POTTED PORTRAITURE: Cathy Wilson refers to her mixed-media plant holders as “pot heads,” shown below. Two clay pots provide the structural framework underneath the mosaic and sculpted clay. -- PHOTOS BY TIM WILEMON

The Painted Planet Art Space has re-emerged in Memphis after a two-year hiatus.

Donna Bowers has reopened the art gallery in a smaller space at 798 S. Cooper St., its sixth location since she founded the business in 2000. She has taken the business back to its roots.

The Painted Planet started out in Cooper-Young.

“When I opened back up on Oct. 30, I called 20 artists to be part of the grand opening show,” Bowers said. “Within three days, I had 52 artists that heard about it and said, ‘You’ve got to have me.’ That’s why there’s much work in the front and it’s so close together. My grand opening shows, I always have more artists in them.”

Vivid colors splash up against one another in the gallery but somehow don’t clash.

“I don’t want see-through art,” she said. “I don’t like the stuff that they call minimalistic art where it just blends in. I love colorful art . . . I kind of lean toward the eclectic funky because there’s a lot of those stuffy galleries.”

New incarnation

Business has been good. Bowers sold $34,675 worth of art on a recent Thursday.

“That was a red-letter day for me,” she said. “It is probably the biggest day I ever had.”

A New York art broker bought 31 pieces created by Rollin Kocsis.

“He is indeed a happy man,” Bowers said.

Business has not always been so good. In past years, she has used part of an inheritance and life savings to keep the Painted Planet afloat. Bowers left a Cooper-Young location for a 4,400-square-foot space on Poplar Avenue a few years ago, but she said her clientele didn’t follow.

This time around, she decided to open with a lower overhead.

“I got a smaller space and I found five or six other women that wanted to give me a little bit of money each month on a little booth or a little spot,” Bowers said. “I don’t have to come up with all it myself.”

Art for the soul

BUTTERFLIES AFLOAT: Cindy Magee is the artist responsible for small-scale portraits of butterflies.

The gallery also has gift items, including jewelry created by her husband, Danny Bowers.

She uses income from the business to fund Healing Planet, a ministry for women battling cancer. Bowers started the ministry in 2003 after she was diagnosed with breast cancer. The chemotherapy made her lose her hair and changed her appearance to the point that she barely recognized herself in the mirror.

Healing Planet offers a monthly “spa night” when women battling cancer can come to the shop to get massages, wigs, scarves and sisterhood support. The next spa night is Dec. 7 at 6:30 p.m.

“We don’t have any meat,” Bowers said. “We have vegetarian soups and we have desserts and cheese. We have all kinds of cool things.”

An area for prayer or meditation is also provided.

The next event on the gallery’s lineup is an “outside art” opening set for Dec. 11.

“Outsider artists are artists that have not been formally trained,” she said. “They’ve trained themselves. That’s one way of using the term. It’s also artists that use found objects for their art, like old rusted wire and screws and bolts and things like that.

“They make something beautiful out of something that would be thrown away. It also encompasses a lot of folk art. It’s basically things that are outside what is normally considered traditional art.”

Bowers, a Memphis native, worked as a music promoter in Texas, where she also operated a couple of skateboard stores. She learned the hard way about market cannibalization and trusting the wrong person.

“From a financial standpoint, when I opened my second skateboard store, I had someone talk me into opening it five miles from my first one, so I split my customer base and lost my shirt and he stole about $36,000 worth of stuff from me. Hiring him and listening to him was a big mistake.”

This time around, Bowers said she plans to stay put.

“Here in Memphis, probably going to Poplar was a big mistake,” she said. “I loved Cooper-Young and I was happy in Cooper-Young and I did well enough in Cooper-Young to support the ministry.”

Her bottom-line best business advice: “Don’t get too big for your britches and try to grow too fast.”