The Gulf oil spill haunts a folk artist’s dreams.

by Ursula Gullow . photo by Anthony Bellemare

Cher Shaffer doesn’t just make art for fun. She makes art for healing. Regarding herself as a “spirit medium,” Shaffer says she never lacks for material. “All I have to do is be quiet for a few moments, and the images come to me. Whatever that image is, it has a life before it ever arrived on a piece of paper, or a canvas, or a piece of clay by my hand.”

Many of Shaffer’s newest pieces, both drawings and dolls, were created as a response to the Gulf Coast oil spill, and she sees them as a way to heal the environmental devastation there. Several drawings appear buoyant, but they came from a deep place within Shaffer. “I started to dream that I was in the ocean with the animals, watching the oil bubble up,” she says.

A collection of her drawings, including several oil-spill-themed pieces, runs from September 10 to October 31 at the Greenhill Center for NC Art in Greensboro. Another show, including oil-smeared dolls, is on display at the Petaluma Art Center in Petaluma, California, through September 19. She’ll show both drawings and dolls at the Atlanta Folk Fest later this month.

Shaffer, 63, has been making art since she was five. Back then, she made dolls out of clay dug from the banks of the Georgia River. Today she still creates her “spirit dolls” from regional clay and stains them with earth pigments just after they leave the kiln to give them an aged appearance. The dots and lines that ornament their bodies are spirit lines, she says, places for energy to enter and exit the body. Shaffer is a self-taught artist, and she says her Cherokee and Melungeon ancestors inspire many images and forms in her work. “It’s as if they are standing right beside me,” she says of her Cherokee forebears.

When she started showing her drawings in public decades ago, Shaffer says people could see some sort of “ethnicity” in it. But they also didn’t know quite what to make of it. “I was this woman from the mountains of West Virginia,” she says. But some people—museum curators in particular—know exactly what to make of it. Her work is currently on display in 15 museums around the country, and celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Jane Fonda and Steve Martin have bought her pieces for their private collections.

Today Shaffer lives in a small cabin in the woods of Crestin, N.C. Her son is the Asheville painter Gabriel Shaffer, and she is currently collaborating with her husband, Denny Connolly, on a series of coffee table books due out by 2012—barring the apocalypse, she jokes.

Her advice to young artists? Learn when something is yours, and when something is someone else’s. Learn to be simple in what you do. “If you can’t get a statement made in seven strokes of a brush, you’re not gonna say it,” she says.

To see more of Shaffer’s work, go to www.chershaffer.com.