I’m a Mississippi artist creating expressive mixed-media paintings inspired by the places, people and ordinary moments that become part of who we are.
Finding my way back to making.
For most of my adult life, I was a nurse. I built a career, raised a family and got very good at keeping a very full life moving. Somewhere along the way, though, creating became something I squeezed into the leftover spaces.
During a season of profound change, I found my way back to making things with my hands. Painting gave me a place to be still, to notice what was right in front of me and to make room for the parts of myself that had gotten a little lost in all the doing.
Eventually, I realized I didn’t just want to make more room for art. I wanted to build a life around it. So after more than a decade in nursing, I stepped away from that career and into this one. Sav Rogers Art became my full-time work and, in a lot of ways, a homecoming.
Some places are more than places.
I grew up knowing that some places could hold you. My grandparents’ home was one of them. My Nanny was my first home, fierce, bold, safe and constant. Even after life moved us elsewhere, summers brought me home to Nanny and Pa.
Years later, I began painting Enon, Nanny’s church. Somewhere between sketching the steeple and remembering everything that place represented, I found myself crying over the canvas.
That was when I understood more clearly what I had been painting all along.
Places hold stories. Landscapes hold people. Sometimes, ordinary ground becomes holy ground.
The holy ground beneath our feet.
These days, I find myself painting the places and moments we don’t always realize are important while we’re living them. A church. A baseball field. Cypress trees reflected in still water. A landscape from a trip you never wanted to end. The view from a place that once felt like home.
Sometimes we know we’re standing on holy ground. Sometimes we don’t recognize it until later. My work is about noticing what matters while we’re still standing in it and preserving some of it through color, texture and paint.
A note about Shug.
My Nanny called us “Shug,” drawn out in the kind of Mississippi twang I didn’t realize I’d inherited quite so strongly myself. We lost her last year, and I’m still learning all the little ways a person stays with you after they are gone.
These days, you’ll hear me start a painting with, “Hey Shug, you wanna paint something?” It started without much thought, but somewhere along the way I realized I was carrying her into the studio with me.
And maybe that’s what so much of this work is about. Holding onto the people, places and ordinary moments that become sacred to us. Noticing the holy ground while we’re still standing on it, and remembering it when we’re not.
If you hear me call you Shug, now you know. She’s still here in some of this, too.
Come see what I’m making.
Explore the places, stories and landscapes taking shape in the studio.
Sav Rogers Art 