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HAPPY BIRTHDAY ROBERT E. SMITH! Remembering Springfield’s own folk artist on his 92nd birthday – October 14.

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Happy birthday, Bob!

For years we supplied Bob with materials—paints, brushes, artist’s board, and occasionally an object like this guitar. We then paid him for the finished art and sold them to collectors and dealers on both coasts. When he began to find local buyers at higher prices we bowed out but kept in touch through the years.

Today would have been Robert E. Smith’s 92nd birthday (October 14, 1927-Feb. 13, 2010). The calendar reminder pops up every year and makes me smile. The indefatigable Bob Smith rises front and center in memory – from our first encounter at his room in a white frame boarding house on North Main Street in Springfield to meetings and phone calls over decades as his art developed and his audience grew. We were delighted with his success.

We first saw his work at the Missouri State Fair in 1977. Across a not-too-crowded room in the Fine Arts Building was a cheaply framed picture of Stalin in the Shower Room, with a camel, some birds and a monkey-like creature. This was an artist we had to meet. Some weeks later we found him in his rented room in Springfield. Somewhere we have an audiotape of that first meeting. From that time on, Bob was a fixture in our lives – as he became with so many people. Through those early years we placed around 200 of his paintings, the majority going to the Larry Whiteley Folk Art Gallery in Los Angeles.

Google the name and you’ll find a lot of Robert Smiths in the world. But there is only one Robert Eugene Smith, Springfield folk artist.

To the best of our knowledge we suggested Bob write down the stories for each artwork. We tape-recorded him telling stories whenever we saw him. He acquired his own tape recorder and began recording his stories, songs and poems. He was prolific and we were able to provide a market for everything he sent us, which helped him realize he could make a living from his art; he could be a professional artist.

When we interviewed him in 1993 for an article in the Maine Antique Digest (see separate post tomorrow), he questioned the term Outsider Artist, a label that had been applied to him. “Well, what is the term outsider art anyway? I’m not exactly an outsider. I been there before. I’m more broken in—I’m not no outsider. I’m a folk artist. If you’re not known [you’re an outsider], aren’t you?”

When we settled in Springfield we heard from him frequently. For years he called a couple of times a week to update us on his busy life. And a busy life it was. Bob was very mobile. He roamed the country on Greyhound buses – to California and St. Joseph and Little Rock. He took the bus to St. Louis for Cardinals baseball games, where he might have sold beer/soda to pay his way. Tales of his trips were very entertaining and usually inspired more art.

Bob Smith became a Springfield celebrity. Artists in the community were fans. Bob was a performer and local musicians and bands played with him. His story paintings are full of animals, usually in incongruent locations and most have names, and monsters and action scenes. Vehicles race down crooked roads; birds and aircraft, even hot air balloons skim through his skies. Some surrogate characters show up often in the stories – Baby Huey and an artist named Abraham Smitty Boob are frequently present.

Robert’s cousin, Grace Mathews, has put up a blog where friends have posted memories and pictures. http://roberteugenesmith.blogspot.com/ The stories are personal and entertaining. Bob made his mark on everyone who knew him.

Once again – Happy birthday, Bob!  We’re so glad we knew you.

Click on an image to view it at a larger size.

STREETS OF SEDALIA During the 38th Scott Joplin International Ragtime Festival, 2019: Leland Payton Photographs

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Mural of Scott Joplin, Sedalia, Missouri

Scott Joplin would feel at home in downtown Sedalia of 2019. Some of the buildings now have Vitrolite façades or other street-level modifications but if you look up, you’ll see many have a pre-1900 date chiseled into their limestone cornices. In the interests of setting the stage for a display of a number of David Wilson paintings, consider the physical setting both he and Scott Joplin experienced. This mercantile landscape evidences a commercial culture that seems an unlikely environment for either’s art. The following brief description of the ambience of current Sedalia and its ragtime score is an effort to set the stage what might seem a completely intrusive cultural phenomenon.

Ragtime was at its zenith before World War I. Its syncopated rhythms made it a precursor to jazz. Scott Joplin was the preeminent composer of this spirited piano music and some of his most productive years were spent in the then-booming railroad town of Sedalia, Missouri. Since Sedalia has been static and its business district usurped by highway development

During this year’s festival, my wife Crystal and I walked the streets of old downtown Sedalia one evening. Many buildings date from the era when the composer lived here. Lamppost banners and window posters advertised the festival. Shops that once purveyed necessities now sell antiques and crafts. It’s a sympathetic setting for the performance of old-time music that, like the downtown, has apparently diminishing attendance. The experience was a tad melancholy but not unpleasant. There is visual richness in the weathered surfaces of buildings slouching toward ruins but still useful if their roofs are good. Perhaps a third were for rent. The twilight when I took the photographs seemed appropriate given the twilight of the moribund business district and waning appreciation of Joplin’s poignant piano music. It’s encouraging that Joplin’s haunting melodies are treasured by some and the culturally unpretentious town strives to keep his memory alive.

Click on the images below to enlarge.

 

Maple Leaf Park
Music store on Ohio Street
Gazebo Park
Old-time music, Gazebo Park, Scott Joplin Festival
Photo restorations
Reflections of a brothel, Main Street, Sedalia
Tower Loans
Jammy Rags and Books and Things
Sedalia, Where Ragtime Began

 

REMEMBRANCE OF TWO LONG LOST WATERCOLORS

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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.

PICTURING AND PERFORMING SCOTT JOPLIN: In Murals and a Festival, Sedalia, Missouri, Celebrates Ragtime’s Premiere Composer

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David Wilson, Ragtime, circa 1974, oil on Masonite, 51 x 36, City of Sedalia, Missouri. Now in an office in the Municipal Building. One might think a fractured folk modern work like this would vex the citizens of a mid-size Midwestern town, but Wilson’s depiction of Scott Joplin is a favorite with the public. It has kinetic energy, not unlike the spirited rhythm of ragtime music.

In 1974 David Wilson was commissioned to paint a portrait of Scott Joplin. It was displayed in the hall of Sedalia’s new municipal building. For better security today it hangs in an office. That same year, Sedalia launched its first annual Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival.

At the end of World War I, other syncopated popular music forms like stride piano, boogie-woogie, Dixieland, blues and jazz successively supplanted ragtime.  Periodically, it was dusted off and performed. Joshua Rifkin’s album of Scott Joplin in 1970 sold a million copies, equally the sales number of Maple Leaf Rag sheet music a century earlier.

Marvin Hamlisch won an Oscar for his score based on Scott Joplin’s songs for the movie The Sting. That 1973 film starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford was awarded a total of seven Academy awards including Best Picture.

The 1970s saw a national revival of interest in Joplin, but Sedalia’s ragtime heritage had been continuous since the turn of the nineteenth century when the town was the base for a number of black piano players who pioneered the lively syncopated dance music. Businessman John Stark was located here and his success publishing Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag in 1899 established Joplin as the “King of Ragtime.”

Article from The Sedalia Democrat, May 23, 1974.

The Sedalia Democrat followed every stage of Joplin’s career. Through the years, nostalgic stories recalled his success and the good old days when he enthralled white concertgoers and diverse patrons of the town’s many bawdy houses. Sedalia is a well-churched town, but is candid about its wide-open past as a booming railroad nexus with a thriving red light district and surfeit of saloons. Does the fetching musicality of ragtime provide a soundtrack that covers over the grim realities of its prostitution industry and rampant alcohol abuse? Scott Joplin would die in an asylum at the age of 48 of syphilitic dementia.

Photographs of Scott Joplin have survived so artists are able to paint credible portraits. Some of David Wilson’s other paintings prove he could have created a recognizable Joplin, but obviously he chose not to. In both our painting and the one at Sedalia’s Municipal Building he departed from the constraints of verisimilitude.

Other Sedalia public art works of Joplin are realistic. In 1977, Eric Bransby was paid $10,000 to paint three panels illustrating the town’s past (below left).

The entire chamber of a courtroom of the Pettis County courthouse is lined with pictures of local history by Barbara Campbell done in 2000. She of course included scenes evocative of Scott Joplin’s years in Sedalia, circa 1895-1901 (center).

Stanley James Heard painted a large mural of Joplin at the piano in 1994 on the wall of the Wilkins Music Co. 205 S. Ohio (below right).

(Click image to enlarge).

 

 

 

DAVID WILSON: A Sedalia Missouri outsider (?) artist envisions Scott Joplin

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David Wilson, title unknown, circa 1970s, oil on Masonite, 28 x 48. As Wilson was known to have executed a commission to paint Scott Joplin we assume this is also a picture of the ragtime composer.

David Wilson, back of the Scott Joplin painting above. Initially we wondered if this was part of a discarded panel of a series of religious paintings he created for the Sedalia Episcopal Church. However, the snake wrapped around the woman’s wrist does not fit any of the forty-four references to serpents in the Bible. Nor does it seem to be a picture of a snake biting Cleopatra. Hygieia, the Greek goddess of health and hygiene is often portrayed feeding or watering a snake wrapped around her. There are ancient sculptures of Hygieia holding a bowl from which the snake is drinking. There is a bowl in Wilson’s fragment. Understanding the origin’s and intent of David Wilson’s art will be challenging.

One day in the 1980s we wandered into Ed Yuell’s frame shop on the courthouse square in Sedalia, Missouri and spied some bold and unconventional artworks left on consignment. The largest of the group we purchased was an oil on Masonite of a piano player. On the back was a section of another picture showing two figures in robes. The woman holds a bowl and has a serpent wrapped around her wrist. Its technique of thickly daubed oil paint is identical to the front but stylistically it is more conventional. The fractured modernist musician front panel was signed WILSON.

Scott Joplin is a local hero and Sedalia has a long running, yearly ragtime festival so we assumed it portrayed the famous composer of “Maple Leaf Rag.” Ed agreed and told us David Wilson painted a Scott Joplin piece, which was on display at the city’s municipal building.  The Sedalia Democrat, May 23, 1974, page 14, ran a photo of the artist and this painting, headlined “Municipal Abstract.” The “local artist” was misidentified as David Walker. The next day the paper ran an “identity was wrong” admission and credited David Wilson.

To our knowledge there has been no fine arts recognition of David Henry Wilson (1919-1989).  He has not been formally exhibited, or had works sold at auction. In subsequent posts we will reveal what we have learned about this obscure creator of powerful and intriguing images.

(This is the first in a series of six posts on David Wilson.)

STILL LIFE WITH HORSE SKULL, 1958: Pre-Cross Hatch Watercolor

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Still Life with Horse Skull, March 1958, Leland Payton, Watercolor, 17 by 23

In 1958, I was a senior at Smith-Cotton High School in Sedalia, Missouri. One Sunday afternoon, I commandeered the dining room table and arranged some artifacts from my found-object collection and a few household items and painted this in one sitting.

Later Edwin Dickinson questioned my use of crosshatching in the Lookdown picture I sold him for a quarter and the other Florida watercolors. I did this still life before I started using a finishing overlay of pen lines to define and control the tone and texture of spaces.

Early in December 2011, I got a phone call about this painting, which, like the Lookdown, I had lost track of. It was from a man who once lived in Sedalia. After discussing what was in the picture (which I thought was pretty evident), I asked him to send me a photo of it. This is his email of December 10, 2011:

Leland,

I`m sorry it took so long to send you the pictures of your painting. I spent last week in Oklahoma with my 2 boys. I am not the greatest at this computer stuff, If your mom would of only had a computer coarse when I was in her class, but since they were not invented yet then I am on my own.

I guess my main questions are, is this one of your paintings? did you go to art school with Sharon? and did you paint it while you were at art school or before. From her paintings it looks like one of you had some artistic influence on the other. I received this painting from my sister after Sharon passed away and just about anyone that stops by always comments on it. They all like it of coarse. They always ask who the artist is so I googled your name and got your number. The info on the internet mentioned books with other artwork in them but I have looked in several bookstores and not located them. My next stop will be Amazon.com.

When we talked I think I said that my parents still live in the house next to Mr. Hall`s old house and when we were growing up it was the neighborhood hang out. I appreciate You Taking the time to talk with me on the phone and any info on your artwork would be great.

The objects in the still life are an inventory of my interests as a teenager. (1) Horse skull—picked up on a fishing trip to Spring Fork Creek. (2) Balsa wood rack to mount butterflies and insects. (3) Swallowtail butterfly on an insect pin. (4) Salad oil jar. (5) Two bottles of Pelican ink. (6) Box turtle shell. (7) Chunk of hematite. Pieces of this red iron-rich mineral were scattered through Indian sites around Sedalia. May have been used as a paint source? (8) Two bottles of Armagnac brandy. My father made friends with a French hotelier during World War II. For a decade after the war, we exchanged Christmas gifts. They usually sent a local liqueur. And yes, my parents let me sample it.

I replied, December 11, 2011:

The central figure in the painting is a horse skull. On the left are two wine bottles. On the upper right is a balsa wood board I mounted butterflies with. Below that is a bottle. Below that are two Pelican Ink bottles. Below them is a turtle shell. Pretty typical still life.

The wife likes the pictures and would be happy to buy it from you if you would be interested. We don’t have very many pictures from my high school days.

He responded on December 17:

I wanted to thank you for taking the time to talk with me a couple of weeks ago. I remember your mothers classes in grade school and she talked about you often. That`s how I made the conection between you and your mother. I can`t remember what I ate yesterday, but I remember your mom`s classes in grade school, go figure. My intention for calling you was to find out a little bit about the painting and you. I wasn’t even thinking of selling the painting. It goes with my decore, and as I said before anyone that see`s it always admires it. I know the painting probably means more to you and your wife than it does to me, but after having it for several years I am somewhat attatched to it.

If you are interested in buying the painting please let me know what you have in mind. The painting is dated and sighned  March 1958 and I was born in August 1958, that makes us both 54 years old this coming year (ouch). I took 15 pictures with my camera but had trouble sending them, I think this computer stuff is just a fad.

While researching Leland on the internet I saw some of your artwork and I discovered you are an author, and photographer, you are very talented. Maybe you would consider trading the painting for other artwork or photographs, we can certainly talk about that if that`s even an option.

Again I want to say thank you for taking the time to talk with me and that I did not call you with the intention of finding out what the painting is worth, or to even to sell it. You are more than welcome to call … and we can talk about it. If you get up this way sometime (Warransburg) we could meet and you could see your art work. If you have trouble reaching me on my cell you can also call me at Westlake Hardware.

We agreed on a combination of my photographs and cash and I got my still life back. Sharon Patten’s mother, Lucy, bought the painting from me during the several years Sharon and I dated. Sharon didn’t take up art until she was out of college I learned from the internet. Her canvases were huge, thickly painted abstractions which were well received by the art world. In 1988 she got a Guggenheim Fellowship. Sedalia’s Daum Museum has eleven and the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City owns five. Our influence on each other was minimal esthetically (and any other way) to answer the man’s question. Smoking two packs a day proved fatal. She died, I learned, in 1995 at age 52.

 

“Legends and Scenery”: Hannibal’s Lover’s Leap

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Leland Payton pondering jumping into a book project while at Hannibal, Missouri’s Lover’s Leap.

Our last two books were on Ozark rivers – the James and the Osage (although it heads in the prairie plains of Kansas). Both streams have folklore about cliffs where Indian princesses jumped to their deaths over parental interference in their love life. These struck us as bizarre and aroused our curiosity. Researching these tragic stories that didn’t jive with our impressions of Native American culture we ran across Mark Twain’s satire on Lover’s Leaps. In Chapter 59 “Legends and Scenery” in Life on the Mississippi (1883) Twain wrote of encountering a garrulous passenger on the upper river who tells a story of a broken-hearted Indian maiden who leaps from a bluff. In a departure from other such tales she doesn’t die but lands on her cruel, controlling parents, killing them. Then she is free to marry the brave her parents opposed and lives “happily ever after.” Of course, Twain’s telling is marvelously arch – and it reminds us how much he imitated Mel Brooks.

So Crystal and I, in late March 2017, drove to Hannibal, Missouri to decide if there might be a book in these tear jerking tales. That leap in Twain’s spoof is off Maiden Rock, Wisconsin – too far for a casual drive. Hannibal, on the other hand, does have a quite well-known Lover’s Leap. Mark Twain loved Hannibal and Hannibal loves Mark Twain. Perhaps there the spirit of the writer would whisper “go or no” in our ear.

Crystal Payton took the cover photograph of Lover’s Leap Legends and ended up with more interior shots with a much smaller camera than husband Leland.

Cardiff Hill, another Hannibal bluff, is prominently featured in several Twain books. He published nothing about Hannibal’s Lover’s Leap, though he knew about it – the legend saw print before the Civil War. Today the overlook is a city park. A short version of its legend is cast in a small bronze plaque. While we were taking pictures, cars arrived and people strolled along the protective fence gazing out over the river and town.

 

In Life on the Mississippi, geography including cliffs are sharply realized. Norman Mailer thought Twain, a pretty promising writer but was critical of him for stealing so much of his stylistic delineations of landscape from Ernest Hemmingway. Twain’s setup for his leap satire was a passage on “the majestic bluffs that overlook the river.” That and the public’s attraction to the Lover’s Leap geography, along with the promise we could like Twain make fun of Romanticism suggested we should proceed. We dedicated the book to the godfather of American realism:

FOR MARK TWAIN

Who diagnosed America’s sentimental romantic infection.

Alas, his injection of realism was not a cure.

That moment Crystal took my picture with my elbow on the fence at Hannibal’s Lover’s Leap may not be the exact second all this jelled, but then it could be. Mark Twain proved you could get by with mocking sentimentality and get paid for it, a good trick.

A folio by Crystal and Leland Payton of Hannibal, Missouri’s Lover’s Leap and Mark Twain’s visible imprint on the town. Twain’s linkage of geography with folklore (which he thought unreliable but intriguing) was a guide to us in writing a book on Lover’s Leaps. Lover’s Leap Legend will be published February 2020.

Click on any image to start slide show.

Lookdown on Ice

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Leland Payton, Lookdown on Ice, 1963, watercolor on paper, 18 x 24

On Feb. 25, 2018 I received the following email:

Hello, I have this beautiful piece by you that I just discovered going through my work and collection. Once upon a time I was Director and Curator at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (1976-78) and curated a show of Edwin Dickinson’s work. I may have gotten this from his widow. She gave me some things including Dickinson’s easel. Otherwise, I can’t recall! Anyway, if you can tell me about it I appreciate it. It is exquisite! Thanks, Sheila Miles (Santa Fe, NM)

A few days later I replied:

Thanks for sending me a picture of my watercolor from long ago. I studied for a few months with Dickinson at the Art Students League in the early ’60s. I ran out of money and had to retreat to Missouri. Before I left I showed Dickinson some watercolors I did in Florida and he seemed generally approving except that he thought I was wasting too much time with the cross-hatching. He liked the picture of the lookdown. I caught two one night on the docks of Marathon; I ate one and painted one. I offered to give it to him in appreciation for how much his paintings inspired me. He said, “an artist never gives anything away.”  I said, “how about a quarter?” He smiled and gave me a quarter, which I used on the subway.

If you look up our websites, for a long time I’ve produced pictures with a camera, mostly of the Ozarks. My wife Crystal and I have produced a number of books, mostly on rivers and the effect of culture on landscape.

If you ever get tired of it, I’d be happy to buy it back from you — for more than a quarter! We’ve got two sons and I probably will leave some of my artwork with them. They’re both scuba divers and just got back from a dive in the Philippines.  So they are appreciative of tropical fish.

Regards,

Leland

P.S. A friend of ours who died a few years ago lived down in Santa Fe… Ted Coe.  Before I fell from grace for suing the Corps of Engineers in Missouri over a ridiculous reservoir, I did environmental photographs, one show of which was at the Nelson Gallery in Kansas City, where we met Ted.

BTW – I’m really delighted to know Mr. Dickinson took it home with him and held on to it all these years. It hasn’t been thrown away. I’ve often wondered about it.

Sheila filled me in on her background, which is impressive and extensive in the arts and explained in a March 1, 2018 email how she acquired the watercolor that I assumed had vanished.

What a great story! (Everything comes around again).

It’s a beautiful piece. But a quarter!  Those were the times.

(I lived in NYC in the late 70’s and did busking in SoHo with my then husband. I remember getting a dollar and we could get a bagel. Another 50 cents, ride the subway home to our apartment at Tiemann Place (near 125 subway by Harlem). Maybe you knew my friend Arthur Cohen. He built my printing press from an old Chinese laundry press.

I can’t imagine what it was like to be at the Art Student’s league in those times. So many great artists came out of it. I knew Raphael Soyer in Provincetown; I think he was also there.

I love Dickinson’s work and was thrilled to put together his show.

And I worked with Victor Candell and Leo Manso at the Hans Hoffman School of Art.. for just a bit. I quit even though I had a full scholarship because I didn’t want to do small ocean scenes. My professor from Purdue, Tony Vevers who owned a house in Ptown sent me there as I wanted to leave IN.

I fell in love with the owner of the White Horse Inn, Frank Schaefer, and stayed 5 years. Was the Director at the PAAM for almost 3 years.

You have had an exciting career too.

If you would like to buy your piece please let me know what you might pay; it is a beautiful piece. It is so great to pass it to your sons. It is really remarkable. I love the cross-hatching. I posted it on FB and it got some nice complements. It is a great example of that style that was very popular at that time. It reminds me of some of those RISD expert artists who make beautiful art supported by strong technique.

Thanks for answering me and sharing the story,

Sheila

We agreed on a price and it now hangs on the wall of our spare bedroom/office in a duplex in Springfield,Missouri.

FIRST BOOK EVER ON LOVER’S LEAP LEGENDS OUT NOW

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LOVER’S LEAP LEGENDS: From Sappho of Lesbos to Wah-Wah-Tee of Waco
Leland & Crystal Payton
ISBN: 978-0-9673925-9-2
352 pages   7.5×10   511 color illustrations
$35.00 retail
Buy the book here for 10% off. Click here.

“Your great grandmother probably teared up when told the story of an Indian princess jumping to her death over a disappointment in love, but Mark Twain laughed,” observed Crystal Payton, co-author with husband Leland of a new book Lover’s Leap Legends: From Sappho of Lesbos to Wah-Wah-Tee of Waco,” April, 2020. The couple believes the godfather of American realism was right about excessive sentimentality. “Twain satirized romantic popular culture, but he was not an elitist snob,” added Leland. “He found these Lover’s Leap fables fake but funny.”

Lovers leap worldwide. Stories about these tragedies extend back to a myth that the ancient Greek poet, Sappho of Lesbos, jumped from a cliff when spurned by her lover, Phaon. In America the leaping was usually done by a love-shattered Indian woman. There are hundreds of dramatic cliffs where a “dusky maiden” is said to have plunged to her death after her father, the chief, objected to her boyfriend from an enemy tribe. Thousands of poems, stories, and newspaper accounts chronicle these dolorous events. Millions of postcards and souvenirs have been manufactured picturing the often-spectacular bluffs where “many moons ago” these tragedies took place. Folklorists have largely ignored these legends. Understandably so—they are “fakelore” and do not resemble Indian traditions.

This 352-page book with more than five hundred color illustrations is the first comprehensive study of Lover’s Leaps. Twain found these saccharine sagas perversely amusing, and so will contemporary readers. Corny cultural products have not vanished however, as the Paytons acknowledge in the book’s dedication: “For Mark Twain—Who diagnosed American’s sentimental romantic infection. Alas, his injection of realism was not a cure.”

“Lover’s Leap Legends is the definitive visual sourcebook for an American tradition that is as disturbing as it is amusing.” –Jared Farmer, author of On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape.

“An inherently fascinating, beautifully illustrated, impressively informative, expertly organized and presented study, Lover’s Leap Legends: From Sappho of Lesbos to Wah-Wah-Tee of Waco, is an extraordinary, unique, and unreservedly recommended addition to personal reading lists, as well as community and academic library collections.”—Midwest Book Review.

Lens & Pen Press’s new book, LOVER’S LEAP LEGENDS, won a bronze medal in the competitive Popular Culture category of the 2020 Independent Publishers Book Awards.

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“MIX AND MINGLE” AT ASH GROVE’S MAIN STREET HERITAGE FESTIVAL

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Although I arrived at the Ash Grove festival late in the afternoon there were still a few folks milling around on Main Street. There were, like many country trade centers, empty buildings, but none looked like they were about to fall in. Some had going businesses. Others displayed relics of the town’s past in their windows. Overall, the scene did not fulfill the stereotype of villages on the verge of economic and cultural collapse. Writers like Edgar Lee Masters and Sinclair Lewis may have erred when, a century ago, they located all that is dysfunctional and antiquated about America exclusively in small towns. Could it be that cultural stagnation and backwardness may manifest itself in urban and suburban environments as well? A place like Ash Grove that takes civic pride in former residents Nathan Boone (Daniel’s son) and notorious gangster Ma Barker displays up-to-date diversity. It mixes historical eras with wild abandon. The place fits our HYPERCOMMON slogan – ordinary isn’t.

Although I arrived at the Ash Grove festival late in the afternoon there were still a few folks milling around on Main Street. There were, like many country trade centers, empty buildings, but none looked like they were about to fall in. Some had going businesses. Others displayed relics of the town’s past in their windows. Overall, the scene did not fulfill the stereotype of villages on the verge of economic and cultural collapse. Writers like Edgar Lee Masters and Sinclair Lewis may have erred when, a century ago, they located all that is dysfunctional and antiquated about America exclusively in small towns. Could it be that cultural stagnation and backwardness may manifest itself in urban and suburban environments as well? A place like Ash Grove that takes civic pride in former residents Nathan Boone (Daniel’s son) and notorious gangster Ma Barker displays up-to-date diversity. It mixes historical eras with wild abandon. The place fits our HYPERCOMMON slogan – ordinary isn’t.

“Is this Ash Grove?” asked the woman in a red dress behind the wheel of a small car that pulled off on the shoulder beside me. “This is Halltown,” I told her. She didn’t understand my directions until a young girl produced a Missouri road map from the glove compartment and I showed her the way to Ash Grove. “I’m performing at some kind of festival there. Come see me.” She did a U turn and headed back east following my directions.

bl454When I finished taking pictures of Halltown I went on to Paris Spring Junction. (Click on the links to see those posts). Later that afternoon I did end up in Ash Grove, and I did see a picture of the lost woman in red propped up by the door of a café. There was no Sing-a-Long Sweet Memories of Silent Movie Music coming from inside, so I did not hear Teresa Arth sing and play the piano. There was a strolling harmonica player, though.

The light was perfect, but it would not last. Things were definitely winding down at the Ash Grove Main Street Heritage Festival. Attendance was sparse, but the old buildings looked good through my viewfinder. The century old structures were an intriguing combination of decay, restoration, and unfinished restoration, many enhanced with stylistic choices not yet categorized by architectural historians. Such esthetic chaos may disturb purists, but American development has been wildly eclectic from the beginning. Bricolage, an arty French word, describes the practice of incorporating readily available materials or styles into an object or work. Unfamiliarity with the theory hasn’t stopped the citizens of this small town from bricolaging the hell out of their buildings, the collections of artifacts in those buildings, and culture.

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Esthetically as well as socially, Ash Grove’s festival was indeed “mix and mingle” as 105.9 KGBX’s press release said of the event. I pulled it up on the web after getting home:

Back Roads to Main Street Heritage Festival
October 18  – 9:00 am to 5:00 pm.
Main Street – Ash Grove

CELEBRATING AND SHARING A FASCINATING HERITAGE

Notable Missourian Nathan Boone, son of Daniel Boone, early settler – here…. Birthplace of notorious 1930’s gangster Ma Barker, on FBI’s Most Wanted List – here……Civil War bushwhackers’ terrorizing raids – here……Main Street shoot out between horse thieves – here.…..Murder over missing foxhound said to be basis of book and movie, “The Voice of Bugle Ann” – here.……Enterprises that distinguished our area nationwide, Ash Grove Portland Cement and Phenix Marble Quarry – here.

Celebration of this fascinating heritage begins on Historic Main Street. It is a mix and mingle of Civil War to 20’s and 30’s eras in fashion, buggies and vintage vehicles, live music – fiddle — ragtime piano -Irish folk songs, plus foods from the days of biscuits always on the table, sarsaparilla a favored drink, and nothing was better than catfish fried up in a pan.

Come in historic full attire…enter the 10:00 am costume contest (for all ages and gender)… and a free order of biscuits and gravy is yours. Costume up your whole family and not only is your breakfast covered but so are the Halloween costumes.

No costume? Get in the spirit of the day with a flapper headband or gangster hat from the Headband and Hat shop. Don’t forget your camera to get a photo of your new look with flapper, Sara Vega, professional model.

Listen to the story telling and watch the re-enactments of stories from our heritage….join in the games and competitions….see artisans demonstrate their skills…make and take a painted gourd… make a planter from Ash Grove cement and paper… AND keep an eye out for Ma Barker’s boys – they’re usually up to no good.

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As well as the display of a log cabin quilt that was being raffled off for a good cause, there was a photo exhibit on Main Street. Clothes pinned to clothes lines were photographs taken by the citizenry. Voting was underway to select the best images for a community calendar. Sunsets were the most popular subject.

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Even if I had missed the opening act, the coda of the celebration was a provocative visual display of old, new, in between and outside the boundaries of time. It certainly wasn’t one of the laid-out-on-a-slab villages I’d photographed for Ozark Prairie Border. Ash Grove has a pulse.

Googling Ash Grove, I pulled up a dissenting opinion. “Agricultural commerce has abandoned Ash Grove. It isn’t a sleepy community. It’s in a coma,” wrote freelance reviewer of live music, Bill Glahn. He pronounced the town of 1,500 a victim of corporate greed that has killed the family farm and sent factory jobs overseas. Glahn is active in Occupy Springfield, a franchise of Occupy Wall Street, so it’s not difficult to discern his political leanings.

He motored up to Ash Grove from Springfield on Labor Day of 2010, “to make some kind of photographic record that this place actually existed before it crumbled into dust.” The anti capitalist protest group didn’t begin until September 2011. So he wouldn’t have been able to start a subchapter – Occupy Ash Grove – to protest the pernicious influence of big business on small towns. After my brief sojourn I don’t get the feeling the place was or is ripe for revolution.

Mural proclaiming Ash Grove’s debt to the coming of the railroad. Although the homestead of Daniel Boone’s son Nathan has become a popular state park just north of the town it was the arrival of the Missouri Pacific railroad in the late 1800s that spurred an era of prosperity, and is embedded in local memory. As well as a decent farming resource (which blogger Glahn prematurely dismissed) a nearby vein of excellent limestone was mined for building stone and crushed as aggregate. During the Depression construction virtually ceased in America and farm commodities suffered a price collapse. Ash Grove has more than survived. Though the train no longer stops and the quarry has closed, it has highway access to Springfield, a small city with a surfeit of shopping and gobs of jobs.

Mural proclaiming Ash Grove’s debt to the coming of the railroad. Although the homestead of Daniel Boone’s son Nathan has become a popular state park just north of the town it was the arrival of the Missouri Pacific railroad in the late 1800s that spurred an era of prosperity, and is embedded in local memory. As well as a decent farming resource (which blogger Glahn prematurely dismissed) a nearby vein of excellent limestone was mined for building stone and crushed as aggregate. During the Depression construction virtually ceased in America and farm commodities suffered a price collapse. Ash Grove has more than survived. Though the train no longer stops and the quarry has closed, it has highway access to Springfield, a small city with a surfeit of shopping and gobs of jobs.