Past Exhibit - “Twilight Scenes” by William Flanagan

(Main Lobby Area, Mullins Library)

The University Libraries are pleased to host an exhibit of paintings created by local artist William Flanagan. These Room,” “Midnight Oil,” and “A Little Night Music” feature merely the gable or roof line of a historic home from a sharply angled perspective that gives dominance to the numinous skies and a peeping full moon. Some of the images in this exhibit use street-level views of local landmarks such as Dickson Street’s own George’s dark watercolors lure us across the invisible boundary between familiar and unseen worlds. “Twilight Scenes” features buildings, homes and monuments as viewed through a midnight blue point of view that “exploits contrasts and plays with contradictions,” to use Flanagan’s words.

An oppressive night sky lowered by restless clouds is Flanagan’s signature backdrop. Paintings such as “Sheryl’s Majestic Lounge and UARK Theatre or Eureka Spring’s Palace Bath House and Basin Park Hotel. But when viewed through the lens of Flanagan’s twilight, even these straightforward scenes convey a dampened, other-worldly look. Flanagan says, “I look for the mysterious within the familiar, and I want viewers to feel it, too.”

Three of the paintings, “Graveyard Cat,” “Gregg Monument” and “Welcome,” take us to a place that we might not wish to visit on a moonlit night—Evergreen Cemetery between University Avenue and Center Streets in Fayetteville. Another painting, “Ghost in Carnall Hall,” frankly admits to the mood conveyed more subtly in other paintings—Flanagan’s twilight world is haunted by others that not all of us may see.

Flanagan’s paintings have been exhibited numerous times in the Fayetteville area, including the Fayetteville Town Center, Arsaga’s Espresso Café, The Gallery, the Perk, Fayetteville City Hall, the Bank of Fayetteville, and the Fayetteville Fine Arts Festival. Flanagan’s images have also been used for historic preservation purposes. His painting of Carnall Hall was used as the promotional image by the Committee to Save Carnall Hall and currently hangs in the lobby of that renovated building. In addition, his painting of the Ozark Theater was used to inspire renovation and purchase by the Bank of Fayetteville, and his painting of the Gregg Monument in historic Evergreen Cemetery was donated to the Evergreen Cemetery Security Fund for fund-raising purposes.