that’s French for opaque watercolors), and then acrylics on wood.
“I love working on wood board,” she said. “I like the surface texture for painting.”
Also at the Café are some 12” x 12” unglazed ceramic tiles that the late Tom Leonard gave her years ago. She painted them with mandela-inspired designs and says the square format was fun to work with.
Debbie had started painting and showed her work at the Back Porch Restaurant back when she owned it, but when Daphne and Howard Bennink bought the restaurant in 1997, she was able to become a fulltime artist.
“I’m happiest when I’m making art,” she said. “It’s really satisfying. It nourishes me.”
In the past few years the economy has made it harder to survive as an artist. Debbie decided to turn her big studio into a weekly rental, and moved her art supplies into a smaller outbuilding.
“I’m still doing art. I stay at it and still have the dream of going back to it fulltime,” she said.
Although most of her artwork is at the Café or her home studio, Debbie and her artist friends (Bob Ray, Barbara Hardy, Roy Revels and Ann Ehringhaus) have organized five shows together on the island. One was at the dump; another was at the beach.
Debbie has also added her painterly touch to the ladies' room at the Back Porch and recently collaborated with Len Skinner on the throne for a school/community production of Macbeth. She and Len also made a map of Ocracoke and postcards that are available at local shops, and she decorates little tin boxes for sale at Books to Be Red and Secret Garden Gallery.
She’s done some design work on Ocracoke houses – she got lots of calls after her own house was on the historic home tour several years ago.
“I’m still always working on my house,” she said. “It’s really fun and now I’m into outdoor art projects.”
She recently scored an old outhouse that once belonged to Sam Jones, and installed it in her yard near the chicken coop. Debbie’s chicken coop is, by the way, a wonder to behold. I wish my house were that beautiful.
Debbie says that although she still enjoys doing the landscape paintings that she started out with, much of her recent work has been smaller. The size of her new studio has made her think small, but also, she says, small stuff is what’s selling. She’s sold three pieces already this year from the Café collection.
But mostly, she’s moved away from paintings to “anything with an iconic feel.”
“My newer pieces have more dimensions; they are visually and conceptually more interesting to me,” she said.
Her recent subjects have interesting imagery that she likes to explore, including a series of works with animals. Her cash cow icon at the Café was inspired by another cow – a large papier-mache one covered in advertising that she made for the dump art show.
“The cow symbol is related to my interest in food,” she said. “I was thinking about how cows are sacred in other cultures, but we see our animals as commerce."
At the Café are some of her egg boxes, in which she uses actual emu eggs. The eggs represent so much that Debbie considers important – chickens, life, fertility, divinity, and, above all, femininity.
“There’s not enough of a female voice in the world,” she said.
Debbie is happy that her artwork can find a place in the Café. She has a longtime connection with Ruth – they met in their twenties and worked in the kitchen together at the Back Porch.
“Ruth is one of my first close friends on Ocracoke, and that makes me happy, knowing that I’ve had a friend in my life for over 30 years and we’re still doing stuff together,” she said.
“I love being at the Café and being part of her beautiful work,” Debbie said, referring to Ruth’s culinary talents. “She’s the draw; we’re just the decoration.”
