Flax It. Unrefined, cold-pressed organic flax seed oil taken daily in supplement form, used daily on salads, or mixed into any dishes which do not require heating to high temperatures will make dry skin moist and supple. Barlean’s Organic Oils have beneficial flax blends for men and women. The Essential Woman formula is derived from seeds of botanical flowers such as special plant phytonutrients, all recognized for their beautifying and balancing qualities. Barlean’s The Essential Woman, Brighter Day, $14.95

Oil Faithful. If you don’t already use one, consider switching to an essential oil blend, or an oil-based serum, as your moisturizer. Most American women are lotion lovers, but stop any woman with amazing skin on the streets of any European metropolis and the chances are that she uses some blend of essential oils to hydrate her skin. Oils actually absorb more readily into the skin than creams, will not clog pores, and will leave skin with a healthy glow rather than appearing oily. Rodin Olio Lusso, SeeJane, seejaneshop.com $140

Cosmetic Cures. Be sure to use a primer, and avoid powder foundations. Not only will primers give your skin added moisture, but many primers also contain an SPF, which can simplify your routine and save you time when getting ready. Choose an oil-based liquid foundation that will help hydrate your skin while providing coverage to even out your skin tone resulting in a radiant complexion. Powder foundations absorb oil, accentuate dry patches, while settling into fine lines and wrinkles leaving your skin looking tired and dull. Youngblood Deep-Sea Liquid Mineral Foundation, Glow Medspa & Beauty Boutique, glowsavannah.com, $45; Waiting for Spa Bleu to get back to me with primer, Spa Bleu, spableu-sav.com

Written by Shelley Smith, the owner and makeup artist for See Jane on Broughton. She is also the founder and creative director of makeup for the Savannah Fashion Week.

What: 13th annual Scholarship Gala
The annual Savannah Scholarship Gala is a celebratory evening for art enthusiasts to gather together and show their support for creative and talented SCAD students in need.

When: February 4, 2012

Where: The new SCAD Museum of Art, 601 Turner Blvd

Why: Rub shoulders with artistic movers and shakers and view approximately 130 original works created and donated by SCAD students, faculty, alumni, staff and friends. The artwork available for purchase in a silent auction will include paintings, photographs, works on paper, ceramics, jewelry, fashion illustrations, sculptures, and fibers pieces, all on exhibit at the event in the SCAD Museum of Art galleries.

Cost: Individual patron tickets are $150 and include cocktails, heavy hors d’oeuvres, live music, and the silent auction. Individual preview party tickets are $250 and include an exclusive buy-it-now option, catered cocktail party, special VIP activities plus all the features included in the patron party. To purchase tickets, make a donation, or preview auction items visit scad.edu/savgala. For any questions, please contact Karla Giebner at 912.525.5821 or kstanfor@scad.edu.

SCAD is known for acquiring and repurposing disused buildings—a practice they call “adaptive reuse.” Using this philosophy, the new museum integrated the ruins of an old freight house into the facility’s artistic, ultramodern architecture. “The building itself has actually risen from the ruins,” says Sam Anderson, the museum’s managing director. “There’s so much history and so much of Savannah encapsulated in these bricks.”

In 1853, the slaves of Hermitage Plantation, just south of Savannah, made the heavy Savannah gray brick that would soon become the 800-foot-long Central of Georgia Railroad freight house. The structure stood as part of the larger CG rail yard—now the location of the Georgia State Railroad Museum and the Savannah History Museum—at the corner of MLK and Turner Boulevards. It functioned as a rail depot until it was sold to Southern Railway and closed in 1963. It is the only antebellum rail yard in America still standing.

By the early 1990s, the old freight house was just a cluster of crumbling walls. The owner planned to level the site for commercial development. But fiercely committed to historic preservation, SCAD and other partners stepped in and secured a stop order through the courts. The freight house, by then resembling a bombed-out building from World War II, remained for decades, protected by law.

While the freight house ruins languished in the elements, the first SCAD Museum of Art opened in 2002. It was housed entirely in the beautiful 1856 Greek revival structure, due east on MLK Boulevard. The building was once home to the administrative offices of the CG Railroad. The stately edifice provided about 17,000 square feet of space for the nascent gallery, but much more was needed.

Written by Clark Byron
Photography courtesy of SCAD

For the full story, pick up an issue on newsstands.

How about hosting your group in the oldest home in Georgia? You can at The Pirates’ House’s 13-person Herb House. Guests can ask servers about on-site ghost encounters while dining on a variety of plated and buffet group menus. The best values are inarguably the buffet choices—Southern lunch buffet for $14.99 and dinner buffets starting at $22.97. Two-hour blocks are available for a $200 deposit, which will be applied to the total bill. Contact Megan Cox at 912.233.5757. 20 East Broad St., thepirateshouse.com

The Distillery

To set an exciting vibe from the start, consider the Distillery’s loft area, which seats a little over 25 people and overlooks the rest of the bar/restaurant. Beer enthusiasts will love the extensive craft beer menu including beer cocktails like the Berry White, a mix of Allagash White and Framboise beers. The food is fun too, especially the giant fried MoonPies, perfect for sharing. Usually there are no rental or minimum food/beverage fees. Contact Ben Volen at 912.236.1772 or via online email form at distillerysavannah.com. 416 W. Liberty St., distillerysavannah.com

The Olde Pink House

Choose the oldest mansion in Georgia, The Olde Pink House, for a dose of elegant Southern hospitality. Six different room configurations offer private dining from 150 people in the opulent Grand Ballroom to 14 people in the cozy Conference Room, or 24 in the more private Office overlooking Reynolds Square. A food and beverage minimum is required. Contact Bianca Raub at 912.232.2803 or theoldepinkhouse@bellsouth.net. 23 Abercorn St., plantersinnsavannah.com/savannah-dining.htm

Cha Bella Grill and Patio Bar

To please an organic-minded crowd, Cha Bella is a wonderful venue with a farm-to-table approach in the kitchen and an easy classiness in the dining spaces. Their private Star Room holds 24 people, or the entire restaurant can be rented to accommodate up to 200 people. The event menu will be designed to suit your tastes. Sample items include locally caught fish, bone-in pork chops or lamb shank entrees. Call for quote. Contact Tessa Mancini at 912.790.7888 or tessa@cha-bella.com. 102 East Broad St., cha-bella.com

700 Drayton

For truly upscale events, 700 Drayton is a place to impress with intimate table settings accommodating 14 to 40 people in elegant private rooms like the Carriage Wine Cellar or Billiards Room. 700 Drayton is housed in the Mansion on Forsyth Park hotel, so prepare to wear your Sunday best. $250 room fee, plus cost of one of three menu configurations of items from regular menu. Contact Effie Hiter at 912.721.5021 or effie.hiter@mansiononforsythpark.com. 700 Drayton St., 700drayton.com

For the full story, pick up an issue on newsstands.

For the full story, pick up an issue on newsstands.

Country-western roots will always course through Tennessee’s bloodline, but Nashville’s youngest stylists are spinning fresh interpretations on the city, making an eclectic, fun stopover with dazzling shop finds, ingenious, even gutsy cuisine and one of the nation’s most impressive live music scenes.

Stay

Centrally located and one of Nashville’s shining stars, The Hermitage Hotel is to Nashville what Chateau Marmont is to Los Angeles, long hosting a patronage of musical elite, U.S. presidents, actresses and gangsters. Today, rockers Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora pen tunes in the lobby bar.

Following a $17 million renovation on its 100th anniversary in 2010, the 5-star hotel was named to Travel + Leisure 500 World’s Best, Forbes Travel Guide Five Star Awards and U.S. News & World Report Best U.S. Hotels in 2011. Nashville’s top luxury comes in the form of Italian sienna marble, Russian walnut, stained glass, 600-thread count Italian Frette linens and Persian rugs but is able to manage elegance minus the stuffy.

In February a Romance Package, which includes a Deluxe King room with champagne and truffles, All American breakfast for two and valet parking, runs $329 a night. Or bump up to the Suite Heart Package with Junior Suite accommodations, fitted with the same amenities plus pre-registered check-in, a personal concierge, rose petal turndown and a late checkout for $579 per night. thehermitaghotel.com, 615.244.3121

Written by Melanie Bowden Simón

For the full story, pick up an issue on newsstands.

Every artist has a process, a collection of habits, of rote and routine that allows them to produce their best work.

For cartoonist Jack Davis, 87, the process is one he’s been practicing and perfecting for over seven decades, and counting.
“I work with black India ink. I didn’t really get into color until I started doing commercial work. I take my Winsor Newton number three brush and dip it into the ink and use the brush to draw, the same way I’ve been doing it since high school, because it dries and it doesn’t smear if you put watercolor over it,” Davis says.

The Winsor & Newton size 3 is a kolinsky watercolor brush. The brush hair is pale red with dark tips. It comes from the tail of a species of weasel, the Mustela siberica, or kolinsky, a rare animal that is generally isolated to the East Asian region of Siberia, eastward of the Urals to the Arctic-Pacific watershed. The geographic isolation of these animals makes the bristles extremely valuable, rare and expensive. For an artist of Davis’ pedigree, a kolinsky brush is a necessity and a luxury, offering strength, slenderness and resilience.

The process and attention to detail has served him well though, and the recent, national release of his memoir, Jack Davis: Drawing American Pop Culture: A Career Retrospective, has given the St. Simons native the career validation he has long deserved.
“It’s amazing to me. I spend some mornings looking over what I have done,” says Davis, who attended the University of Georgia and grew up in the South.

Even as a young boy reading the Sunday comics, Davis seemed to know intuitively the path he wanted to take with his life. “Comics aren’t what they used to be. They were beautiful pieces of artwork,” he recalls. “As a boy I would look all up and down the Sunday page and think, I want to do this. And that’s exactly what I’ve done.”

Illustrations by Jack Davis

For the full story, pick up an issue on newsstands.

Photography by Shawn Heifert

For the full story, pick up an issue on newsstands.

It would not be inaccurate to say that such abilities are truly in his blood, for his great-grandfather who emigrated from Germany at age 16, Friedrich Gretsch, founded the world famous company, which still bears their surname. Way, way back in 1883, long before anyone with even a feverish imagination and a belly full of jimsonweed could have imagined the kind of swinging jazz percussion and screaming rock guitar solos that have come to be associated with “That Great Gretsch Sound,” the 27-year-old Friedrich started a small NYC shop which made and marketed banjos, tambourines and drums. Within a few decades, his son Fred Sr. moved the expanding business to Brooklyn, where it would quickly become one of the most recognized and respected musical instrument dealers in the country—and eventually, the world.

“I first visited the factory in Brooklyn in 1951 with my grandfather [Fred Sr.],” recalls Fred—who’s occasionally referred to as Fred Gretsch III. “My first full-time gig there was in the summer of 1958, and I went to work there full-time in 1965.”
As Lou Reed once said, “those were different times.”

“The entire music industry was centered around New York City then,” Fred continues. “And since we were located right in Brooklyn, we were able to collaborate directly with the finest guitarists and drummers of that era. That was back when technology meant the radio! It was the Internet of its day.

“Working with the artists as we did, in the ‘30s and later when jazz really came into its own—and then when rock and roll started to take off—we were making the professional instruments that people of the day wanted to use. That was our focus: developing instruments with the input of great musicians.”

The eventual peaks and valleys of the firm’s fortunes are somewhat legend in the industry—as Gretsch’s star often rose and fell relative to unexpected trends in popular music—but the reputation built as an artist-friendly organization remained intact. And ever since the business came back into the Gretsch family hands and it relocated its center of operations to the greater Savannah area, it has re-emerged as a stalwart example of the great American success story.

Photography by Jabberpics

For the full story, pick up an issue on newsstands.