MISSOURI ARTS COUNCIL

NOVEMBER 2012

A Quartet of Visual Artists From Missouri’s Far Corners

by Barbara MacRobie Artists flourish in every cranny of Missouri, from the big cities to the back roads. Some are nationally renowned; some are off the radar except in their own communities. With the invaluable help of people from regional arts councils and arts institutions, we talked with an artist from each of Missouri’s four corners.

We met Doug Hall, who from his log cabin near the Huckleberry Forest recreates the lives of the Eastern Woodland Indians. Erin Oehler experiments in her “glaze kitchen” for the pottery she makes when she’s not teaching art to children in Maryville. Sali Ware creates intricate pencil drawings from the studio she built in the back yard of the house in Malden where she grew up. And Rich Baily’s surreal visions are part of everyday life in Canton as they adorn the walls of a downtown pizza parlor.

Rich Baily | CANTON, Northeast “When I was 7 years old, I wanted to be a fireman. When I got over that, I wanted to be a painter.” “The storm is coming up behind them, and they are trying to find shelter—in a place that offers no shelter.” That, says Rich Baily, is the “pretty simple” theme of his painting The Rookery. “I started out with a shape, a reverse ‘s.’ On that I built up a tree and put people on it. I happened to be looking at some work by Goya at the time—he did people sitting in trees—I don’t remember if it was before or after I began The Rookery, but it was definitely an influence.”

The Rookery, by Rich Baily

Francisco José de Goya is one of the “old masters” in whose work Rich reveled during the six years when as a young man he studied painting in Amsterdam and roamed the museums of northern Europe. And like Goya, whose work ranged from exquisite Romantic portraits to hallucinatory scenes of nightmare and horror, Rich’s paintings are sometimes straightforward, sometimes surreal. For instance, for many years until Rich recently substituted different paintings, diners at Primo’s Pizza in downtown Canton ate under the eyes not only of The Rookery but also Dispatching Justice. “When I painted it, my attitude toward the judicial system pretty much sucked. I’m not trying to preach with my paintings, but they sometimes wind up being sermons.”

Rich told us this story: “On the left side is a jail cell with rats coming out. On the right is an angel—I think he’s a lawyer—showing a picture of a key to a guy who’s scared. Behind the scared guy is a judge taking down names. The guy is being accused of taking the key and unlocking the cell. But if you look closely at the woman climbing a rope, she’s wearing the key around her neck. She took it, and she’s getting away.”

But then there is Koi, a portrait of a woman who except for the tattoo on her back could be a Renaissance goddess. And her tattoo is not grotesque, but exquisite. Rich painted Koi from life. “She was my model years ago. She showed up again one day with a Harley-Davidson and this monstrous tattoo on her back. I like the way the water in front of her connects to the fish.” Rich’s family moved to Canton when he was a year and half old. A town of about 2,500 people right on the Mississippi, Canton has been since 1853 the home of Culver-Stockton College, a small

Dispatching Justice

Rich Baily and Koi

private college devoted to liberal arts. “I had some private instruction when I was in junior high from a teacher at Culver—that got me started solidly painting in oils,” Rich said. “I’ve tried acrylics, but they’re unacceptable. The colors aren’t as vibrant, the colors change, and we still don’t know that they’re going to last 400 years.” And just as the Renaissance painters he admires did, he uses oil-based gesso and rabbit-skin glue to protect his canvas from the acid in the paints that otherwise would eventually eat it through. After high school, Rich studied in Kirksville at Northeastern Missouri State University (later Truman State University) and then at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. “I got what I needed to get. I didn’t care about a degree.” He then took off for six years in Holland. There he studied art at the University of Amsterdam and Gerrit Rietveld Academie, and spent most of his free time in the art museums of Holland, Belgium, and Germany. When he came back to Canton, he converted the building his father had used to manufacture ice into a garage for his own business of restoring old cars. “I’d do anything from the 1940s on back,” he said. “It was great working on the cars, but it did take all of my energy. I still have a couple of them, including a 1922 Studebaker that’s been in my family since it was new.” Rich’s association with Primo’s goes back decades, long before the restaurant was a pizzeria. “When I was in grade school, I had a paper route, and I would stop there after school to pick up my papers. Much later,

I’d get coffee there in the morning after my shop opened up. The people who ran it became good friends. They sold it to another friend who put in a pizza place, and he wanted me to put my paintings up. When Jarod Phillips bought the place, he changed the name to Primo’s but kept my paintings.”(Note: Jarod Phillips is also Canton’s mayor.) Rich told us with relish about a self-portrait he had up in Primo’s. “I once walked in there and came up beside a woman who was starting at the portrait. She turned around, looked me straight in the face,

and just gasped.” Pizza lovers occasionally buy Rich’s paintings off the walls, but he does most of his sales through shows devoted to his work. “I do shows when I’ve got enough ready to go,” he said. “I sold two paintings just this September at Olivet Nazarene University in Kankakee—a friend of mine teaches there. I usually sell one or two paintings within minutes after the show opens. It seems I have a following.” These days, Rich told us, “All I do is watch TV and paint pictures.” He knows he will never run out of ideas. “Someday I’ll paint a Tower of Babel. One of my favorite painters, Pietr Breugel the Elder, did that twice. I think mine will probably look sacrilegious.”

From Primo’s Pizza’s Facebook Page

Koi

On the trail of an elusive artist

We would not have been able to talk with Rich or even known about him if it hadn’t been for a team of dedicated people in Canton.

When we contacted Carol Mathieson, professor of music at Culver-Stockton and president of the Canton Area Arts Council, to ask about artists in the northeastern corner, she immediately alerted us to Rich. But he did not have email nor, as far as Carol knew at that point, even a phone. Carol was determined, however, to get him to a phone and have him call us. Fortunately, when she went to Primo’s to ask for Jarod Phillips’ help, he was able to give her Rich’s new cell phone number.

Next challenge: Rich had no high-quality photos of his work. Kyle Trudell, Culver-Stockton’s director of com-munications and new media, came to the rescue by going to Rich’s studio and taking all the images of Rich and his art that you see in this article. Rich himself was affable and helpful every time we talked with him (as were the other

three artists in our story).

Sali Ware | MALDEN, Southeast "True art ought to have meaning. If not, it's a decoration or an illustration…perhaps no less valuable, but without meaning." Sali Ware left her home town to go to college in Memphis, and was gone for 37 years. But Malden, at the north end of Dunklin County in the Bootheel, always held her heart. In 2002, when she retired from a long career as a teacher of art technique and art history, she returned. She moved back in with her mother,

Clara (now age 98), in the Victorian house where she had grown up. From the studio that she built in her back yard, she produces award-winning acrylic paintings and intricately detailed pencil drawings that are in more than 300 private and public collections throughout the mid-South. “I love Malden,” she told us. “We don’t have lakes or mountains or water-falls, but it’s the people.” Sali’s studio, which she

calls The Warehouse, is made exactly to her desires. “I have all southern light. It’s the opposite of what most artists want,” she said. “But I think northern light is for people who don’t know their colors. I feel like if you know your paints you don’t have to worry about northern light to check the differences. Some people think there’s too much glare coming in from the south, but I’m heavy on light—I work a lot with light and dark, with the contrasts of chiaroscuro.”

The Artist in the Studio

Sali at Midsouth Reflections: the Art of Sali Ware, August 2011, Margaret Harwell Art Museum, Poplar Bluff Photo by Paul Davis, courtesy of the Daily American Republic

Since graduate school, Sali’s favorite medium has been acrylic. “Acrylic is a polymer base, unlike oil paints which have an oil base. Oil is easy to blend and takes longer to dry, so you can work on it with a leisurely pace. But acrylic dries quickly. You can put in a retarding medium, but I use it straight. Sometimes I even use a hairdryer to dry it faster so I can paint over it in layers and do what I want.” Four years ago, Sali began doing pencil drawings, which can take her five weeks to complete. “I enjoy them—they’re not as supersonic as acrylic,” she said. She also sometimes makes jewelry of fused glass, abstract glass enameled onto copper, and decorated boxes of walnut. Sali began drawing when she was 4 and got her first oil paints when she was 8. “There was a great art department at Malden High School that benefited a lot of people in this area,” she said. She earned her bachelor’s degree in education from the University of Memphis, and two master’s degrees, in education and in fine arts, from Stephen F. Austin University in Nacogdoches, Texas. She discovered acrylic in graduate school. She taught art history at Marion High School in Arkansas for 23 years, and art and art history at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City.

Though Sali still teaches students one on one, she says she very much misses classroom teaching. “But I don’t miss the new technology! I wouldn’t want cell phones in my classroom.” Sali’s work was the sole focus of an exhibit in August 2011 at the Margaret Harwell Art Museum in Poplar Bluff. At the museum’s 50 th Annual Regional Art Exhibit in 2009, one of her drawings was chosen both Best of Show by the exhibit’s jurors and People’s Choice by popular vote—the first time, remembers Director Tina Magill, that an artist had won both honors. Sali sells her paintings through exhibits and word of mouth. “I never have been big on marketing my work. I’m busy doing it and love to do it. I think artists’ personalities don’t normally go with marketing. I do try to do an exhibit every few years. It takes me a long time to get enough works together because I’m a perfectionist.” In her paintings and drawings, Sali likes a variety of subjects—“landscapes, seascapes, old shacks, and still lifes. I don’t like commissioned portraits, and I don’t do them anymore. I like to do people if they’re interesting—old or wrinkled or different-looking.” People like the old man she met when

driving in the country in northern Arkansas. “He lived near a wildlife refuge. I saw him sitting on his front porch, I asked him if I could take pictures of him. When I made his picture, I called it Mr. Dignity Holyshoes, because his shoes had holes in them yet he was trying so hard to accommodate my photos and to please me.”

Caastal Twilight, acrylic

Mister Dignity Holyshoes, pencil; Margaret Harwell Art Museum

Erin Oehler | MARYVILLE, Northwest “The clay is where I go to recharge. Being muddy in the clay Is a good day!”

It was while Erin Oehler was taking a class as a requirement for becoming certified to teach art that a life-altering revelation struck. “I found what fills my soul: making things in pottery.” Now she has a dual career as a potter and as the art teacher of the Horace Mann Laboratory School of Northwest Missouri State University. Horace Mann provides innovative learning experiences for children age 3 through 6th grade and hands-

on classroom training for Northwest education majors under the guidance of master teachers. Erin teaches art, from fiber to painting, to all grades. Northwest is vital to the vibrant cultural life of Maryville, a city of about 12,000, and Northwest is what brought Erin to Maryville nearly 30 years ago from Edwardsville, Kansas, where she grew up across Missouri’s northwestern border. In Maryville she attained her bachelor’s degree, starting in accounting and switching to theater. She met her husband, David, currently associate professor and chair of fine and performing arts at Northwest. In Maryville they have reared their three daughters, now 23, 20, and nearly 18. Erin’s daughters are the ones who first introduced her “through the back door” to both teaching and making pottery. “My kids were attending Horace Mann, and in 2001 the school was out an art teacher,” she said. “So I took it on as a part-time teaching job.” Erin found that she loved teaching and decided to get a master’s degree in art education from Northwest, which she achieved in 2004. During her studies, she took that life-changing class in clay.

Erin is primarily a “functional” potter, making objects intended for use, especially bowls and vases. “I like purely sculptural pottery, but most of the time I seem to be very grounded in the vessel. Maybe because I’m a mom?” She often makes vases with a removable “frog” on top, a lid with holes to help arrange flowers. She is an enthusiastic gardener; she and David won a Beautification Award from the City of Maryvile in 2010 for the garden on the steep bank in front of their home. “Our water meter reader nominated us!” Her love of nature is intrinsic to her work, which often reflects natural forms. Erin makes all her own glazes. “It’s certainly easier just to unscrew the lid of a jar,” she said, “but making your own opens a lot of possibilities. The commercial ones go on perfectly smoothly—they’re more idiot-

Two of Erin’s vases with a “frog,” a lid with holes to aid in making flower arrangements, one in action with flowers and one as artwork on its own

proof—but with your own glazes you get a richer, deeper surface. I like to play around in my ‘glaze kitchen’ and then see what happens in the kiln. Sometimes the results are great, sometimes not. And sometimes a mixture that has worked for years stops working because of a change in the way the minerals were mined. Then you’re stuck with five gallons of something that’s really bad!” Erin sells her pottery mostly through word of mouth; her shop on Etsy, the

e-commerce website that focuses on handmade and vintage items; and Maryville’s annual Holiday Hunt art and artisan show (the 2012 Hunt is coming up on November 18). “I always anticipate that next summer I’m going to put more effort into going to art fairs, but so far something’s always come up, like my daughter’s wedding.” Erin credits her artistic success to the supportive environment at Northwest. “I had always done drawing as a child, but it was personal and private. I didn’t want anyone to comment on my work. It was so hard when I went back to school in my 30s and had to make art in front of people. “But in those years I grew more than I could have imagined. The criticisms were not ever meant to be hurtful but to make me grow. My teachers would always say, ‘This is an open-ended problem; your answer is going to be unique to you.’ You realize that the freedom to be creative is very scary…but it can be so rewarding. It was such a nice atmosphere in which to learn that.” She has translated that approach into her own teaching. “There’s not a day I don’t learn something from my kids. Sometimes it’s just a reminder to try things, to take risks, to make mistakes,” she says. Erin also advises the Northeast elementary education majors, and this semester she is teaching a university course on how to incorporate the arts into social studies, math, and science, which she especially loves because it ties in to her passionate belief about the everyday important of the arts. “In these economic times it’s very easy to dismiss the arts as unnecessary or not worth the money. But people have been producing art since our hunting and gathering days,” she said, “Art makes us human; we need to create and to surround ourselves with things that make us feel good. Art makes life better, and that translates even to recruiting businesses to Missouri. My hope is that people understand not only that small things bring us joy but that allowing creativity and beauty to be part of what we value is going to do more to bring prosperity than pinching the penny.”

Pedestal bowl with “petals”

Detail of “petals” on a pedestal bowl

Doug Hall | PINEVILLE, Southwest “When I lost everything, I thought, I’ve got a clean slate. I’m going to see if I can paint for a living.” Doug Hall was content running his own small archery and muzzleloader hunting store in Neosho, Missouri. In his free time, he rode his horses, shot black powder, and painted. He also did a bit of commercial artwork, and he hung his paintings on the walls of his shop, but “I suspect a lot of people didn’t even know they were mine,” he told us. But one day in 2001, that life was obliterated when a tornado swept through Neosho and razed Doug’s shop to the ground. . “Everything was gone,” he remembers. “So I thought, I can do anything at this point, it doesn’t matter.” What he decided to do was see if he could turn his painting hobby into his full time livelihood. Eleven years later, Doug is one of the nation’s most respected painters of Western art, special-izing in works that reflect his admiration for the culture of early Eastern Woodland Indians. Doug has received awards in shows from Oklahoma to Arizona. His work has been displayed at the Missouri State Capitol, the City of Springfield Art Museum, and the C. Williams Gilchrist Museum in Maryland. His oil originals are represented by Altermann Galleries & Auctions in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and his limited edition prints by Somerset Fine Art in Fulshear, Texas. Just this September, his painting Red Coat, depicting Shawnee Chief Tecumseh who allied with the British in the War of 1812, set a record-breaking high bid at the 31st annual Buffalo Bill Art Show & Sale in Cody, Wyoming. Listed in the auction catalog at $16,500, Red Coat sold for $29,000.

“That’s the latest, greatest I get!” Doug told us, proud and bemused at the same time. “The auction was crazy! It just got louder and louder.” He is still awestricken that he has been able to live his dream. “My interests have been Indians, horses, and log cabins my whole life,” he said. “I had painted some Native Americans before, but I’d mostly done a lot of ducks, geese, and deer. When I started to paint full time, I thought, I’m going to paint what I really want. If it works, it’ll be great, and if it doesn’t work, I tried.” Doug has always lived in Missouri’s southwestern corner. He was born in the old mining town of Granby and grew up in Neosho. He cannot remember a time when he did not paint. “I have painted literally all my life, through grade school and high school,” he said. “I did art shows as a teenager. I’d paint in the mall in Joplin every weekend night for years.”

Girl in a Blue Dress

Red Coat

Doug’s artistic mentor has been Bob Tommey in Carthage, still an active painter and sculptor at age 84. “He’s been a wonderful teacher for me,” Doug said. “Bob taught me how to mix paint. He can mix color and make it look like sunlight. Over the years now I’ve been able to paint that sunlight—it’s changed my life. And he charged just five dollars on Friday nights to go paint with him!” Because the Indian way of life that Doug paints has been gone for 200 years, he does ongoing research to ensure accuracy. He paints mostly from photographs that he takes. “I travel around and photograph characters all over the country,” he said. “Some are Native Americans and some aren’t. A lot are reenactors. They really live it; they’re Indians in their minds.” Some of what the people in his paintings are wearing comes from Doug’s research, but some he is able to paint from life. “When you can find a guy that’s really into it, he’ll have a lot of gear. That’s as good as it gets,” he said. “I’ve collected a lot of stuff too, “When I’m in a pinch, I paint my nephews and cousins. If I can get people together and pose a shot, I’ll do that. Sometimes all I can get is a random shot of a person walking, or a facial expression, but if I can pull it off I’ll have people actually sit here and I’ll build a painting from the ground up,” To get an accurate look when transforming non-Indian models into his paintings, Doug studies photographs of Native Americans. “I just start tweaking until I get what I want,” he said. Also, he said, he

can spot people with the right shape when he is photographing. “I always look at the shape of people’s heads when I’m out! I know the basic structure I’m looking for.” Doug’s mailing address is Pineville, but he actually lives about four miles east of the town on his 50 wooded acres bordered on two sides by the Huckleberry Ridge Conservation Area, hence the name of his Huckleberry Forest Studio. “When people ask me where I live, I tell them we go to Arkansas for breakfast,” he said. Doug has a beautiful, sophisticated website, maintained for him by Jeremiah Dawson of Webb City two counties to the north, but on his land he lives simply. He started out by having a barn built for his two horses and, with the help of his parents, modifying part of it for a studio and living space. This past year, to his joy, he completed a log cabin. “It’s a true Ozark log cabin,” he told us. “It’s 20 by 24 feet. It sits on the side of a hill overlooking a valley, with a basement dug into the hill. A friend of mine cut all the logs, and I hand-hewed them, squaring them off on two sides, off and on for a summer or two.

Then I realized I was The Finishing Touch

“Then I realized I was going to be 90 by the time I had them all hewed. So I called a guy who owns a sawmill. He came over and in two afternoons he had them all sawed. That was well worth every penny!

“I pulled each log from the valley to up here. Then I called two carpenters from Webb City, I would paint through the day while they would build on the log cabin. “I’d built two other cabins in my life but this was the first they’d ever built. I showed them how to stack the logs and said, you just keep doing that over and over until you get 8 feet tall. “It is really neat—I can’t even describe how neat it is! I feel very fortunate. Looking out my window right now across the hills, I truly live in

a beautiful place”

All images are courtesy of the artists unless otherwise noted. Thanks! We couldn’t have created this story without you: Becky Golubski, founder and coordinator, Pierce City Arts Council Ashley Jones, marketing coordinator, Allied Arts Council of St. Joseph Tina Magill, director, Margaret Harwell Art Museum, Poplar Bluff Carol Mathieson, president, Canton Area Arts Council Kyle Trudell, director of communications and new media, Culver-Stockton College

A Quartet of Visual Artists from Missouri’s Far Corners was created in November 2012 for the Missouri Arts Council, a state agency and division of the Department of Economic Development. The Missouri Arts Council provides grants to nonprofit organizations that meet our strategic goals of increasing participation in the arts in Missouri, growing Missouri’s economy using the arts, and strengthening Missouri education through the arts. For information, contact moarts@ded.mo.gov.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. Attribution: Courtesy of the Missouri Arts Council

Doug Hall at his new log cabin with Dobbins, one of his two horses. “We’ve been together a long time. I got him when he was 2. He’s 25 years old now.”