Medford mail tribune., July 07, 1963, Image 44

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By CURTIS MITCHELL
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Robert E. Fiedler, Waltham, Mass.
LOOK where you will, the pursuit
1 of painting by just plain folks is
busting out all over.
In Ware, Mass., Mrs. Elizabeth Lincoln, mother
of six, stands before the easel in her kitchen. She
can still hear the tumult of departing pre-teeners
and see the breakfast dishes piled in her sink,
'"" but her face is radiant. She is painting her 100th
amateur landscape.
A fragile wisp of a lady mails off a package to
an art correspondence school. "Please hurry and
send me your criticism of this painting," she says.
"I'm anxious to finish your course, but I'm 94
years old and haven't much time."
A scrubwoman in Chicago limps stiffly through
the doorway of an office building, homeward bound
after a night of emptying wastebaskets and
scrubbing floors. She writes to her art teacher:
"Some might think that life hasn't been kind to
me, but I don't complain. When I get home to
my paints, I live in a world of beauty."
A recent Gallup poll estimates that amateur
painters in the U.S. now number 10 million one
in every fifth family. The group includes Dinah
Shore, Charlton Heston, Henry Fonda, and John
Steinbeck, as well as a host of Americans not
known outside their neighborhood.
Countless exhibits and competitions pop up
everywhere from shopping centers to stately
museums, and none lacks for exhibitors.
Art instruction is booming, too. Museums are
conducting classes for housewives, senior citizens,
and young Norman Rockwells. Two dozen univer
int bourse
V
Darrell Fritz, Lafayette, La.
sities are building modern studio palaces for
their bulging fine-arts classes. And a handful of
excellent correspondence schools have proved that
painting-by-mail can be almost everybody's cup
of tea. The largest of them already has shep
herded 150,000 through its three-year course.
Even preschool moppets are painting with
fingers, with pipe cleaners, and with old felt hats.
One class dunks Yo-Yos in paint buckets, spins
away, and exhibits the results as "Young Amer
ican Modern." Most popular with small fry, how
ever, are soda straws and tempera. Predictably,
their art work is unique and messy.
The urge to paint seems to arouse man's com
munity instinct In Philadelphia, a club of bank
employees recently traded exhibits with their op
posite numbers in Tokyo. American church dea
cons traded with English vestrymen. Chemists
and physicians have their own clubs, as do archi
tects and musicians, lawyers and engineers.
In New England, 30 or so water-colorists queue
up in their cars behind art teacher Edgar Whit
ney each summer while he roams the countryside
in a station wagon jammed with paintboxes and
campstools. By day, they hurry along back roads
trying to get the sun exactly right on the Great
Stone Face or to catch the flood tide at Passama
quoddy Bay. By night, they collapse at the nearest
motel and recoup their zest for the morrow.
Not only does the public want to paint, but a
huge and hungry segment of it wants to gaze at
paintings. Museums everywhere are reporting
greatly increased attendance.
Where will it all stop? Nobody knows, "Every
These paintings courtesy of
the Famous Artists Schools.
Glen Fowler, Beverly, Mass.
one has something to say," declares a noted
illustrator. "Everyone has a talent, and it can
only come out through some means of expres
sion. Painting is a means that comes easily to
most persons."
Every walk of life is well represented among
the art hobbyist priests, tycoons, cowboys,
teachers, soldiers, and stenographers who have
taken up painting and become better for it. Files
of art schools bulge with their letters.
A seamstress entered two paintings in her
town's art show and won first and second
prizes. She says.JTve been pointed out and con
gratulated. It's nice to be a celebrity."
A fireman in a steel mill wrote: "I was just a
little guy in a big mill. Drawing got me known.
One day, they took me off the furnace and put me
behind a desk. My life has sure changed for the
better, but best of all, I've got a lot more con
fidence and faith in myself."
A 20-year-old convict, who paints exquisite
hummingbirds, says, "All my life, I never had any
interest in anything. Nothing got to me. But the
warden put me in this prison sign shop where I'm
working. That's how I discovered art When I
get out, maybe I can earn a living at it."
An 80-year-old woman lived alone in a hotel
room. All her relatives and friends had died. She
began to paint the scenes she saw through her
window, then scenes she remembered from her
girlhood. She wrote: "Now I have visitors at all
hours bellboys, maids, even guests. They all '
want to see my latest Suddenly, I'm important."
HaD
WiUiam Lary, Mill Valley, Calif.
Suddenly, I'm important. "This is the secret
of what painting does for people," a psychologist
says. "You begin in fear and trembling, painting
like a mouse. Suddenly, you're important, and you
paint like a tiger."
Many students, especially the younger ones,
want a better job and a home on the right side of
the tracks. Horatio Alger might have plotted
their exciting stories.
John Buskette was a pipe fitter with a habit of
sketching everything he saw. His obsession, and
training, led him to a fine job in an art studio.
Roger Gould was a milkman in Portland, Maine,
but the glory of a spring sunrise persuaded him
to buy a box of paints. This eventually led to his
own agency, called the Drawing Board.
Miss Gail Chin, stitcher in a Boston garment
loft, learned to draw pretty figures and got a job
as a fashion artist Tak Murakami was a 17-year-old
Illinois farm boy who worked from sunup
until 9 p.m. Like Lincoln, he discovered his career
between the covers of books he read each night
At 18, he sold his first drawing. At 19, with a
roll of samples and an extra shirt, he invaded
Chicago and became an art-studio apprentice. His
work appears today in national magazines.
Once in the bloodstream, oil and pigment act
powerfully and sometimes unpredictably. Four
years ago, Sam Dillon was a $10,000-a-year school
administrator in Woodsfield, Ohio. Then' he
answered an art-school ad ; it seemed like an in
nocent diversion. For three years, instructors said
of his work: "Cold, weak composition, muddy
figures, heavy-handed." He painted on, getting
f Ti ) For 10 million Americans, amateur
Fy painting takes the
drabness out of life and
sometimes adds a lovely
greenness to their pocketbooks, tool
Mrs. Ralph K. Wittenburg, Reno, Nev.
madder and madder at himself. Suddenly, he
decided to devote full time to painting, to lick it,
and to make a career in it He resigned his job
and hung out a sign. -
Today, Sam Dillon portraits hang all over Ohio.
Service clubs clamor for his lectures. "I work
harder than before, but my health is better," he
says. "And best of all, I'm now my own man."
Retired people often snort: "Me paint? I've got
no talent." For them there's the example of a
great-grandmother, Mrs. Alice Hitchlach. She be
gan to paint in her 75th year, completely unaware
of the reservoir of talent within her. Three years
later, to satisfy the curiosity of her neighbors,
she moved all her paintings onto her front lawn
for a one-day show. A passer-by asked, "How
much for that one?" She replied, "Oh, I guess
$35." It was a deal.
WORD of HER pictures spread. Not primitives,
not blobs for people, but solid, American
style landscapes. Tourists began to stop at her
little, house in Milan, Ind. Strangers sent her
photos and drawings. Some visitors even bought
her wet canvases right off her easel. Now 84, she
has sold more than 1,000 originals.
Although most amateurs don't paint for mon
ey, an astounding number of them find their
easels turning into money trees. In upstate New
York, a homemaker took her sketch pad to the
laundromat. The 25-minute washing cycle was
just right for sketching some of the other wom
en. "It's good practice," she reports, "and you'd
be amazed how many of the pictures I sell."
Carlota Dodge, Stonington, Conn.
Another amateur wanted to try his hand at
painting murals. He got permission to decorate
the playrooms of some new houses in a real-estate
development When the homes with murals sold
quickly, the builder recognized a good thing.
Now that "amateur" paints a mural in every
house for pay.
Possibly the most improbable art transaction
in history took place recently in Ohio. Mrs.
Joanna Lee Hiehl, a housewife, kept on painting
through her pregnancy. Her obstetrician watched
her work during his house visits, liked what he
saw, and said he wished he could afford such
beautiful paintings for his office. Mrs. Hiehl
made a deal: she would trade two beautiful oils
for one beautiful baby, delivered in good order.
Both parties report complete satisfaction with
the exchange.
To the part-time painter, it's not the quality
of the picture but the painting of it that is all
important In his re-creation of a remembered
experience or in his communication of an idea,
he has achieved something quite apart from
artistic merit.
Longfellow said, "Art is power." How truel
It causeB a nun, who is allowed only two phone
calls a year, to use them to telephone her art
instructor to talk about her paintings.
Or a widow, dying of cancer, to write: "With
out painting, I could not endure the waiting."
Art heals the mind and deadens pain and
banishes loneliness; but more than that, it gives
to the artist the precious feeling that, for a lit
tle while at least, he is a person 10 feet tall.
Family Wnkly, July 7, IMJ
Family Weekly, July 7. mi
IS