Sketch Artist 
Blue Period
Art critics may roll their eyes, but that doesn’t slow down W. A. Slaughter, Texas’ leading bluebonnet painter.
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Although the elitists in the Texas art world quickly lamented the bluebonnet genre—before Onderdonk died in 1922 at the age of forty, he openly regretted his public reputation as a bluebonnet painter—ordinary Texans were thrilled by the paintings. “It became a tradition in San Antonio for people to buy little bluebonnet paintings and give them as wedding gifts,” Steinfeldt says. One of the state’s most famous post-Onderdonk bluebonnet artists was Robert Wood, who moved from England to the Hill Country in 1932. He would do his paintings, start to finish, inside a window of Joske’s department store in downtown San Antonio and sell them on the spot. He quickly got bored with bluebonnets, but sales were so good that he hired a young, self-trained painter named Porfirio Salinas to add the bluebonnets after he had done the landscape portion of a painting, paying Salinas $5 for every canvas he completed.
Wood eventually moved to California to escape the bluebonnet madness, leaving Salinas as the state’s dominant bluebonnet painter in the forties and fifties, the favorite of politicians like Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, who hung a huge Salinas painting in his private dining room at the U.S. capitol. When Lyndon Johnson became president, he chose three Salinas bluebonnet paintings for his White House bedroom and two smaller ones for the adjacent study. Yet the bluebonnets took their toll even on Salinas. By the sixties, at the height of his popularity, according to one associate, he had become “an alcoholic lush of the first order.” His upstairs studio in downtown San Antonio was a raucous place, filled with booze, broads, and bluebonnet landscapes. When asked to comment on Salinas’ later work, the elegant Cecilia Steinfeldt said simply, “Oh, dear.”
After Salinas’ death, in 1973, bluebonnet painting went into a decline. Bluebonnet landscapes still brought amazing prices (today a 24- by 36-inch Onderdonk fetches up to $85,000, while a Salinas on wood sells for $10,000 to $15,000). But perhaps because it took a hardy soul to return to the same subject over and over without going stark raving mad, there were not as many artists willing to take up the bluebonnet mantle. One of the state’s best bluebonnet painters, G. Harvey, turned to cowboy paintings (see “The Quickest Draw in the West,” October 1990). Dalhart Windberg, whose bluebonnet prints used to hang in just about every dentist’s office in the state, moved on to paint everything from National Park scenes to pictures of turn-of-the-century railroad trains.
Enter the humble Lutheran pastor W. A. “Bill” Slaughter. When he was a boy growing up in San Antonio, his artwork consisted of drawings of airplanes and a couple of old girlfriends. Although he never considered a career in art, he became an accomplished weekend painter (“Only on Saturdays, never on Sundays,” he points out), and the members of his congregation at King of Glory Lutheran Church in North Dallas began asking if he would sell any of his paintings. He would and he did—for $75. “You could say I had a built-in clientele,” Slaughter says with a shrug and a glance toward the ceiling, as if to acknowledge that he had been blessed by God.
He discovered bluebonnets during church retreats to the Hill Country, and in 1968 he exhibited a couple of his bluebonnet paintings at a Dallas shopping mall. Gene Carmack, who owns Southwest Gallery, took one look at them and, he says, “I knew I had found the next star.” Carmack held a small show for Slaughter at a Dallas country club, and a group of women playing bingo in the next room came in and bought 25 of his paintings. His popularity soared so quickly that he retired from the ministry in 1971 at the age of 49 to paint full-time. “I don’t want you to think I disliked the ministry,” Slaughter explains, “but I kept hearing another call—to go into art and try to convey the beauty that the Lord has given this world. My congregation understood. Besides, they were happy to keep ordering more paintings from me.”
For better or worse, what distinguishes Slaughter’s paintings from Onderdonk’s, Wood’s, and Salinas’ is a boldness of color—“Rock ’em, sock ’em color,” says Shirley Elrod of San Antonio’s NanEtte Richardson Fine Art Gallery, which receives half a dozen new bluebonnet paintings a year from Slaughter. “There’s nothing subdued about his bluebonnets.” While Onderdonk—who is perhaps the only bluebonnet painter whose work is respected by art historians—blended his bluebonnets so that you could not tell one from another, Slaughter likes to put hundreds of bluebonnets in a single painting, each one carefully rendered. That devotion to detail, combined with his sweeping hillsides, vast blue skies, bright sunlight, and huge oak trees (known among his followers as Slaughter oaks), has proved absolutely repulsive to some art lovers and irresistible to others. “I think his paintings make people feel happy and hopeful,” says Simic’s Terwilliger. “There’s a peace in his big landscapes.” Slaughter, never one to toot his own horn, offers another suggestion as to why the demand for his paintings has increased in the past decade. “These new homes that you see going up in suburbs like Plano are the size of small hotels,” he says. “It is as if more people are looking for bigger paintings to fill up their walls.”
Whether you like his work or not, you have to admire his output. Porfirio Salinas, even at the top of his game, was able to produce only 40 bluebonnet landscapes a year. Before diabetes and a heart condition slowed Slaughter down recently, he could knock out 250 paintings a year. “We’ll call him up and tell him that we have a client who is willing to pay for a Slaughter bluebonnet painting that has a windmill, a barn, and three oak trees in it, and Mr. Slaughter will sit down and do it,” says Elrod. People will send him a pretty photograph of the Hill Country and ask him to come up with a similar painting. Slaughter has painted bluebonnets lining country roads, bluebonnets surrounding a church, bluebonnets waving next to a creek, and bluebonnets surrounding cattle. He’s the artistic equivalent of that guy in Forrest Gump who has about a hundred different ways to fix shrimp.
It’s clear that Slaughter prefers the bluebonnets of his imagination to the bluebonnets of real life. When I ask why he doesn’t move to the Hill Country to live among the flowers that have made him famous, he says, “I don’t care for that quiet Hill Country life. I’m not a country boy. I like being around the city.” Well, has he ever considered taking his easel down to the Hill Country and painting outdoors like Julian Onderdonk did? “Oh, no,” he says matter-of-factly. “The wind blows, and you have to fight off ticks and mosquitoes. I suppose I like my office.”
And just like the minister he once was, he remains committed to his second calling, serving those who want a pretty picture on their wall. He arrives at his office every morning punctually at eight-thirty and paints till four-thirty. When he heads home, he usually has a canvas under his arm, and after dinner with his wife, Evelyn, he heads to a spare bedroom to continue painting. “I’ve gotten arthritis in my fingers from my years of painting bluebonnets, and I’ve been having to wear trifocals to prevent my eyes from straining,” Slaughter says. “I can get a headache if I paint too many bluebonnets. But I’ve still got the compulsion. The Apostle Paul said, ‘Woe is me if I do not preach.’ For me, it’s ‘Woe is me if I do not paint.’”
W. A. Slaughter looks one more time at the ceiling, then he stands up to shake my hand good-bye. Just before the glass door with the brown venetian blinds finally closes, I see him heading for his easel, where a freshly painted landscape awaits a field of bluebonnets.
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