Contemporary folk artist Eldridge Bagley was born in 1945 and raised on a farm outside Kenbridge, Virginia, where he continues to live with his wife, Beth, and their son, Wade. Inspired by his home region of Southside Virginia, he began painting in 1973. He is wholly self-taught and paints, as he says, “straight from the heart.” While many of his paintings recall the rural Virginia of his youth, they are not strictly documentary. He is inspired by his surroundings, employing memory, personal experience, and imagination in equal parts to chronicle a lifestyle that once sustained many, but today is nearly lost to the encroachment of exurbia and the steady advance of the big-box store. His work entered the Morris Museum through the acquisition of the Norrell Collection in 2006. He was represented in this exhibition by dozens of paintings, all of them depicting his beloved Southside.