The Artist’s Eye: Vernon P. Johnson’s Watercolors of 1950s Small Town America

If you are a Baby Boomer…

If you grew up in America in the 1950s…

If you lived in a small town in America in the 1950s…

If you are researching that era of American art and culture…

If you are fascinated by American 1950s retro…

If you want your children and grandchildren to remember that unique time of innocence and transition…

……You’ll want to read this book.

 

The Artist’s Eye: Vernon P. Johnson’s Watercolors of 1950s Small Town America uses the iconic example of Mount Vernon, Ohio to document the enduring legacy of this transitional decade in which the first generation of Baby Boomers was born.  Johnson was an accomplished watercolor artist who studied under influential artists of the popular “Cleveland School” in the late 1930s and after serving in World War II, became a graphic design innovator in the burgeoning consumer packaging industry. He had a particular vision for small town America, which he illustrated in his paintings of Knox County.

In a volume that is part memoir, author Janis Johnson, the artist’s daughter and a published journalist and writer, takes us back to the 1950s using extensive family memorabilia and her father’s paintings, drawings, journals and writings.

“One of the pleasures of this book is that it fills in a chapter that has been missing from most of the art history that’s been written of the 1950s…Vernon Johnson’s watercolors bring us back to a simpler, more optimistic, more understandable world…It’s a sort of Paradise Lost.” — Henry Adams, Professor of American Art, Case Western Reserve University

 

As you read this blog and the book, be sure to share your memories!

Celebrating the Golden Jubilee – Boomers with 50 Years of Success

Yikes! When I read that The Rolling Stones, The Beach Boys and The Chieftains will celebrate their Jubilee Year in 2012, I did a double-take. If they are that old, what does that say about me? In 1962, I was right in there discovering these bands, much to the chagrin of my parents. But if we are going to talk about Vernon Johnson’s legacy of the 1950s, then we must acknowledge the Boomers — his generation’s offspring — and how we were influenced by the transitional 1950s. Let’s face it, look at their clothes if nothing else, we are still torn between the nostalgia of tradition and the energy of the future.

The New York Times, in describing these bands’ 50 years of staying alive, despite all the changes in music, technology and culture, calls their impact “living histories.” Note the emphasis on “living” — they are for the most part alive, well and actively working. Like it or not, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, haggard as they look, are killing the rest of us with their on-stage athleticism and survivability. And The Beach Boys remain the default brand for “summer.”

Contrast that with The Sammy Kaye Orchestra, with which my father played pickup during his college years in Cleveland, Ohio back in the late ’30s-early ’40s. They have performed deep into this century even though Sammy Kaye died in 1987.  In my case, I grew up with both Sammy Kaye and Mick Jagger — and so did most of us in those early Baby Boom years. No one translated the old to the new for us, because that understanding comes with wisdom years later. So we had the very traditional pre-1950s with the revolutionary ’60s with no guideposts. By the 1980s, it was normal to take my son to a Rolling Stones concert with his parents, while my parents would never have envisioned taking me to see Sammy Kaye.

Traditions preserved, innovations achieved. With life experience comes the knowledge that all this is interconnected, although all the dots may not create a linear pattern. What really strikes me is the longevity — hate to say it, but 50 years of staying alive in any business is pretty phenomenal! As the New York Times noted, our Baby Boom youth and these musicians demonstrated both “a well of history and a blank slate for representing the ideals of the culture.” What I’ve come to understand in my research and introspection in writing this book and the many responses following is that as much as we want to marginalize the past, we are its children, and embracing rather than fighting the transitional context of the 1950s helps us truly know who we are. Even at 65 we are still learning what that means.

How Modern! 1954′s “White Christmas”

Surfing the holiday movies on TV, I took another peak at “White Christmas,” probably the first movie I ever saw in a theater, in my hometown of Mount Vernon, Ohio. The Vernon Theater was on the town square beside the donut shop.

East High Street #1, 1948

While these visual slices of mid-century small towns are long gone, happily “White Christmas” isn’t. Watching the film after dismissing it for years reminded me of this winter snow painting by my father in 1948, which is one of his most favored watercolors in The Artist’s Eye book. Like Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye who starred in the film six years later, his World War II experiences were still firmly front-and-center in his identity.

“White Christmas” is steeped in nostalgia, opening with a flashback to Christmas 1944 at an Army camp in Europe. In fatigues, helmets and grimy faces, the soldiers are glum and homesick as bombing raids burst around them. Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye & their Army pals decide to entertain the troops with a lively music show. It all culminates in the yearning for back home, “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the ones I used to know…” while their general booms, “there’s no Christmas in the Army, gentlemen!”

Fast forward to Christmas 1954 — when Crosby and Kaye along with Rosemary Clooney (aunt of today’s George) and Vera Allen produce a new show to surprise their old Army general upon his retirement. Ponytails and capris, circle skirts and pencil-thin waists, Marilyn Monroe look-alikes, ’40s dance bands, Army uniforms, athletic tap-dancing. The early ’50s still evoked images of the late ’40s but with a very modern style that permeated that transitional decade — the first half of the 1950s pulled to the past and surged toward the future. And, oh, the glamorous romance. To use one of the film’s jazzy expressions, it’s just “crazy” to remember!

You Can Own “The Accent House!”

The Accent House continues to be one of the most storied residences depicted by Vernon P. Johnson in The Artist’s Eye. Recently I talked to a former Mount Vernon, Ohio, resident, who is nearly 98 and who members Mrs. Congdon, the onetime owner who cast a memorable shadow around town. Not the least because her heavily ivy-shrouded Steamboat Gothic home was referred to by neighborhood children as “the spooky house.”

Years later, The Accent House on North Main Street was beautifully restored by Tom and Candy Bartlett, who commissioned a Vernon Johnson watercolor of the dwelling they had converted into a bed-and-breakfast.

Now you can own a piece of The Accent House! The artist signed and numbered 100 small color prints of that painting — at 8×10 inches, they are easily frameable for any location. A number of these prints are still available for $75 — and they are going fast!

Email me today so I can put you directly in touch with Candy Bartlett — and you can have your own remembrance of small town America’s history and central Ohio’s legacy. In this one print, you will also have a faithfully executed watercolor snapshot of mid-century American history and of small town America.

And, by purchasing The Artist’s Eye book from the Knox County Historical Society, you can read more of the stories and loving care that have preserved one exemplary 1950s small town’s history through the architectural aspirations of the grandparents and parents of us Baby Boomers. Chapter 7 in the book describes how Vernon Johnson conceived and constructed two version of The Accent House from multiple lenses.

The Barlett’s no longer own the home, which is once again a private residence, so the visual memories preserved in this print are even more invaluable and irreplaceable in time.

From the Dave Brubecks “with great interest”

I received a gracious personal letter from the Dave Brubecks not long after I emailed The Brubeck Institute the story of Vernon P. Johnson’s watercolor of “Calcutta Bazaar,” which he entered in a Brubeck-related contest in 1958. “I remember the contest that was sponsored by Columbia Records very well,” Iola Brubeck wrote me, “because Dave and I went to San Francisco to view the work of the finalists of the Pacific region.”

I recounted the incredible 65-year journey of this painting in a recent blogpost, and it’s such a thrill to have the Brubecks validate my somewhat pieced-together story! Mrs. Brubeck filled in some of the details: The contest winner in San Francisco was Wayne Thiebaud, an art student at the time who is now a renowned Pop Art painter. “Wayne must have gone on to win the national prize, because he told us many years later when we met him at the White House…the prize was two tickets to Paris and I believe a week in a Paris hotel, or the equivalent in cash.” Apparently Thiebaud chose the cash, which undoubtedly Dad would have, too, had “Calcutta Bazaar” traveled into the first place position. Clearly Dad was in good company in the contest despite their very different approaches — Thiebaud in 1994 was conferred the National Medal of the Arts by President Clinton.

In closing, Mrs. Brubeck reflected the same thoughts I’ve been having since this story began developing a few months ago: “It’s strange how often things and connections come full circle.”

And what’s also amazing is that the changes in technology since 1958 — when that Dave Brubeck album was a vinyl LP — now allow me to listen to my special “Dave Brubeck Channel” on Pandora Internet radio while writing this blog article.

Meet and Greet (Me) in Petaluma

Join “The Artist’s Eye” author Janis Johnson at Copperfield’s Books in Petaluma, California, on April 30 from 1:30 to 2:30 pm for an informal “meet and greet” session. That’s 140 Kentucky Street in historic downtown Petaluma. We’ll talk small towns, the Midwest, growing up in the 1950s and Baby Boomer memories – captured through the iconic watercolors of Vernon P. Johnson, my father. And I’ll be signing books!

Marin, Sonoma and Napa counties are made up of a series of small towns. For many of us the North Bay area is like the Midwest where we grew up – hometowns in Ohio, where this book is set, and in Indiana, Illinois, Minnesota and Iowa — let alone other parts of the country, like New England. Just last evening a new reader in San Francisco told me, “It reminded me of growing up in St. Louis.” And last week I heard, “When I was reading your book, I thought of my childhood in Danbury, Connecticut.” 

“The Artist’s Eye: Vernon P. Johnson’s Watercolors of 1950s Small Town America” is also available at another of my favorite  independent bookstores, Book Passage in Corte Madera, California.

The Similarities of Pablo Picasso and Vernon Johnson

While surveying the Pablo Picasso exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts last week, I was thinking about what two artists –Vernon Johnson, my relatively traditional Ohio-born father, and Pablo Picasso, the European hedonist of ceaseless experimentation, had in common.

Of course, both were painters, but there is definitely more than that. Dad might be aghast, given his overall conservativism, but I find this quite fascinating. Several personal or artistic similarities come immediately to mind, including wrestling, the human form, still life themes and beach scenes. Perhaps most importantly, both represented their times, their environments and the familiar subject matter that defined those contexts. They had a shared purpose — portraying their vision of what they saw, despite wildly different artistic execution.

Two examples are these paintings: Vernon Johnson’s “Lake Erie Beach, 1940″ (on the left) and Picasso’s “The Bathers, 1937.” Even the era was similar, though the coasts were an ocean apart.

If you’re in Richmond, Virginia, be sure to stop by the VFMA before the Picasso show closes.  (There’s another beach scene if you follow the link.) The traveling exhibition has three U.S. stops while its home museum in Paris is being renovated (Musee National Picasso). Leaving the VFMA on May 15, it will be in San Francisco starting in June for four months, his latest U.S. destination.

Yes, Boomers, You Can Go Home Again!

Marketing a small town in the USA in the 1950s, by Vernon P. Johnson, (c) The Artist's Eye, by Janis Johnson

I returned to my hometown after more than 45 years — and wrote this book, The Artist’s Eye: Vernon P. Johnson’s Watercolors of 1950s Small Town America. You couldn’t find a more typical small town in America in the 1950s, and my father, an artist, recognized that immediately. He painted more than 100 watercolors of this Midwest community of 15,000 in central Ohio — in fact, a town officially recognized as a “typical, small American city” by the US State Department.

In my Womantraveler blog, I wrote about what it’s like to go back again and rediscover your hometown. In our mobile Boomer and post-Boomer society, that’s been a subject of many conversations in recent months since the book has been published.

The Artist’s Eye portrays a time that has been lost all over America — the first full Baby Boom decade of the 1950s, an era of small towns, families who lived in their communities for generations and genuinely held a  spirit of  optimism about the future. While I began this book as a way of honoring my parents, our family’s legacy and the great gifts of Mount Vernon, Ohio, and Knox County, I soon understood that my own story is not unique — it’s one of those irretrievable stories of our Baby Boom generation. In another post, I’ll share some of the other comments.

Today I was talking with a colleague from Columbus, Ohio. He is another Midwesterner who lives nearby Mount Vernon, and he affirmed my theme — my father, an innovative marketing guy in his own right in the mid-century, preserved a story familiar to us today through his paintings. In Dad’s case, it was probably unintentional — he simply knew good visual material when he saw it and, deep down, he believed in the story that he was telling through his art. There were Mount Vernons all over America back then and they’re gone or at least quickly disappearing. You don’t have to be related to the people described in this book to know that, in essence, they are our “cousins” dispersed in the small towns and big cities across America and sharing similar memories and values.

I now live in California and since I published this book, I’ve connected with many people — but perhaps most startling is that a woman who grew up in one of the houses that my Dad painted in this book now lives within a mile of me! Our fathers worked together, and I knew her house well. That is what small towns do — they send us out, keep us close and deeply embed our roots in us.

I hope this blog will become a place for all of us to share our stories. What are your memories of the ’50s and growing up as a Baby Boomer? Please share them!