Leland Payton, Three Trees Along Gravois Creek, March 1958, watercolor, 17 x 23. On weekends we often drove to my mother’s hometown of Versailles, Missouri, to visit her sister, Maureen. One Sunday I took the Studebaker south to a place where gravel extraction had messed up Gravois Creek and did this watercolor. Bob Green introduced me to large flat sable brushes, which I used extensively. It may not look like Cezanne but I was influenced by the ambiguities, unfinished look, and overlapping panels of colors characterizing the landscapes of the French proto-Cubist. It was a foggy day and the ground was a mixture of wet leaves, mud and remnants of snow. Yes, the three trees had a Christian symbolic meaning. That recognition, like any emotional association, came to me as I painted, not before.
Two watercolors of Ozark streams I did in the spring of 1958 bring up memories—some good, some interesting, and a few painful. Having quit the University of Kansas after one semester I rented an old storefront in Lincoln, Missouri and opened the Lincoln Gallery to sell (or try to) my paintings and antiques I had acquired. A woman and her husband came in one afternoon. After looking around, she asked what I would take if she bought two framed watercolors I had done during my senior year of high school. She wrote a check for $200 and they left with them.
A few weeks later my best friend Ron Freed came down from Kansas City, Kansas to see “what was shakin.’” We drove from Sedalia to Lincoln in my used Porsche. As we locked the front door of the gallery that evening, some local guys in a Corvette pulled up beside my 1956 red Speedster. A not-completely-cordial, or purely technical discussion on the merits of each vehicle followed. Freed asserted that while the V-8 would of course blow the little German car away on a straight stretch, the Porsche would take curves better.
Leland Payton, Cole Camp Creek, April, 1958, watercolor, 17 x 23. There were several low water bridges on Cole Camp Creek where I often parked to fish or, when I returned from Florida, to snorkel in the deep pools below them. One rainy day in March, I did this watercolor probably in an hour between showers. Obviously it was a very complex scene and required much simplification. The stylizations would be to acknowledge the liquid unity of the creek water, the about-to-rain sky, and the wet, fresh green buds on the trees of the opposite shore. Willows rose from concrete chunks broken off the bridge. At the bottom left of the picture is the bridge then geometric and intact, but I knew it would one day be chewed up by high water and become rubble. I remember thinking how the willows would always regenerate but the bridge would ultimately be destroyed. When the toughs in the Corvette challenged me and Freed to a race (or Freed challenged them, I’m not sure) they asked how far on H highway we would go. I suggested the bridge where H crosses Cole Camp Creek where several years earlier I painted this watercolor. “Great,” they said. “We’ll be waiting for you there.” The low water bridge is gone, replaced by a higher concrete bridge. My friend, who I almost killed, has been dead a half a century.
Stupidly, I went along with a challenge to prove his theory on a nearby winding blacktop. The initial hairpin curves gave me a lead, but a loopy curve five or six miles down the road caused me to accelerate and I lost control. We rolled four or five times coming to rest upside down, held in by our seatbelts. We kicked the doors open, climbed out and saw the Corvette stopped at the top of the hill. Freed beckoned to them and they drove down and helped us right the Porsche. Miraculously it ran. With a smashed flat windshield, flickering headlights, and fighting the steering wheel, we slowly made it back to Sedalia. Frame bent—it was totaled.
Sunday, August 13, 1961, about three months after that, Ronald Michael Freed, 20 years old, was the passenger in a car driven by David Eugene Rouyer, 23 years old. Near the Nelson-Atkins Art Gallery in Kansas City, Rouyer lost control rounding a curve, going by police estimate 65 mph. His vehicle “broke off a utility pole and hit a tree.” Both young men were killed.
A “Distress Sale (Auction)” was held at the Lincoln Gallery Saturday, October 14, 1961. The sale was largely old stuff but a few artworks were included:
There will be offered at this sale some of my original paintings including a pen and ink sketch, which I made of the building across the street from the gallery. The person who buys the most in dollar value will be given a painting by me valued at approximately $50.
Searching my name (which is on a dozen books) allowed several people in possession of my early paintings to contact me. This allowed me to buy back four watercolors from the late 1950s and early 1960s. Two of them hang on the wall of our office, above a table of awards we have won for our photographically illustrated books. I’ll post three chapters from an unfinished biography that explains my transition from painting to photography.
What those sketches and original paintings were or what they sold for I don’t recall. The two watercolors I had sold earlier I vividly remembered and often wondered what became of them. Then in 2014, the son of the woman who purchased them from me in Lincoln in 1961 emailed me after finding my address on the Internet. I inquired if he would be interested in selling them back to me:
Mr. Payton, the only way I could get those paintings out of my mother’s house is if she (god forbid) passes away. She loves them that much! If they ever do become available, I will definitely keep you in mind!
Further interchanges revealed that although Mom “loved them” the rest of her family didn’t share her enthusiasm. Turns out she downsized and there wouldn’t be room for these and no one in the family wanted them. One thing led to another and for an exchange of several of my photographs, the son said I could have them. Crystal and I drove to Jefferson City to retrieve them.