Illustrator leans toward the moody and the Gothic
Photo by Rachel Pressley
Southern Gothic fiction is often a shadowy blend of the everyday and the otherworldly. Similarly, the line between written and visual art is a blurry one for Evelyn J. Mayton.
The portrait artist is passionate about literature; as an administrator of the online William Faulkner Book Club, she got to know biographer Carl Rollyson, and this led to her illustrating Rollyson’s 2022 book William Faulkner: Day by Day (University Press of Mississippi), a meticulous study of the author’s personality and preoccupations.
Now, Mayton has contributed a number of drawings to another book in Rollyson’s Day by Day series — a second such volume on confessional-poetry icon Sylvia Plath, out in August — as well as three-dozen illustrations for Raymond Atkins’ poetry collection They All Rest in the Boneyard Now and Other Poems (Etowah River Press). Boneyard includes drawings of old gravesites — “but I don’t trace or create exact renderings,” Mayton emphasizes. “Perfection is boring.”
Faulkner remains front and center for Mayton, who is particularly proud of her 17 drawings for poet Robert Hamblin’s Faulkner: Critical Commentary in Verse, published in April. “I love working on anything Faulkner related,” Mayton says. “The illustration of both [the Atkins and Hamblin] poetry books are rather basic line drawings,” she notes, “because the books’ importance is the beautiful writing.”
Mayton’s family roots are in Virginia and Kentucky, but her attraction to regional literature has prompted frequent forays into the Deep South — to Rowan Oak, the Faulkner family home in Oxford, Mississippi; to the Eudora Welty House & Garden in Jackson; and to Milledgeville, Georgia, site of Andalusia Farm, Flannery O’Connor’s family estate. (Mayton’s portrait of O’Connor graces the library where the author’s letters and manuscripts are housed.)
The sketch artist says she had a knack for portraiture and drawing from an early age, encouraged by early teachers — she mentions art teacher Jon Fordyce and his wife Linda, and another grade-school teacher, Dean Howell — with whom she still keeps in touch.
“I used to skip art class to go read in the library. Mr. Fordyce said, ‘Why don’t you draw your books?’”
But making art didn’t come to the fore until Mayton’s move to Hendersonville several years ago. “I worked full time, like most people do, and just did not draw or paint. I had horses, read a prodigious amount, kept thinking about writing. But now I have the time, and I draw mostly every day.”
Beside her literary drawings, Mayton — whose increased output has led to private commissions — produces rural landscapes in graphite and pencil, along with occasional work in watercolor and acrylic. “I love graphite and charcoal — the moody feeling of that medium.”
Enthusiasm is the prevailing motif. Mayton still consumes local, regional, and national literature with reverence and spirit, using her prominence as a portrait artist to amplify underground voices. One of her newest literary passions is the work of the late author William Gay (1941-2012), whose novels and short stories are set in the mid-twentieth-century South but whose work was not widely recognized until shortly before his death at age 70. Mayton has begun illustrating a book of essays to generate more interest in Gay.
“And I’m currently working on my own prose with my own drawings,” she reveals. “But portraiture has been kind to me.”
Evelyn J. Mayton, Hendersonville. Mayton’s illustrations are included in Carl Rollyson’s Sylvia Plath: Day by Day, Vol. 2 (University Press of Mississippi, upress.state.ms.us); in Robert Hamblin’s Faulkner: A Critical Commentary in Verse (via Amazon); and in Raymond Atkins’ They All Rest in the Boneyard Now and Other Poems (from Etowah River Press, via Amazon). See “Evelyn Mayton” on Facebook or e-mail emayton@hotmail.com.