On the first Friday evening of every month, downtown Fairhope turns into a block party with an artistic bent. Galleries open their doors, bands play on the sidewalks, and families wander De La Mare Avenue and Section Street looking at new work. The First Friday Art Walk has become one of the Eastern Shore’s most dependable free nights out, and it is where the city’s newest generation of artists gets its introduction.
Few of those introductions carried more personal weight than the one at Lyons Share Custom Framing and Gallery, where painter Abi Waller mounted her first-ever solo show, with her oil paintings hanging in the gallery throughout the month.
A Military Kid Who Found Home in Fairhope
Waller’s path to that gallery wall ran through several continents. Born in Phoenix, Arizona, she and her three older brothers moved constantly as her father, Blake, rose through the United States Air Force to colonel. The family lived in Korea, Germany, Pennsylvania and Las Vegas before a transfer to Maxwell Air Force Base brought them to Montgomery. Her grandmother, Stephanie Crowe, a longtime Fairhope resident since 2013, had been drawing the family to the Eastern Shore for years, and after her father retired the family settled in Fairhope when Abi was in the eighth grade.
“We bounced around a lot,” she has said of the military childhood. “As a kid, you think everyone’s experiences are just like yours. So many of our friends were military kids, and we were used to picking up and moving, so it seemed normal.” The moves had one constant: art. She took a class at a local gallery and found her medium. “Art felt right, and my parents were always supportive,” she says. “Oil is my medium.” Her teen years also revolved around horses at Fox Run Equestrian Center, but the paints kept calling.
After graduating from Fairhope High School, she enrolled in the fine arts program at Birmingham-Southern College — the only school she applied to. Study of art history and philosophy took her to the Louvre in Paris, where the tiny, overwhelming presence of the Mona Lisa left a lasting impression on how she thinks about visual art as a language.
Turning Memory Into Paint
During college, her mother Sharon was diagnosed with breast cancer, and the experience reshaped Waller’s approach to her work. She began to treat ordinary moments with the attention usually reserved for milestones, daydreaming about the present as if looking back on it through the lens of memory. Objects became her entry point — one of her first paintings in this vein was of a jacket she identified with her mother.
After graduation she moved to Austin, Texas, and worked for a private company in the art world. In the summer of 2024, she moved back to Fairhope to be close to her mother. “Family is so important. Growing up as a nomad, we became each other’s best friends,” she says.
The return home set the gallery show in motion. Her best friend Joy Davis works at Lyons Share, the custom framing shop and gallery at 330 De La Mare Avenue next to Page and Palette, and introduced Waller to owner Kelley Lyons. Lyons took a few pieces on consignment; they sold; the invitation to a show followed. Lyons Share has been a Fairhope institution for more than 30 years and features local and regional artists during each First Friday Art Walk.
Impressionistic, Colorful, Nostalgic
Waller describes her style as impressionistic, colorful and nostalgic. She paints wet-on-wet, letting the oil blur the lines of the image the way memory blurs a scene, and she resists the idea that art appreciation belongs only to the trained. “It’s not limited to people who are trained. There are no rules,” she says. “An artist can’t control what people will think about their art or how it makes them feel.”
Her view of what art does is characteristically direct: it is a triumph of the human experience, a call to appreciate who you have in your life and to notice the sweetness before it becomes a memory. Alongside her own work she has done portraits and commissioned pieces, and her next goal is to place work in more galleries and engage further with the local art community.
Fairhope’s art scene runs deep — the city’s First Friday gatherings, the Mobile Arts Council’s LoDa Art Walk in the Lower Dauphin district on Mobile’s second Fridays, and Gallery Night Pensacola on third Fridays all give regional artists recurring stages. With her first solo show behind her, Abi Waller has joined the lineup, painting the ordinary moments of a life that, thanks to a childhood spent crossing the world, she has learned never to take for granted.