Arts for Community and Connection
- Rachel Lewis Hillburn
- Jun 8
- 8 min read
By Rachel Lewis Hillburn
“I want to see this city alive.”
Greyson Davis goes by his artist name, HP FANGS. He was on the cover of the very last edition of Encore in 2020.
“There's absolutely no reason, with the amount of talent that we have in Wilmington, that we can't compete with Asheville or outdo Charlotte or Durham. We have all of these things.”
Nugget is a visual artist who, most recently, creates large public installations. She believes the original Encore was a portal of sorts into an artistic community that helped wandering creatives find a path.
“I'm a huge proponent of creating the life you want to live and creating the community you want to be a part of and creating the town, the scene that you want to thrive in.”
Five artists are contributing their work to a re-imagined Encore, which is taking its mission of community service and connection to the arts a step further.
For artist and designer Jeffrey Vossler, art allows storytelling in a way he characterizes as “passive.”
“There’s a way that you’re not really pushing people into your messaging or what you're trying to say; you actually are hoping for them to figure it out themselves.”
Brandon Blanks arrived in Wilmington to find a thriving art scene. During Covid, he saw the community founder, and he doesn’t believe it has recovered.
“There's more to Wilmington than nightlife. There's a lot of energy here. There's a lot of creativity.”
Broadening the umbrella to include non-artists, people who love art, those who might be afraid of it, those who feel art-curious but uncertain, all of them – and others will be welcome in this space.
Angela Fernot, Director of Communications at Cape Fear Literacy Council, is also a visual artist.
“Encore, to me, feels like an opportunity to bridge those gaps and to bring that connection and that community that I think all of us are seeking, even when we don't know how to say it out loud.”
This effort-in-progress began with Executive Director Shannon Gentry, who once served under former Editor-in-Chief Shea Carver (now Editor-in-Chief of Port City Daily) as Assistant Editor.
“You know, it's invigorating. It's exciting in a time when, sometimes, it's hard to feel that way. For me, this vision is all about connection and rebuilding connection, and that looks like a lot of different things.”
She started at Encore as an intern while still in graduate school and, for the better part of a decade, loved the work.
Then a global pandemic slowed economies around the world, local advertising dried up, and Encore was put to sleep.
“Looking right at you, 2020! I think it's fair to say a lot of us felt like our game board was tossed up in the air.”
Putting the pieces back on the board, for Gentry, begins with art and the people who make it.
Says Gentry, “The arts are a bridge. They are the ultimate equalizer of sorts, and they are also a way of storytelling that can reach more people.”
Then, as any good editor-in-chief of a newly-conceived, gestating publication would, she points to the role arts play in a healthy economy.
“It has a huge impact on our economy that is unmatched by a lot of other industries, and we underestimate the arts in so many ways in terms of its literal and figurative value to us.”
Although there’s a lot she wants to accomplish with Encore that goes beyond arts and culture, the rebuilding is grounded there.
“You have to connect on things that are less politicized these days, in order to be able to talk about the rest.”
Meet the Artists
Angela Fernot, Illustrator, Comic Book Artist
Scratching the Surface
Angela Fernot finds it difficult to describe her art.
“This is always the hardest thing for me to talk about. … I am a comic book artist at heart. I am trained in watercolor illustration and realism. I am capable in graphic design, but my love and my passion is 100% in comic books and illustration.”
Comic books, to Angela Fernot, are one of the highest art forms. She holds up Calvin and Hobbes as a powerful example.
“There's a lot of incredible life lessons that Bill Watterson was telling in what misled audiences to think it was a simple form.”
A few years ago, Fernot started producing a series of pieces that were personal – just for her.
“I was feeling burnt out and frustrated and challenged, and I needed to make something that was just mine, and I did a sketch.”
A common theme among these artists, which could be tooth-grindingly obvious but still needs to be said, is that they express using their art – which often means using their art to work through issues.
“I am a deeply people-pleasing person, and I want to bring harmony and love and joy to the people around me, even if it's at my own expense, and it means that sometimes I've internalized feelings that are painful, that I need to let out and don't know how to express. And so this piece became a manifestation of all of that.”
The piece, called Scratching the Surface, is a confrontational, symbolically-rich portrait of a woman dragging her fingernails over the mask she wears.
Fernot “re-imagined” the piece for Encore.
BRANDON BLANKS
Sequential Comic Artist and Writer
Brandon Blanks can draw anything.
“I knew that I was an artist before I actually knew what the word was. My mother bought this chalkboard set for me when I was like 3 or 4 years old, and she had friends over, and I was sitting there doodling on the chalkboard.
“One of her friends – they gasped out real loud.”
Brandon, the toddler, had drawn the cover of a Super Mario Brothers game cassette case.
“They told me it looked like I traced it. But you can't trace on a chalkboard.”
That event was a bellwether for his future art. Today, he prefers to draw comics.
“I mean, I am a traditional artist,” says Blanks. “I have a BA in graphic design, and I use oil paints and acrylic. But I prefer to do storytelling, you know, like sequential artwork, comic books, comic strips.”
Encore’s disappearance left Brandon Blanks feeling out of touch with the heart of the artistic community.
He also missed interacting with other artists. The cross-pollination makes him better.
“I feel that artists need artists… You need to be surrounded by other voices and other opinions, and that might help one's art, be it drawing, painting, or writing, and help it become better, and not only for themselves, but your writing or art may influence someone else.”
NUGGET
Multidisciplinary Visual Artist
Flow Creative, Self Portrait
Her proper name is Tiffany Machler but she’s known around town as Nugget. She went to UNCW, despite her grandfather’s skepticism about a degree in art, and earned a bachelor’s degree in painting.
Upon graduation, she was underwhelmed by the limited options people told her were available for a career in art.
“You can either become an art professor, right, and just be ready to be poor forever, or you can kiss butt to some rich fancy gallery, and let them tout your artwork around to rich people, and then they take half the money for it. Neither of those career paths really sound[ed] like what works for me.”
So she followed her inner promptings and started painting at local live music venues.
It turned into a career path for Nugget. She credits Encore with helping her find her people, and ultimately, her artistic career.
Today, her art is evolving into the multi-dimensional realm.
“It's not just walls anymore. It's walls with incorporated seating and relief in the surfaces… collaborating with actual fabricators to make 3D items. So the scale and the scope is really growing over time.”
Because she also considers herself an arts advocate, large public art holds a dual purpose for her.
“When I'm able to do these larger projects, the scale definitely, for me, increases the potential of the transformative power of the art on a community,” she said.
The piece she’s contributing to this issue of Encore is a self portrait called Flow Creative.
JEFFREY VOSSLER
Artist, Designer
Building an indivisible community
Jeffrey Vossler describes his art as covering a wide spectrum that is rooted in storytelling.
“And that's been primarily through a digital medium, which has been Photoshop, digital paint…”
And now he’s starting to experiment with AI.
“And so I sort of live in these two different worlds, almost, with my art. There's commercial art and fan art and comic art, and then sort of more, like, gallery, you know, artsy-fartsy-say-something-with-your-art.”
He looks for stories that need to be told. His muse? Current events. He’s especially concerned about the environment and what it could mean for his kids.
“I grew up in the Adirondack Mountains. I had 300 acres of forest, surrounded by state park, and I feel very fortunate to have had that experience growing up. And so I’m always aware any time I see that get torn apart.”
Vossler believes consumerism is a major factor in environmental degradation, so that’s a frequent subject of his. In fact, the piece he created for this edition of Encore is what he calls a media landscape.
“It features Encore as this beacon of hope, this beacon of light for people speaking truth.”
And part of speaking the truth, says Jeffrey Vossler, is creating a community that’s more media literate, one so strongly connected that institutions or ideologies won’t be able to break it apart.
“And then you can’t be separated. You already know each other. You’re a community. And I think that's ultimately what Encore is for the art community in Wilmington, and that's what I hope for it to be.”
GREYSON DAVIS AKA HPFANGS
Doodlist, Caricature Artist
Diving headfirst into insecurity
“Yo, artists pretend to like being lonely, but they hate it.”
Greyson Davis is known in the art world as HPFANGS.
As he does with his actual art, he leaned into his deepest insecurities to choose his artist name.
The first time he went to a music studio to record professionally, he was late and didn’t have his song ready.
“And the producer I was working with was like, ‘Look, man, like you gotta stop sleeping. You gotta get out of your pajamas, and I just thought that sounded cool.”
He added “pajamas” to his then-artist handle, Haji.
“So that was the HP,” he said.
The fangs?
“I just had really big teeth as a kid, like, enormously. I looked like a Simpsons character. And so I used to draw big teeth on people's yearbooks. Whatever is your biggest insecurity, zero in. Target destroyed.”
Leaning headfirst into his insecurities is a way of life for HPFANGS, who doesn’t believe they go away.
It’s also his way into drawing caricatures, one form that his art takes.
“You know what people would consider their insecurity makes for the best art.”
He’s created street art, fine art, but doesn’t think of himself as an artist. He said he just has to stop the ideas from squatting in his head.
“I have a brain like a bag of cats playing pinball.”
The work he’s contributing to the first mini-edition of Encore he describes as tongue-in-cheek, a corpse coming out of the grave with Encore’s logo.
Then he gently, almost reluctantly, says that Wilmington’s artistic community has foundered. The city looks less to him like a place that can incubate culture, and more like something you might see in Better Homes and Gardens.
He’s ready to see the city and the artistic community itself resurrect.
