After our prolonged winter, watching throngs of people returning to the banks of our lakes and river has been a particularly welcomed sight. Paying close attention to these renewed signs of life is painter Jim Conaway, an astute observer of the Minnesota landscape. A new exhibition of his work, currently on view at the Groveland Gallery, provides a colorful view of Life on the Mississippi. While the exhibition title reflects the subject matter of Conaway’s newest paintings, it also provides an apt metaphor for his extraordinary life.
Conaway has always lived in cities along the Mississippi River. Born in suburban St. Louis, he was already an accomplished oil painter as a teenager. “I always knew it was what I was going to do,” he said in a recent interview in his bright studio in the North Loop warehouse district.
Having joined the U.S. Navy after high school, he spent three years as a radio operator on an oil tanker in the Mediterranean. In an extraordinary stroke of fate, he was allowed to establish his first painting studio onboard the naval vessel. Following military service, he took advantage of the GI Bill to attend Southern Illinois University, across the river from his hometown, where innovative designer R. Buckminster Fuller was on the faculty of the school’s Institute of Art and Design. Fuller’s theories of deductive reasoning made a profound and lasting impression on Conaway’s approach to painting.
A teaching job took him to yet another river town, Davenport, Iowa, where he eventually enrolled at the University of Iowa in one of the country’s first MFA programs. Here he had another chance encounter with a legendary figure. In the summer of 1964, British painter David Hockney had been hired by the University for his first U.S. teaching appointment. While Hockney’s signature use of exuberant color was already evident, “He really emphasized the importance of drawing,” Conaway remembers. “He told us that if you can’t draw, you can’t paint.”
A final migration up the Mississippi brought Conaway to Minneapolis in the late 1960s. Since then, he has become an influential member of the Twin Cities’ art scene. For more than 30 years, he taught studio art and ancient art history at Hamline University where he also ran the University’s art gallery. Since retiring from teaching in 1996, he has devoted himself full-time to painting and his work has been exhibited and collected throughout the country. When asked if he was ever tempted to leave Minneapolis for New York, he replied with an emphatic, “No! I have everything I want here: a good family life, many longtime friends, and an active art community.”
A founding member of the Traffic Zone artist cooperative, Conaway has maintained a studio just three blocks from the Mississippi since 1993. In 2016 Conaway also moved his residence to the riverfront, a move that piqued an intense curiosity about the river’s history and lore. An avid reader, Conaway immersed himself in the pivotal role the river has played in the life of the city. “As a dedicated walker, the riverside is my favorite place,” he says. “For the past decade, my work has been about the Mississippi River. My paintings are all abstractions painted in my studio from shapes, lines, and colors that are stored in my memories.”
Life on the Mississippi is his first show since before the pandemic. After a long hiatus, he had just returned to figure painting when COVID forced him to stop working with live models. On his daily walks, Conaway observed the people along the river and started incorporating them as abstract forms in his paintings. “I’d never seen walkers so excited to be out,” he said. That palpable joy is on full display in his most recent paintings.
“The new work is a departure,” says Sally Johnson, Director of the Groveland Gallery, where Conaway has shown his work for almost 50 years. “Previous paintings focused on the more industrial and urban side of the river and used more somber color. The softer palette of these new paintings reflects a different aspect of the landscape he knows so well. His painting has always vacillated between representation and abstraction, but the figure hasn’t made an appearance for many years.” For the current show, Johnson has included some of Conaway’s early figure paintings from the 1970s.
Life on the Mississippi will be on view through July 16. It provides an excellent opportunity to visit the elegant Groveland Gallery located in the Frank B. Long mansion, a Lowry Hill historic landmark.
Life on the Mississippi:
Paintings by Jim Conaway June 11 – July 16
(opening reception with the artist on Saturday, June 18)
Groveland Gallery
25 Groveland Terrace
Tuesdays – Saturdays, 12 – 5pm
Free and open to the public
