These videos were taken at Eric's Studio on 9/8/00
At Work	About Mary Proctor
More Work	Madonna
Even More Work	Two Sides
Hog Marker	Late Shift
Studio
These videos were taken at Kentuck, 10/12/1999
Eric Legge Intro	Eric Legge Continued
These videos were taken at the HOB Festival, 11/13/1999
Eric at HOB	Eric on gardening
Eric on Numbers

Eric recently was the subject of an article by Atlanta Magazine (see photo below). 

The following is an excerpt of an article which appeared in Atlanta Magazine in June of 1999...

Wedged into the churchside slope of a valley in north Georgia is a small trailer. It is barely recognizable as such, enshrouded as it is in carports of canvas and tin tubing and patched lumber. Add-ons have been pieced onto the single-wide like a crazy quilt of knotty pine — a front deck, a boxy, plywood studio and the skeleton of a turret-in-progress.

Out front, on a pile of age-browned wood pallets, a wet painting basks in the sun. It is a startling splash of color among the late-winter tones of gray and brown. A frame of paintbrushes surrounds a long-nosed face made of bottle tops and rope, all slathered into place by variegated smears of fire-orange paint.

The painting's artist, Eric Legge, emerges from the bald wood studio, blinking, a little disheveled. His habit is to brew a full pot of coffee late in the afternoon and paint through the night. He has an air of hibernation about him.

Where he actually works in his assemblage of tiny rooms is unclear. The bedless bedrooms, the kitchenette, even the bathroom is choked with art — canvases, old shutters, chunks of found wood, all covered over in iconic, long-nosed faces and Lady Liberties, long-necked pensive nudes and plump-breasted birds. Art is stacked everywhere, half-finished or socked away for safekeeping, leaning against every spare inch of paneling, all but obscuring the old fabric-draped furniture.

Legge, 28, peers through paint-flecked, tortoise-shell specs. His smile is nervous and constant. His haircut is as choppy, his cheekbones are as hollow and his jeans’ legs are as voluminous as any Greenwich Village urchin's. But his accent is South Georgia sweet. Every sentence or two ends with an agreeable, "ah-hah."

"I started making art since I was 3 or 4," he says, crouching to a seat on a low chair in the trailer's front room. Without having to get up, he rummages through a nearby pile of paintings, extracting a sample from his toddler years — a knobby branch painted into a red snake.

Legge was never a follower — or an imitator — of Reverend Howard Finster or R.A. Miller or any of north Georgia's pantheon of elder self-taught artists. "I hadn't heard of them people before," Legge says. If anything, he was influenced by his father, Joe Legge, who made a living as a hairdresser but considered his wood carvings his life's work. Likewise, Eric Legge made art while he worked his way through Val-dosta State University, graduating five years ago with a double degree in philosophy and anthropology.

"I got out of school and I figured either I'd do law or medicine or try art," he says the smile widening a little. " love all three of them, but I love making art so much, I decided to try it and voila !

Eric Legge, student hobbyist would become Eric Legge sought-after folk-art figure. After he graduated, Legge peddled his paintings on Atlanta street corners. He made a day trip to three galleries and landed niches in two of them that day. The same summer, his work was hung in the Olympics' temple of funk, the House of Blues.

Legge's launching sounds like commerce. But he doesn't see it that way.

"You know, they say find what you love to do and do it," he says simply. "If it's something technical, wonderful. If it's doing something from your mind or heart or hand — I try to connect those three if I can. Mind, heart, and hand and let if flow out onto the wood or dirt or whatever."

After that trinity — heart, mind, hand — is satisfied, he affixes to his work his signature, a stairstep "eLegge." On every succinct autograph, the tail of the final e loops around the top of the letter, much like the World Wide Web's ubiquitous @.

Caller I.D. and kerosene heaters are about as wired as Eric Legge gets, but the symbolism in his signature is still apt. A young man with a bachelor’s degree, with paintings in museums from Dallas to Manhattan, Legge is a far cry from the eccentric elders or unschooled "isolates" many people type cast as self-taught artists.

In the end, it probably won’t matter if an artist is self-taught or school-trained, had a Ph.D. or dropped out or middle school, lived in city or in rural isolation."Time will tell and the only question that really matters is 'is it any good?' " says art critic Fox. In making that determination, critic collectors, and the public will use the same standards that are used in evaluating all art — color, composition, shape, form, execution and vision. That, more than biography and personal history, will determine if work — folk-art, self-taught art, outsider art, whatever you want to call it — has staying power.

Does Eric Legge have what it takes to be immortalized in the next generation? Perhaps time will tell. Perhaps he'll be tested by a fickle marketplace. He'd tell you to judge him by a life in which art is constant and paramount. And if the coming decades are as prolific and feverishly innovative as his first three years, it will be something to see. Already, in his halting descriptions of his work the still lifes that suffice until he can get a garden going, the "Bunny in the Box" that makes obscure linkage between a lucky rabbit's foot and a horizontal, half- slashed-out Christ, the elaborate, sketchy, almost mathematical kachina — he does seem to echo the Finsters of the world, who paint to preach, to excise a lifetime of memories or, as Bill Traylor told Collier's magazine in 1946, because, "It just come to me."

If Legge's education has rendered him a bit more articulate about his visions than the older school, it doesn't appear to have sullied the vision itself. Now, with a string of shows on his calendar and a host of devoted collectors, Legge's selling power is only increasing. But as for proving his own outsider status to the cult of personality, his ever-present small grin turns a bit wry and he says, "I don't believe in all that hoopla." "I think art is art. If it strikes somebody, great. If not, well that's fine too."

by Elizabeth Lenhard

Eric's work is on display at many House Of Blues venues across the USA