Painting: Summer Dies as Slowly

If William Faulkner had made Gavin Stevens an artist instead of a lawyer, chances are the Mississippi novelist’s folksy philosopher would have been just about the spitting image of Carroll Cloar. As it is, Cloar never made it into print, but with the retrospective of his works currently making the rounds of nine Southern cities, he has clearly added a colorful chapter of his own to the legendary South (see color page).

Most of his material comes from his own backwoods boyhood spent on a 2,500-acre cotton plantation in the Arkansas Delta country. There, as a youth, he listened in on back-porch yarn spinning, submitted to hell-fire-and-damnation sermons, saw ghosts at the foot of his four-poster and, like many another adolescent, doubted his own provenance (“Was I adopted? Had I been stolen from the gypsies?”). Unlike most children, though, he drew constantly. “At first it was only cowboys, then it was baseball and football players. Finally,” he recalls, “I drew a cowgirl.” Not long after, Cloar, like many an ambitious Southerner—in real life as well as in Faulkner novels—set out for Memphis.

Like It Is. It was another 15 years before he was to distill all of these experiences into a running narrative capable of recollecting an era. Going from Memphis to New York to Saipan, Cloar skipped from cartooning to lithography to painting pinup girls on the fuselages of B-29s. Returning from the service, he got a Guggenheim fellowship for oil painting, was ready to throw in the towel when he discovered the technique of tempera. About the same time he settled in Memphis. Somehow, medium and milieu matched each other perfectly and Cloar, now 53, was soon the master of his own distinctive style —a kind of sophisticated primitivism.

“You see,” he says, “I never studied painting. When I decided to paint, I started the way primitive painters do, just trying to paint it like it is.” Painting it like it is does not mean simply recording a scene; Cloar feels he must color the experience, sift the facts through memory and imagination. To bring his memories alive, he often turns to a well-worn family album. It helps with the crucial details, he says, “the features, the dress, the wrinkles—the things you’d never remember.”

He also preserves masses of clippings and miscellaneous photographs, which he somehow manages to unearth when they fit an idea. Where the Southern Cross the Yellow Dog—which depicts the Moorhead, Miss., crossing of the Southern Railway and the old Yazoo City Line, colloquially known as “the Yellow Dog”—was inspired by a line from W. C. Handy’s Yellow Dog Blues that Cloar had jotted down on a scrap of paper.

In His Mind’s Eye. Other paintings spring more naturally out of the past. “My father was a big man,” recalls Cloar, “and I couldn’t help wondering as a boy if he wasn’t big as a tree. Actually, I thought he was a little too big, and I didn’t quite approve of him.” As Cloar portrayed him in 1955, his father is indeed as big as a tree, and he himself is a pouting boy in a soapbox racer looking for all the world as if Pa had broken a branch on him that day.

Some things never change, of course, says Cloar. “Summer dies as slowly and stubbornly as ever. But the gravel road is blacktopped now, there are fewer trees and more and more ordered rows of cotton. If you go northward in Arkansas you might see people who stepped out of my mother’s album—early American faces, timeless dress and timeless customs. But perhaps they are changing, too—the last of an old America which isn’t long for this earth.”

So while he can still see the scenes in his mind’s eye, Cloar means to continue recording the life he knew. In that way, though an older America may pass, on Cloar’s canvases its memory will remain vivid and fresh.