During a break between sessions at Saturday’s Savannah Book Festival, I revisited the exhibit of paintings by Preston Russell in the parlor of the Telfair Academy.
After hearing so many words in the previous couple of hours, the immersion in images was a welcome relief.
As indicated by the name of the exhibit, “Low Country Memories,” Russell’s work has a clear grounding in place and in history. The show comes down on Sunday, so you’re running out of time to see it.
Russell’s paintings are well suited for the Academy, which itself has played such an important role in Savannah’s civic life.
The buildings around Telfair Square — Trinity United Methodist Church plus the Telfair Museums’ old Academy and newer Jepson Center for the Arts — lend an additional depth to the book festival’s increasingly impressive offerings.
Former Vice President Al Gore could hardly have found a more beautiful stage than Trinity, and I was lucky to see two writers — Susanna Sonnenberg and J.R. Moehringer — talk about their work in the sculpture gallery at the Telfair Academy.
The writers’ transitory words seemed especially rich juxtaposed with the permanence of the art behind them — the sculpture of the dying Gaul and paintings by the likes of Frederick Carl Frieseke and Gari Melchers.
In just six years, the Savannah Book Festival has grown explosively, with sold-out special events at Trustees Theater and impressive turnout for the Saturday festival with as many as six authors appearing simultaneously throughout the day.
While a few hundred were waiting to have Gore sign their books, I tried to get into Paula McClain in the Jepson’s Neises Auditorium, but that was full. At the same time, more than 100 folks were listening to Back in the Day bakery owners Cheryl and Griffith Day in a tent in the square. Another 125 were listening to Sonnenberg.
Later, I was among the many who couldn’t get into the Telfair Academy rotunda to hear T.C. Boyle, but there were plenty of other diversions.
Mentally exhausted, I left before the end of the presentations, but did watch historian Garry Wills, who appeared last week on “The Colbert Report,” via C-SPAN’s Book TV speaking to a sizable crowd in the final time slot at Trinity.
I don’t know what the best course is for the book festival going forward. The event has already grown to the point where all six presentation spaces are full or close to it.
To accommodate additional visitors, the event will need to spread out in either time or space. Both choices would present logistical problems.
But those are good problems to have.
City Talk appears every Sunday and Tuesday. Bill Dawers can be reached via billdawers@comcast.net and http://www.billdawers.com. Send mail to 10 E. 32nd St., Savannah, GA 31401.