Great art and great weather drew big crowds of Nashvillians to last month’s First Saturday Art Crawl. Inside The Arts Company there were people of a different kind: two-dimensional figurative works by contemporary artist Denise Stewart-Sanabria. These paintings are part of a larger oeuvre of life-like charcoal portraits she calls “plywood people.” Stewart-Sanabria has been taking her plywood people on the road and having fun showing them in several solo and group exhibitions. Most of the work at the ArtCrawl was from the abandoned photo album series the artist had at the Tennessee Arts Commission Gallery’s Skeletons in Closets.
Denise Stewart-Sanabria paints hyperrealist “portraits” of everything from jelly
doughnuts to people. Stewart-Sanabria was born in Massachusetts and received her B.F.A. in Painting from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She currently lives in Knoxville, TN.