PHOTO BY SARAH OWENS
John and Wendy Cappelletti in their Briar Chapel restaurant.
ART HISTORY
ARTIST GARY OWENS IS OUT TO BRING HIS COLORFUL CARICATURES TO THE CLASSROOM
[MY PAINTINGS OF FAMOUS HISTORICAL figures] are caricatures, not portraits. I’m not a fine artist, I’m not a trained artist. The only training I had was in the fourth or fifth grade [in Georgia]. I talked so much and the teacher gave me some art materials and told me to get to the back of the room and get to work. You didn’t have the same [materials] you had today, so they took butcher paper and taped it on the back wall. They gave me a box of chalk and said, ‘Go do something with that and stop bothering us.’ I did that for two years. Then the people from Mercer University came over and were delighted with them. They said they wanted to use those drawings that I did for children’s art in their university library. After that, I went to military school. I used to work for the state at the housing finance agency [in 28
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Raleigh] and then before that I owned a mortgage company down in South Carolina. I started this particular [project] in probably late 2012. I lived over on Greene Street and had basically turned an apartment into a studio. I believe MLK was the first one I did. [The reason the word ‘dream’ in ‘I have a dream’ on the bottom corner of that painting is split onto two lines is] I wanted to indicate to people that this was an important figure but also that it was done by an outsider artist. That’s why I dropped the ‘m’ [onto its own line] like it was a mistake, so that people would say, ‘Oh, well, why is that? He just didn’t know what he was doing.’ Then my daughter Sarah said she’d like to buy this house [on Dairyland Road with me and] with her husband, Ken, and their son. It was one of the most wonderful things I’ve ever seen and