Pages

Friday, June 10, 2016

down by the river -- dead success

I was asked by some folks with an interest in the Kentucky River to comment on Paul Sawyier, local artist doing well in demise, who lived in a houseboat on the river by Frankfort for four or five years about a hundred years back. Fact is I’ve never been too interested in his work, mostly river scenes and autumn creek beds, the warm brown colors of fall, year by year more impressionistic and browner as his fugitive medium inevitably fades. Paul, himself, is remarkably illusive, glossed over by fawning biographers, a bit rougher in spoken memory, his life seemed complicated. 

While young his family fell from social prominence to receiving charity, living in a vacant parsonage behind the church for free. He was either a local celebrity, ‘everyone loved Paul, always so polite and friendly,’ or the town drunk, groveling and ingratiating, some of the time living on a houseboat and paying no rent still. He was ambivalent toward his work and openly disliked doing portraits, seemed to have rocky relations with dealers and agents, a gentle commentary leaving much room between lines. He found himself living out his father’s ambitions, forbidden to study art by his father before him, an oft told tale, and he never had any money. 

So what’s it like to be an artist in a small southern town a hundred years back? Ninety percent of the population were agricultural back then, and folks lived with animals, carried water into the house, and conveniences weren’t very. Perhaps they found respect for the painter and reverence for his efforts just as the biographers have claimed, but having lived it I’m not so sure. Artists always need money, but he must have had it special, growing up with linen sheets and currently sleeping on straw, and if he had a serious intimacy with alcohol as local lore recalls, he was bound to be broke all the time.

Polite and friendly may have been his reputation, but he went alone to live on the river in all sorts of weather, with only paints and a bottle, subsisting on food brought to him by the children of concerned ladies of the neighborhood. Was he expressing his reverence for nature or were landscapes all he could sell, and was his painting leisurely and joyous or driven by hard-bitten necessity? Depends on who you listen to and what you see. For myself, any alcoholic who still manages to be productive is partially a hero just for saving just enough integrity to work at all, but chances are they won’t be happy.

The artist is the grasshopper of the children’s fable, destined to starve while the industrious ant dines, a featured acorn in early education for generations, embedding a notion that hangs around after the lesson is forgotten. There are places and times when artists are respected and their work valued, could be here, and wherever it’s a land of happy artists where everyone else is happy too.  


2 comments:

Patrick Lynch said...

When I was still at my old day job, I helped someone research a print that was being released because it was a Lexington street scene and I correctly identified it as the old post office on Main St. I was given a print along with my former workplace for the research I did. It resides in my flat file in the studio. If I free up enough wall space in my house it might go up someday. I have mixed feelings about Paul Sawyier. I think the cliche about the truth being in the middle probably applies. If he drank as much as he was reputed to have, his output as an artist was amazing. I find it hard to believe he could have drank that much because whether we like what he does or not, the quality of what he did is generally quite good. Did he paint better while drunk? Can't say myself, I wasn't there.

But back to the truth being in the middle, I'd venture to say there was a mix of reverence for nature and hard-bitten necessity in selling landscapes and street scenes. I suspect Sawyier felt conflicted about why he originally wanted to be an artist and having to paint what sells. In that, he is very much in tune with what conflicts so many of us today. If I only painted what sells to the exclusion of why I am an artist in the first place, it would not be long before I would be very unhappy.

danny said...

Interesting post Clay. I've been thinking about what I value about Sawyier, and for me it's that he took the time to visually represent and value landscapes that, viewed a century later, are now mostly gone. I notice it most on the river pictures, where traffic, life, and vitality have generally moved out of the bottoms and into the suburbs. In capturing those landscapes, he also captures some of the lifeways that are not often captured in photographs (or if they are, are not often preserved to be handed down to future generations).