Miriam McClung
Crossville, TN
Birmingham, Alabama artist painting on life and faith for over seventy years.
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Drawings - Landscape
Various landscape drawings Miriam did throughout the decades. She often sketched while she waited at appointment and events.
Flowers
Like most artists, Miriam loved flowers of all kinds. She often painted the flowers people brought her or she planned on giving others. She maintained an extensive garden of flowers around her Birmingham, Alabama home and studio, and often stopped at homes in the neighborhood to paint the neighbor's flowers.
Gardens
Miriam loves to paint at the gardens. That love was passed to her by her mother who kept her own garden of flowers in their backyard growing up. Miriam visited the Birmingham Botanical Gardens to paint and draw throughout the decades and most of her art around gardens was done there.
Genre - Everyday Life and Scenes
Scenes of everyday Southern life and the cultural history of Birmingham and Alabama.
Great Is Thy Faithfulness Series
A series of abstract watercolor collages based on the hymn, "Great Is Thy Faithfulness".
Lake Scenes
Miriam's family owned a cottage on the Coosa River before it was dammed to form Lake Logan Martin in Alabama. Miriam spent many hours as a child with family along the river and cottage and later as an adult on Lake Logan Martin. Note: she was not a fisherman (but her mother was!).
Landscapes
Miriam paints the landscapes of the American South, in particular, her native Alabama but also Tennessee and North Carolina.
Photo Collage Series
A photo collage series based on the artist's own photographs of various subjects.
Portraits - Burnsville
Throughout the 1980s Miriam spent several summers in Burnsville, NC attending the Burnsville Painting Classes (SeeCelo). There were many opportunities to work on portraits in the class with an emphasis on watercolor. During her time at the Burnsville Painting classes, she explored and honed her watercolor techniques on people and landscapes. This phase loosed her style and would play a part in how she approached pastel work in the 1990s.
“My favorite place was the Burnsville Painting Classes. John Bryan and Everret Kivette were teachers there who took over the classes started by Frank Stanley Herring and his wife, Frances. I attended classes there in the summer for two weeks over ten years. The criticism was frank but never cutting. These are some of the portraits from those classes.”
Portraits - Early
This is some of Miriam's early (1960 and earlier) portrait work, including some self portraits.
Portraits - Farnsworth School
The portraits were all done while Miriam studied under Jerry Farnsworth at the Farnsworth School of Art in Florida.
Scenes from the University of Alabama and Tuscaloosa, Alabama
Done around the Tuscaloosa and University of Alabama area while Miriam was an undergraduate fine arts major there from 1952-1956.
Scenes of Israel
In 2003, Miriam took an guided tour of Israel and the Holy Land that centered around sites of biblical significance. These works were created from that experience.
