It is rare that an established professional artist would migrate to a small town such as Marion to further a career, but that is just what Anne Maddox has done. She established permanent residence in 2009 and opened a gallery in Centrum Mall.
But, her association with Marion goes further back when she met future business partner, Pam Schlechty in Florida.
“Pam put out a call for artists in Florida when she had a small gallery called Arts and Creative Community,” Maddox said. “She has family up here and she came back. We stayed in touch and remained business partners with a business plan. We have been working on this for 17 years.”
Maddox first came to Marion when the Quilters Hall of Fame opened.
“We did an insert in the newspaper on the arts,” she said. “In fact, we used the Centrum Mall. We had artists in here and performers to help promote what was happening.”
The next step was to establish a base in a building on Spencer Avenue.
“We had a grand opening in the building that later housed Aunt Sue’s Tea Room,” Maddox said. “(Community School of the Arts director) Mark Fauser came to our grand opening before he took charge of CSA. He was new in town. We were calling ourselves Art and Soul Connection. We were hosting events when the owner of the building decided to sell. We didn’t have enough time to arrange for the money to purchase the building. It sold very quickly and we had to move.”
And now Maddox is back at Centrum Mall with her partner, Schlechty, as Centrum Mall manager.
“It has the potential, the way it is set up, for small entrepreneurial businesses and boutiques as a happening place,” Maddox said. “We already have set up food vendors and arts and crafts. We want to build that up and have studios. We think now that the building is being revamped that we can begin to attract new people. The downstairs is already rented out and the new owners are excited about our business plan. Their plans and ours are being meshed to promote the businesses and move forward.”
Operating under a new name, now Creative Community instead of Arts and Soul Connection, and with the new ownership of the mall, Maddox is looking to a larger community.
“We are not just looking for artists,” she said. “That’s why we changed the name from Art and Soul Connection to Creative Community because people couldn’t get beyond the word ‘Art.’ They thought it was all about the arts. It is about creative minds, creative people with ideas. It’s about bringing ideas for business in the community and making them happen. They have creative ideas for the community, but they don’t know how to make them happen. We want to promote a lot of that activity, not just the arts.”
Maddox says the concept is catching on.
“Apart from filling this place with businesses, we have yoga downstairs,” she said. “We have a life coach who will have a small book store along with her coaching. She will be having seminars and workshops as well as working one-on-one with clients. We are promoting things that mesh with our main idea. The main thing is that we want to add to the community. We want to help revitalize downtown by creating something here that will attract people. We want what goes on in here to go back out into the community because we want to nurture the community.”
Marion seems the ideal place.
“There is certainly a need here,” she said. “There is no sense in going where there is not the need for what we have to offer. A lot of small communities are having the problem that their downtowns have fallen by the wayside. With a lot of those towns, it is through the arts that they are making their downtowns attractive.”
Maddox grew up in England in the countryside near Kent. She said her whole family was not just aware of nature but it was a significant part of their daily lives so she knew she wanted to be an artist at an early age. She attended arts college and became a teacher before finding her way to the Bahamas.
“I was so enchanted with the beautiful colors there that I gave up the teaching and went full time into painting,” she said. “Because of my childhood, I was curious about the wild flowers and wanted to know about them. I wanted to know about the environment. The locals couldn’t tell me much. If it didn’t have a use to them, it didn’t have a name. When I went looking for a book on the subject, it just covered all of the tropical floral that you find in Florida even. It was not about indigenous plants at all. I saw the need and began documenting the wildflowers of the island I was on, eventually producing a book.”
That project brought her to Florida.
“I began illustrating a book about the flowers of the Bahamas since there was none available,” she said. “I came to Florida to find a publisher in 1990. I arrived just in time for the collapse of the publishing industry and the housing market and the Gulf War. And everything that went with that. The project got shelved, but I stayed on. Then I met Pam.”
Though she is accomplished in many genres — “jewelry, crystal ware, I want to get back into pottery. I haven’t done it for some time. But I am just a craft person. I do dry flower arrangements, I sew” — her first love is painting, more specifically watercolor.
“It is very versatile,” Maddox said. “I like the way the color glows. When I was traveling, it was the easiest to carry around and work with. I started because of the convenience of it, but now having mastered it, and I say mastered but it is an ongoing learning process. I have gone from minute detail to the very abstract.”
Recent local awards attest to her success. This year she won a statewide contest at Honeywell in Wabash and a juried art show in Hartford City. Before that she gained national recognition in Tennessee.
“I was invited to a national show,” Maddox said. “I didn’t win an award, but being selected is quite an accomplishment. My painting was published in the organization’s national glossy magazine.”
Maddox’ basic philosophy of art centers around world peace and spirituality.
“I did a book of World Prayers for Peace,” she said. “It is a collection of prayers for peace from all of the major religions. That is part of our mission in this business. That is to address every aspect of a person’s life and journey and what makes a community. We try to feed the soul through addressing spirituality or religion, whatever you feel feeds the soul. We already have a group that hosts discussions.”