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Born on a farm near the town
of Shaw, Mississippi, Lucy Webb Millsaps grew up with the pastoral fields
of the Delta in her mind’s eye, and she returned to landscapes again and
again in her own artwork, a world flooded with rich green fields and calm
afternoon skies. Years later when she was traveling in Italy or Greece
or France, she would still find herself drawn to "the rich simplicity of
the rural landscape."
Millsaps, who will retire from the College in May, joined the art department in 1969. She received her B.F.A. degree from Newcomb College (Tulane) and M.A. from the University of Mississippi. When William Rowell became the first official chair of the Millsaps Art Department, he invited Millsaps to bring her considerable talents to the College. She readily agreed and has been enriching the lives of Millsaps students ever since. "Lucy has been the backbone of the department for many years," says Millsaps art history professor Elise Smith. "Her clear, steady vision of a strong art department set within the context of a liberal arts college has been crucial to the current strengths of our program, as has her recognition of the need for students to balance creative vision with a solid technical foundation. She’s been a remarkably dedicated, committed teacher, and students often comment on how comfortable they feel in her classroom." Hundreds of student evaluations tell the same story. As one student wrote in an evaluation, "Ms. Millsaps has really helped me get over a lot of fears I had about drawing." Another student described her as "a great professor who allows her students to be creative." And a student in her printmaking class wrote that "Ms. Millsaps makes such a traditionally structured course like this fun and flexible and freeing." She is not only a distinguished teacher, but also a talented artist. Her work has been exhibited in numerous galleries and museums and has won awards from the National Oil Show, National Watercolor Show, and Southern Contemporary Art Festival. "Teaching art at Millsaps has given meaning to my life. But it’s not an easy thing to balance one’s art and teaching. I have not been as prolific an artist as some people are able to be," says Millsaps. "But I do believe teachers should be practicing artists. A teacher is a role model, and a student should see a teacher doing her own work and exhibiting." Gouache. It rhymes with squash. Though she works with color pencils often, Millsaps most enjoys painting landscapes in gouache, an opaque watercolor prized for its vibrant colors. "Lucy’s paintings are beautiful, quietly compelling works with powerfully simplified forms and finely adjusted and juxtaposed colors. Each work reveals great sensitivity to compositional rhythms and tonal balance," states Professor Smith. "I grew up on a farm, and the first memories I have were landscapes," explains Millsaps. "So when I started painting, I used the Delta landscape. Then Alabama, Georgia, then European ones. Just a simple kind of rural beauty. Fields and trees and simple houses." Of course, the landscape is always changing. For Millsaps, this includes the College landscape. William Hollingsworth and Karl and Mildred Wolfe retired before she arrived, leaving a rich legacy in art that was realized in the establishment of a permanent home for the department in the Academic Complex. Millsaps is proud to have followed them and to have taught with William Rowell in years past, as well as with Collin Asmus, Elise Smith, and her former student Lea Barton today. "The art department is stronger than it has ever been because there are more courses offered in both art history and the studio practice of art. The rotating exhibits in the Lewis Art Gallery give students the opportunity to see graduate and professional work in diverse mediums. The department has inaugurated a visiting artist program, and there are more students seriously interested in art than ever before," states Millsaps. At the heart of Lucy Millsaps’ work is a land of endless possibilities, and that is what her students remember most about her: that she shared the world with them with all its many colors.
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