Ellington

Cliff Speaks would rather not know where his art will take him. "Halfway through, it could turn to a completely different direction."

Speaks, 40, lights up when he talks about art. "I never get to talk about it, so when I do, I don't shut up." He admits that his art physically pulls him. "You have to get things out," he said, and it's better to get it on canvas.

Born in Yazoo City, Speaks lives in Brandon with his wife of nine years, Tanya, and their two children: Sophie, 7, and Evan, 5. Speaks graduated from Brandon High, and attended Mississippi College for a year on a football scholarship. Quickly realizing that football wasn't his thing, Speaks transferred to Mississippi State for a few years, completing his degree in Fine Art at Southern in 1995.

Speaks was an artist at an early age. "In fifth grade … I sat in the back of the class … and drew stuff on people's hands and charged them a nickel." He began painting in the 9th grade, presenting his parents with a huge scene for Christmas. "Everything I do seems to be a big," he told me. The painting—too big for the house—ended up in the attic, but that hardly stopped him.

He asked for a guitar instead of a class ring for his high school graduation. He promptly took it apart and painted it—ruining the guitar, of course, but having a great time.

Music is a big influence for Speaks. "Do you 'see' music," I asked him. "That's probably the best way to describe it … The music that I liked the most, that's what I saw. … The person wasn't separated from the instrument, nor was (the instrument) separated from the music." He recently created a large work commissioned for Brad Arnold of Three Doors Down. Arnold proudly displays the panels in his Gulf coast home.

Among Speaks' other influences, he cites Van Gogh's brush strokes, Moore's sculptures, the chaos of Dada, and most strongly, Kandinsky's theories of color and shape, along with Pollock—a working-class drunk, as Speaks put it—and his emphasis on process.

View Speaks' work at the Jackson Street Gallery in Ridgeland, the Silver Star Casino restaurant in Philadelphia, and soon at the Infusion gallery in Los Angeles. See his Web site at http://www.speaksart.com