Walk The Walk

There's something distinctly Southern about the hospitality at the annual White Street Studio Walk in Eureka Springs.

It's a reunion, of sorts, a time of year when locals and regular visitors get together after a long, isolated winter.

It's an open house, as artists who live and work along White Street let fans and friends in to see their personal spaces.

It's about a group of friends, founders of the walk, who have known each other since art school in Memphis, Tenn.

And it's about cookies made from family recipes. What's more Southern than that?

Southern-born Eleanor Lux, Mary Springer and Zeek Taylor are the founders of the walk, which celebrates a quarter of a century tonight.

Lux remembers how it all started.

"I was sitting around, looking at all these studios on White Street. I knew Mary and Zeek from Memphis, so I called them and said, 'What would you think if we just open up the street for one night?'"

Ten locations will host 40 artists, and most of them return to the same spots year after year, Taylor says. "They have dibs, and they don't give them up." John Rankine will set up to sell his line of altered denim clothing in Taylor's driveway, for example, and wood carver Doug Stowe will join Lux in her gallery as he always does. And both resident artists will show a variety of their work.

Taylor is best known for his paintings of chimps, stylishly dressed and set in various situations -- on a train, on a swing, in a garden. Since his recent one-man show at the Arts Center of the Ozarks -- at which he sold eight of the 12 originals on display -- he's had time to create four new works: a cowboy chimp, a hippie chick chimp, an iris and a lily.

He's also made a bushel of cookies, his mother's recipe for caramel dip, his partner Dick's grandmother's cheese roll and acquired 60 liters of wine.

"I have lots of standard recipes I make because people look forward to eating them each year," Taylor says. The bushel of cookies recipe "is so big, I have to mix it up in a huge ice chest." It includes 21 cups of flour, 12 cups of oatmeal, a dozen eggs, a pound of pecans, butterscotch chips, raisins and maple syrup, he says, and it too is his mother's recipe.

Taylor says he began offering food the first year of the White Street Walk.

"I'm just a good ol' Southern boy, and I always think if you have guests in your house, you need to provide them with nourishment and drink," he says. "And if it's hundreds of people, so be it. It's a lot of work, but it's worth the effort."

Visitors often try to wheedle recipes out of Taylor, particularly the caramel dip for apples.

"I don't give it out -- because people look forward to it so much," he says. "I tell them it'll be in my obituary, and they can have it then."

On the business side, he adds, "this is one of the events that helped establish me as an artist."

And that's true for Lux, too. The surprise for her fans is often the breadth of her art.

"I do everything. I just like it," she says simply. "I've always thought of myself as an artist. I think I was 4 when I started thinking that's what I wanted to do."

When Lux moved to Eureka Springs in 1970, she was making stained glass. But "I didn't like to cut the stuff, and it was very risky with my children in the studio. Someone had a loom at one of the hotels, and I started demonstrating. When winter came, and the hotel closed, they gave me the loom. It's still my favorite."

But Lux also makes jewelry, does metalwork, draws -- and at 75, she has no intention of slowing down. "I feel so good!" In fact, in October, she's headed to Borneo -- by herself -- to a bead convention.

After all, after 25 years of the White Street Walk, what could worry her?

"There are a few rules" for the event, she says. "Please do not give away red wine. Someone might go to your neighbor's house and spill it. And please find someplace else to park your car; the visitors need the spaces for that night."

She pauses, then laughs. Those just might be the only rules, she admits.

"What's really fun is we all know our duties, so we meet in March for 15 minutes and then put this thing on. And it's fun every year."

NAN What's Up on 05/15/2015