APRIL 2023

“KERMIT, TEXAS” finished painting. Oil on Canvas 35.5 x 39.5 inches. by Henry Vermillion

FIGURATIVE ART – 1 (“Kermit, Texas”)

By Henry Vermillion

The world is our oyster, for us figurative painters. People, places, trees, flowers, things real or imaginary, events---all grist for the mill, to squeeze in another cliché. But it´s more difficult, these days, to be a figurative painter than, say, an abstractionist, or a decorative painter, because figurative art on rocks and in caves is what started us humans on the path of artmaking, and there are thousands or years of wonderful figurative art to learn from, to admire, to inspire and to be intimidated by. It´s taken me a very long time to realize that I don´t have to be discouraged to realize that I could never paint as well as Matisse, or Goya, or Rembrandt. They did it then, and there, and I´m a new person discovering the world afresh, as they did, but now, not then. The thing is to learn from their example, imitate, copy, be influenced, steal (that´s OK. It´s the way you learn).

Of course, the biggest problem for all us artists is our own acculturation. Big, BIG factor. Family, art world trends, current styles, fashion, advertising/commercial art; no one can escape these influences. Big time art poohbahs tell ambitious artists what the rules are; can dos and cannot dos, if you want to succeed. A rule for acceptable modern art I recall reading not too long ago is that Modern Art must not tell stories or have content; basically, it must be Art for Art´s Sake. (That leaves me out of consideration.)

The good thing is that art talent is always being reborn. It´s both in the genes and the environment of some few lucky, or sometimes unlucky, humans. The tricky part is how they react to their family, and their particular culture. Artists, like everybody, want to please and be liked, and popular taste in art is what it is. The new artist may fit comfortably into the culture of the time, or may not.

I´m saying the obvious, I know.

As a painter myself, I´ve often used past happenings in my own life as subjects. I do usually tell stories. Love, relationships, events, history, politics, stuff from other artists show up in my pictures. Lately, I´ve found myself painting pictures from my past life: tawdry but human pictures of Texas-Mexico bordellos (yes, I´ve been there), pictures of ranch life in 19th and early 20th century West Texas, where my mother was born on her father´s ranch (I was born in El Paso). I´m now working on a large canvas showing scenes in and about Kermit, Texas, where my family lived for four years, and where I began elementary school and lived until the fifth grade.

I loved the town. The countryside is sandy, flat as a pool table, no native trees, and hot, hot,hot in the summer. I cried in our loaded-down Plymouth as our family finally drove away from the town toward a new far-away home.

The painting itself is divided into four major areas. Each shows an event, a memory of that place. On the bottom right, my friend Brandon McReynolds and I are lying on the tool shed roof, finding horses and animals in the clouds above. Brandon lived out of town on a ranch. He was the only person I have ever heard of who called his parents by their first names.

“Ruby, we´re going to the sandhills”, not “Mom”, he would say. He called his father Tommy. His parents raised him to do that.

And sandhills there were on the ranch. In the upper left of the painting are the dunes, where we once witnessed a miracle of nature. Kermit usually gets only ten or 15 inches of rain each year, but when it comes, in summer thunderstorms, you´d think it was the full year’s amount all at once. It soaked the sand and left pools of water between the dunes. After such a cloudburst, we were amazed to see frogs digging their way out of the wet sandunes and hopping into the pools of water.

Years later, I realized that these desert frogs (or toads) somehow survived in the cool interiors of the dunes, waiting for the rain to free them to mate and lay eggs in the inter-dunal pools.

In a lower section of the picture, our house is marked with an X. On the street corner are the house and workshop of the carpenter Hickson and his family. Across the road is his pickup truck with a camper, inside of which Donny Hickson showed us neighborhood kids how sex worked.

On the lower left of the picture, I´m in the abandoned cave in the sand off the road between our house and my grade school. One day, after a first-grade class, three mean older girls pushed me into the deep hole. They taunted me and wouldn´t let me out. I think they kept me there for hours.

What ever happened to my good friend Brandon? I´ve sometimes wondered. Last week I Googled his name and finally found it. He is a member of the Texas Rodeo Cowboys Hall of Fame, in Fort Worth. The birthdate and other details checked out. My young friend Brandon turned out to be a champion bronc rider!

There are other bits in the picture about misdeeds, friends and other things, but I´ll leave it with that.