By Molly Mobley
Contributing writer
Professor Charles Clary has been consumed by a passion for art his entire life. As an art professor and a successful 3-D paper sculptor, he’s now able to share his wonderful art affliction with the world.
Some of Clary’s earliest memories are of observing his mother, an art teacher, at her drafting table and being encouraged to put his imagination of paper.
“My mom had an art room with a drafting table, and my first memory [of art] was me sitting next to her drafting table as she was working on her stuff, and I would be drawing cartoons and weird characters based off of cartoons, and she would always be really supportive of what I was doing and would make helpful commentary every now and again, but got me really excited about what I was doing,” Clary said fondly.
He’s been creating masterpieces ever since.
Educated artist
Raised in Morristown, Tenn., his art eventually drew him to Middle Tennessee State University, where he obtained his first degree in painting. After graduating, Clary decided to pursue other opportunities.
“I took a couple years off and just experienced life,” Clary said. “I got a real job, and I hated every minute of it, and just realized it wasn’t something I wanted to do.”
While working another job, he was still spending his down time creating original works. He had developed a certain style in his last undergrad semester and liked the direction it took.
“It was more me; it wasn’t trying to be anything other than what I wanted to do,” Clary said. “ It was the first time that I felt really comfortable with the work, but it wasn’t ready for grad school, so I took a couple years off. About a year later, I was really fed up, and that’s when I decided to go to grad school.”
Clary enrolled in graduate school at the Savannah College of Art and Design, and from there his work began to infiltrate the art scene. Through the school, he was able to participate in a New York residency art program for three months. This led to an internship in Brooklyn, and eventually developed into a freelance job in Miami. But it was in New York that Clary’s’ art took a turn from 2-D painting to 3-D paper sculptures.
“I wish it was more romantic,” Clary laughed. “But I was in New York, and I was doing large scale wall paintings with hundreds of little cut-out drawings interacting with one another on the wall. I left for home from my internship, got off the subway, and started walking back to my studio, and I passed a paper store. So I walked in, and I’m a little ashamed to say that the paper that struck me the most was done by Martha Stewart; it was her scrapbooking paper.
“I grabbed as much as I could at that time and took it back to my studio and started playing around with a lot of the abstract forms that were in my paintings but cutting those out and layering them on top of one another to give them a two-and-a-half-dimensional environment in which my little characters could reside in and that set me on this path.”
Biological blend of 3-D art
Clary drew inspiration from his other love of music, as well as his fascination with science, and began experimenting with creating complex and beautiful 3-dimensional paper sculptures.
“A lot of my childhood started coming back into my work, and that’s when my art started connecting with my music,” he said. “I started thinking, you know, what if music was this virus that could evolve and then we as the viewers act as the contagion and take it from one place to another place, and it’s this non-dangerous kind of disease.”
This inspiration of infection also stemmed from his deep love of science. Growing up, Clary had been fascinated by the subject, at one point wanting to pursue a career in microbiology. Although the desire to become a scientist faded, the effect of science stayed within his art.
“The beauty of those images never went away,” he explained. “I still have files on my computer that are nothing but weird — funky stuff growing in a petri dishes, I still use it as source material, whether it’s the structure of the piece or the color harmonies used.”
These unique works of art based on biology create a beautiful representation of depth and color, while requiring quite a bit of patience. Clary’s use of science as inspiration led him to create a piece representing his mother’s death from cancer last year.
“Both my parents died last February of cancer, so it was like, trying to come to terms with that disease,” he said. “Looking at it under a microscope and looking at all these close-up images, it’s a beautiful thing, but it’s very destructive. That really influenced the last years worth of work.”
Art across the world
Clary’s artwork has influenced the art scene both nationally and internationally. From Tennessee to Paris, Hong Kong to Arizona, his work has slowly metastasized across the world. Now, as an adjunct teacher at MTSU, he hopes to infect his students with his passion for art.
“When I bring my experiences to my students it really speaks to my decision to do this” he said surely. “I have these two passions, creating and teaching, and both of them function together. I can’t separate them. They can’t exist without the other.”
Now through many galleries and through his curriculum at MTSU, Clary intends to continue creating sculptures and sharing his innate artistic gift with his students and the world.
“I hope to be considered one of the guys that really projected paper art to the next level, or really made some great strides in this,” said Clary expectantly. “Or I hope that students will come back and be like, you were the guy who made me take a left instead of a right, and look where I ended up, and be thankful for that.”
Clary’s works can be found in buildings in Nashville, such as Music City Center and the Pinnacle Bank, as well as on his website.
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