Art, Hooked on Iffy Taste

Portrait of Robert Eugene Smith

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Click to view a PDF of the entire Maine Antique Digest article.

We did an extensive profile of folk artist Robert E. Smith for the Maine Antique Digest, which was published October, 1993. In it we have many quotes from Bob, which we tape-recorded and transcribed. Interestingly, he rejected the term outsider: “I’m not exactly an outsider,” he said. “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?”

Bob not only painted interesting pictures he was a showman, musician, poet, and all-around intriguing personality. See also Crystal’s post, Happy Birthday Robert E. Smith, which has a number of photographs taken when we interviewed him for the Maine Antique Digest.

Art, Hooked on Iffy Taste

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.

Art, Hooked on Iffy Taste

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

 

Leland Payton Paintings and Photographs

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.

Art, Hooked on Iffy Taste

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).

 

 

 

Art, Hooked on Iffy Taste

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.)