Word: cloar
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...