Art

 

 

Art

By Fred Holt

We finally got an Art teacher. Miss Myrtle Langston came in 1943 to spend the summer with her sister. She brought her things from Monroe and made a studio upstairs at her sister's boarding house. She wrote friends before she came that she would do some painting and that she might take a few pupils

We never had a regular Art teacher, unless you count Miss Allie Mae Temple and Miss Sue Martin. In Primary School, Miss Allie Mae taught us to make Indian teepees out of construction paper and Japanese umbrellas out of toothpicks. In the fifth grade, Miss Sue told us about artists like Winslow Homer and Grant Wood, and we all made Poppy Day posters for the American Legion Auxiliary. 

But they weren't regular Art teachers. During school, Miss Allie Mae kept the auditorium and Miss Sue kept the library.

Miss Sue taught Art at her house the summer before Miss Myrtle came. Harvey Donegan and I took from Miss Sue, together with some girls, including Ann Neely. We did charcoal sketches of bottles and dried flowers, learning to draw and shade. Ann Neely already knew how to draw and shade, but she was older, and she grew up smart. She also took Art lessons as a child in Pine Bluff.

People all over Southeast Arkansas knew about Miss Myrtle's work. She painted big pictures. She also decorated chinaware. If anyone had anything done by Myrtle Langston, we knew a good price was paid for it.

I saw one of her big paintings at Miss Annie Bess Dunne's house. It showed three magnolia blossoms lying on a table. Miss Annie Bess said it was done in oils. She hung it over her mantel in her front room. Her friends thought it was pretty and they all wanted one like it. 

I also saw dishes Miss Myrtle decorated for Katie Ruth King. Katie Ruth kept them in her china cabinet and brought them out to show visitors. She thought they were too nice to use.

People could hardly wait for Miss Myrtle to come. Some chose china pieces for her to decorate. Others wanted big oil paintings of magnolia blossoms to hang over their mantels. She took all these orders for her work, even though she was slow to deliver.     Harvey Donegan said that keeping her production down kept her prices up. Harvey's mama thought he learned that and other worldly ideas from talking to traveling salesmen and cotton buyers who stayed at his mama's hotel, where he lived.

Miss Myrtle said her work was especially slow that summer. Her studio was hot, and she carried her many pounds on the stairs, to and from her sister's boarding table, three times a day. She thought that made her tired.

After we started lessons, we learned another reason she was slow. Miss Myrtle talked more than she worked. She told us over and over about the old times, about the years she taught Art in a woman's college. Harvey said her talking was surely tiring.  Ann Neely thought so too.

She also talked about her brother. He was a missionary in South America. She sat in front of her big electric fan, dried sweat off her square eyeglasses, and told us how talented her brother was.  He was a Bible scholar. He spoke three languages and played the guitar. She showed us his picture in her photograph album. She wanted us to see how refined he looked. Ann Neely thought that he had sad eyes. Harvey thought so too.

Her brother had strict ideas about everything. Miss Myrtle agreed to them all, especially his rule on drinking alcohol. Neither one married. Miss Myrtle said, "My preacher brother and I never found helpmates to fit our standards." Harvey thought it was just as well. Ann Neely thought so too.

Harvey's mama called my mother in May to see if I would take Art from Miss Myrtle. Ann Neely was going to take, and Mrs. Donegan thought if I would, Harvey would. Miss Myrtle charged a dollar an hour, for three hours a day, for two afternoons a week. It would give us something to do all summer, and it would keep Harvey from just sitting around the hotel reading.

Harvey read a lot. He got books every birthday and Christmas from his Aunt 'Nez in New York. She also subscribed to literary magazines for him. He got Atlantic Monthly and Harpers. He talked to the traveling salesmen and cotton buyers at the hotel about what he read. His mama wanted him to do something else with his time that summer.

She thought he took to heart strange ideas from those books and magazines. Harvey did have strange ideas. Most of us read kid books like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Nancy Drew, and Dr. Doolittle, but Harvey liked heavy stories about people who got into deep trouble. He read Tobacco Road and Of Human Bondage two and three times, and when he gave reports at school, he told about them.  This upset teachers who wanted us to think only the best about people, but Harvey didn't care.

Harvey didn't like to be told what to think Miss Venable, our ninth grade English teacher, read to us from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe. She thought Harvey had a dark vision like those writers. A cotton buyer from Memphis thought so too.  Harvey's mama thought so too, and that was why she wanted him to learn Art at Miss Myrtle's and to paint pretty pictures that people liked.

My mother thought I should take Art at Miss Myrtle's because I won the Poppy Day poster contest, and I drew cartoons. I copied comics in the Arkansas Gazette.  I could draw men like Moon Mullins, Popeye, and Dick Tracy, but I couldn't do women, like Daisy Mae and Tess Trueheart and make them look good. Harvey had trouble drawing women too. I thought Miss Myrtle would help us with this.

As we began our first lesson, we learned that there would be no women, or men, drawn at Miss Myrtle's. We would only do landscape scenes or still life with flowers.

Miss Myrtle's preacher brother told her that our time on this earth was too short to spend it representing anything but the most beautiful scenery of nature.  Anything else, including the human body, was vulgar and a waste of paint.

She lectured to us about that. "Dear Hearts, I want you to choose only the best of God's world and to capture that beauty on canvas for the people you love." Ann Neely said she really meant, "sell it to the people you love."  Harvey thought so too.

We also learned where the "best of God's world" was located.  Miss Myrtle said it was too hot to paint outside, so we found the beauties of nature in her studio, in front of her big electric fan. We stayed inside her apartment and copied other people's pictures.

Miss Myrtle collected thousands of prints, mostly out of old magazines, through the years.  They were sorted out in shoe boxes that lined the walls of her studio. Some were flowers in different arrangements. Others were woods and mountain scenes.

After we bought art supplies, at retail prices, from Miss Myrtle, we sifted through the shoe boxes in order to pick out pictures to copy.  I found an old man with a torn hat on the back side of a waterfall scene. I liked it, but Miss Myrtle thought it was ugly. 

Ann Neely didn't care for any of the prints, but she chose a bunch of roses from an old greeting card for her china pattern.  Miss Myrtle said she had a good eye for beauty. Of course, Ann grew up smart. She also took Art lessons as a child in Pine Bluff.

I finally chose some birch trees along a path with purple mountains in the background against a pink sky. Miss Myrtle told me to paint this landscape first in watercolors then in oils to get the feel of both. I figured I would spend all summer with the birch trees.

Miss Myrtle found that Harvey was a different matter altogether.  He didn't like to be told what to paint. He couldn't understand why he had to copy somebody else's pictures and why he couldn't work from real life. 

He read in Atlantic Monthly that an Art teacher in New Mexico let his students go out and paint whatever they could find. They did trash dumps, alleyways, run down houses, and people who were old and poor. They also did jagged rocks, dry creek beds, and bones of dead animals.  They found beauty in ugly things. At least, Harvey thought so.

Miss Myrtle suggested a pot of geraniums for Harvey to copy, but he wanted her to send him into the streets and fields around town to paint whatever was out there. He wanted to pick the subjects if she would just teach him some techniques, like mixing oils, brushing on watercolors, and rubbing and shading pastels.

Miss Myrtle knew that Harvey had his own mind about things. Her sister told her about the year before when he ran up against Miss Nettie Moseley and the women at the County Library.  He went to check out The Grapes of Wrath, but Miss Nettie told him that they didn't keep books with vulgar words and ideas.

The women at the library believed that books ought to uplift and teach only the best of values, so they didn't have The Grapes of Wrath or anything by John Steinbeck for that matter

Harvey didn't like to be told what to read. That very day, he talked his mama out of money to start a rental library, at his mama's hotel, where he lived. He wrote every bookclub he knew, and for a year he received monthly selections plus bonus books and free introductory offers.

In the summer, he placed over a hundred volumes in an old bookcase in the hotel lobby. He charged them out at a penny a day for the first ten days and two cents a day for any day over ten.  The County Library lost business, especially when people from the best families and some high school teachers started reading from Harvey's books.

Miss Sue read God's Little Acre. Miss Venable read The Good Earth. Ann Neely read Strange Fruit. Katie Ruth King read Elmer Gantry. I read Appointment in Samarra, which begins with a man lying in bed thinking about making love to his wife. The traveling salesmen and cotton buyers called the books "Harvey's Dirty Book Library".

So, in the summer of 1943, Harvey took on Miss Myrtle and her notions of what all was not fit to paint, but Miss Myrtle stood stronger than the women at the Library. She determined not to let her class get away from the ideas of her preacher brother, from art that would sell and from her upstairs studio with the big electric fan,

Miss Myrtle wiped her eyeglasses and spoke to Harvey about it. "Dear Heart, Miss Myrtle doesn't want to do anything that would cause you not to love her, but she just can't ask you to go out to paint subjects that are not worthy of your best and the best of God's world. There are so many beautiful creations around, and you must give them your whole heart to show forth the Lord's great works. Once you get into it, you'll see what I mean.

"Now you know Miss Myrtle will not be disagreeable.  She wants everybody to do what they have to do. My preacher brother said that life is not worth living if you don't follow your star.  I've followed mine, and you see how life has been good to me.  Look at how fat Miss Myrtle is, but she still gets around pretty good for an old lady.

"I don't want you to waste your talents on little things, and you are so talented.  I want you to go commercial when you finish school. You wait and see. You'll be selling for good money the beautiful things that Miss Myrtle will teach you to do. Why, I love your mama too much to let you go and do something you'll be sorry for later. Stay with Miss Myrtle, just for the summer, and I promise you won't regret it."

Harvey stuck it out though July. During the month, Imogene French, who roomed at the hotel, told me that he spent his free afternoons with watercolors down on Franklin Creek. He painted Roy Galloway's scrawny looking cows huddled in a rainstorm and some junk that had washed up along the banks.    

Later on, he showed Ann Neely and me a pastel he did of an old bull alone on a hill and a charcoal of a sad-eyed guitar player that looked like Miss Myrtle's preacher brother.

He also did pencil sketches of women standing outside Hughes' beer joint, an oil of run down shacks in weeds near the ice plant, and a pen-and-ink drawing of the traveling salesmen and cotton buyers drinking and playing poker at the hotel. He never showed these to Miss Myrtle. She would think they were ugly.

In early August, Harvey quit coming to class for good.  Miss Myrtle said she was sorry to lose him. After she finished firing Ann Neely's china set, she let me copy the old man with a torn hat in charcoal, a reward for my regular attendance. Then she spent more time working on orders she put off all summer.

I didn't see Harvey for a couple of weeks, but a few days before school started, I got a phone call from Imogene French.  She sounded upset. She didn't know what Harvey was doing.  He locked himself in the cold drink room, just behind the hotel's main desk.  He stayed in there almost a day before he came out to eat and to go to the bathroom. He wouldn't let anybody in, and he wouldn't talk to anyone. She said his mama and everybody at the hotel wondered what was happening.

The next day, I dropped by to see for myself. Harvey still locked himself in. He didn't answer when I yelled to him outside the door, but I knew he was painting. I smelled linseed oil. Miss Myrtle used that as thinner.

The cotton buyer from Memphis came out of his room down the hall. He thought Harvey had lost his marbles and that the long hot summer was too much for him. He noticed that Harvey acted strange the summer before, about the time he opened his rental library.

On the third day, Harvey unlocked the door and came out.  Imogene French called me to come see. She called Miss Myrtle too. We got to the hotel at the same time. We walked together through the lobby, toward the cold drink room without saying a word. Harvey's mama, Imogene French, and the cotton buyer from Memphis stood there staring at the south wall.

Harvey went to his room to sleep, but we could plainly see what he had done. He covered the wall, just above the wainscoting, behind the Dr. Pepper box, with a big oil painting, a mural in fact, directly on the plaster. On the floor, at the base of a step ladder, he left three palette boards, dotted with dabs of oil paint, drying in the heat of the room. 

We stood before Harvey's work for a long time, and no one spoke. I easily made out what it was. Nearly everything in the picture came from around town.  A sad-eyed guitar player stood in a rainstorm with Roy Galloway's scrawny cows and those run-down shacks near the oil mill in the background. Someone shot him in the chest, and blood poured down the front of his yellow shirt. As he fell over to die, he saw his past life pictured in three gray clouds floating above him. 

There were women from Hughes' beer joint in one, men from the hotel playing poker in another, and empty bottles of booze in the third. In the middle of the picture, a bolt of red lightning streaked from the sky.

After a while, we all tried to say something about it. Imogene French sounded sarcastic. "I guess it's marvelous, but I'd just like to know why that man was shot and who did it ... probably one of those women up there in the sky. What does Harvey know about gambling and drinking? I can't wait to hear what he has to say about it. I'm sure it's too deep for us ordinary folk."

Harvey's mama seemed upset. "Have you ever seen the likes of it?  I wondered what Harvey was doing in here. This old dark room needed color, but why would he paint something like that?  I know he didn't learn that at Miss Myrtle's. I don't understand my own child."

The cotton buyer from Memphis shook his head. As he walked out the door, he turned to me and said, "I figure the heat gets to Harvey every summer, but he'll be all right this fall when school starts."

Miss Myrtle still breathed hard from rushing to the hotel after Imogene French called. She stood back and stared at the mural over sweated eyeglasses for two or three minutes. Then, she fished a Dr. Pepper out of the cold drink box, stepped back again, and smiled.

"Dear Hearts, I knew that all that sweet boy needed was a little time with Miss Myrtle, and he would do wonders. 

"I can surely see those lessons in technique showing forth.  Once Harvey got the basics, he took it from there and soared high to serve his own genius. He turned out to be one of my best pupils.  I'm glad that I let him go off on his own before the summer was out. My preacher brother would approve how I handled him. I do hope he'll continue to study Art after he gets to college.  He can make good money."

I studied Harvey's mural a long time that day, and, for weeks after, I went by the hotel to look at it again and again. Just about everybody in town, and some from as far away as El Dorado, came by the hotel that year to see it. Some came many times and stayed for hours, just looking.

Most people had opinions about it. Ann Neely liked it. Katie Ruth King said it showed that Harvey spent too much time talking with traveling salesmen and cotton buyers. Miss Sue thought he was trying to paint like Winslow Homer, "or maybe Grant Wood." Miss Annie Bess said nothing like that would ever hang over her mantle. Miss Nettie thought it was flat out vulgar.  Miss Allie Mae said it was just Harvey.

The Free Will Baptist preacher saw the bolt of red lightning as the Judgment of God on us all, and he preached sermons in the late summer on sin in Southeast Arkansas. Miss Venable said that, most likely, the idea behind the mural came from Aunt 'Nez's books and magazines out of New York and from what she called "Harvey's dark vision."

Harvey never said.

Harvey quit Art for good that summer and went back to reading. Years later, after his mama died and the hotel closed, I could still see, through the front window, Harvey's books, moldering in the old bookcase in the lobby, and, through the west window, in dim light, Harvey's mural, in the room behind the main desk, on the south wall, above the wainscoting, in back of the Dr. Pepper box.

Harvey went to the University and then on to New York with his aunt. He never came back to stay, but Miss Myrtle did. 

For several summers, she brought her things from Monroe and made a studio at her sister's house. She became our regular Art teacher. She also took more orders for china sets and for big oil paintings of magnolia blossoms, which she sold to several people, at good prices, to hang over their mantels.

Because of Harvey's mural, Miss Myrtle had more young folks wanting to take Art than she could manage. I ran into Ann Neely at Glasgow's Confectionery the summer after her first year at college. 

I told her it was hard to imagine ten or twelve hot and sweaty pupils in the upstairs studio every summer in front of the big electric fan, sifting through prints, looking for the beauties of nature, and finding "the best of God's world" in those shoe boxes along the wall.

"Well, Harvey tried," she said. 

Maybe Ann Neely knew all along what Harvey was up to. Of course, she grew up smart. And she took Art lessons as a child in Pine Bluff.