Art Gives Hot Springs Fresh Coat of Paint : Culture: The mineral baths aren’t as popular as they once were, and the casinos are long gone. New studios and showcases are helping to fill the gap.

Across from Bathhouse Row, new art galleries hold the paintings and sculptures of local and international artists. At Magee’s Cafe, poets from 8 to 87 years old gather each week to read their works to standing-room-only crowds.

This old spa, where once the high and the low came to take the waters, bet the horses and party the night away, is enjoying a cultural renaissance. A burgeoning colony of artists is revitalizing the run-down downtown area.

The artists colony is centered on Central Avenue, across from the two-block row of nine Mediterranean-style thermal bathhouses, built between 1892 and 1936 and now designated a National Historic Landmark District.

The city for decades was a wide-open mecca for gamblers. Al Capone and rival gangsters came to relax under a truce. Then in 1967 Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller sent in the state police to shut down the casinos.

This city of about 33,000 people, adjacent to Hot Springs National Park, has been in economic decline since.

Getting into hot water is not as popular as it once was. By late October, only about 22,000 people had partaken of the mineral baths this year, as compared to more than 100,000 in 1978.

Only one of the baths on Bathhouse Row is open for business, owned by the National Park Service and leased to a private operator, as is one other public bathhouse, the Libbey Memorial Medical Center and Spa, which is not on the Row.

But now those empty storefronts that blighted the downtown area are being rejuvenated by the artists moving into the city.

Joe Orlando, a sculptor who works in bronze, moved from Dallas in April. He is establishing a foundry for fine arts in a 1911 two-story building near the downtown area. The foundry will pour bronze for artists’ works, and Orlando says he hopes to attract sculptors from around the world.

A growing number of gallery owners also have moved in, buying up at bargain prices the turn-of-the-century stores and warehouses across the street from Bathhouse Row. They have turned the buildings into showcases and studios for artists.

On the first Thursday of each month, the doors open for an informal gallery walk, an unstructured tour of the exhibits in Hot Springs’ seven fine-arts galleries and 14 arts-related studios and museums.

Malinda Herr-Chambliss, owner of the Herr-Chambliss gallery, has displayed sculptures from artists in Holland and Iceland. She has shown works from Romania, Little Rock, Italy and Jonesboro.

She estimates that 1,500 people, mostly Hot Springs residents, roam the galleries when they open for the monthly walks.

In Magee’s Cafe, a lectern is crammed into a corner in what used to be the carriage house of an 1871-vintage store. Weekly poetry readings at the cafe, going on now for almost two years, draw a diverse crowd of artists and pseudo-poets, children and their mothers.

It is a place where the patrons know almost everyone who walks in the door.

Those who come in for the evening bring their spiral notebooks, which lie open on tables. They scribble words as they listen to others who have stepped up to the microphone to read.

On this night, Robert Brummer, 58, intermittently naps and writes on a napkin. Sometimes, he will add his name to the list, step forward to the podium and read the words he has written that evening. On this night, he is dressed in a red velvet dinner jacket, the large lapels trimmed in black. He sports a black top hat.

Carrie Jamison is 87 and serious about her poetry. She moved to Hot Springs in the 1930s, when she made her living as a masseuse in the city’s hot mineral baths. She wears a large plumed hat and flowered skirt and shares her table with a woman who will read her own poetry in French.

“I think this is the most wonderful thing that could happen to Hot Springs,” Jamison says. “If these galleries can survive, it will bring other cultural things to this town. It’s changing the whole tone of the town.”

John Eagleheart plays his guitar for the cafe’s audience. A visitor from Scotland offers songs from her homeland. A massage therapist reads a fairy tale, and brings tears to his own eyes.

Paul Tucker, known as the singing neurologist, reads Robert Browning.

Bud Kenny, who two years ago walked from Pennsylvania to California with a dog and a packhorse, moderates the evening’s lineup, which is carried live on radio station KBHS.

A key figure in the Hot Springs art scene is a painter named Benini.

Benini--he uses no other name--sat on a couch for a recent interview, beneath a huge, heavy-lined portrait of himself. Two small braids tied in black ribbon reached to his beard.

He is cited by many in the community as the driving force behind Hot Springs’ renaissance.

Benini moved to Hot Springs in September, 1988, from Central Florida. He and his wife, Lorraine, were returning from an exhibit of Benini’s works at a Ft. Smith arts center when they took a wrong turn off the interstate, he says.

“I was blown away by the old elegance and beauty at night,” Benini says. “Night is very beautiful in old cities.”

Benini, 49, left his hometown of Imola, Italy, when he was 14. He said Hot Springs reminds him of the Italian countryside; the baths remind him of Europe.

The environment allows him the peace to pursue what has become his passion during the last three to five years--bright acrylics and three-dimensional geometric shapes that spill from the canvas.

Artists who have moved to Hot Springs, some at Benini’s urging, say Hot Springs’ appeal is manifold: It is undiscovered. It is reminiscent of Europe. The mountains are enticing. And the hot baths are a curiosity.

“It’s probably the most European spa atmosphere in the United States,” says Paul Sullivan, a curator with the National Park Service.

About five blocks from Central Avenue, in an elementary school turned studio, Jeanfo, a sculptor originally from the south of France, welds steel in a cavernous gym. Some 250 steel sculptures, from 3 to 7 feet tall, line the hallways of Jeanfo Studios.

“This is something very different, because the environment is not the same,” Jeanfo says. “People are not the same. In New York, there are too-sophisticated people who know, perhaps, too much about art.”

And it’s cheap. Jeanfo says buying the same amount of space in France, New York or the West Coast would have cost 10 times as much.

Low overhead for gallery owners allowed them to drop their commission to 33%, instead of the 67% that is standard in New York, says gallery owner Debrah Phillips.

“When I came up here from Florida, people thought I was committing professional suicide,” Herr-Chambliss says. But her gallery is booked through May, 1991, she says.

Paul Tucker, a Hot Springs doctor, and his wife, Suzanne, restored four buildings and donated the use of one of them to the nonprofit Hot Springs Arts Center for five years.

“There’s a much more eclectic collection of art here than in other places,” Tucker says.

But even before the arts came in, Tucker says, Hot Springs was an unusual town.

“This was a town with open gambling. This was a town with open prostitution. It has one of the biggest race tracks. So it’s always been unusual.

“Even before the arts, it was a city of complexity.”