Painting the Towns
Johnnie Swearingen's jazzy paintings of his native Washington County challenged its genteel version of the past, and some folks wanted to get rid of them. But today the works of one of Texas' best self-taught artists are proudly displayed there.
(Page 2 of 3)
His earliest extant work, painted on a cardboard diaper box in 1952, shows "boss man" Robert Schaer overseeing the delivery of cotton at his gin. True to life, trucks line the roads waiting to unload, while the pale orange gleam of dusk seeps through the tree line. Swearingen was obviously proud of the painting because he found a way for all the town to see it. He gave it to Schaer, then the president of the Chappell Hill Bank, who put it on display there.
By the sixties, Swearingen's life as a farmer had become nearly desperate. He told a reporter from the Houston Chronicle, "My tractor's down, and I'm trying to sell it. My horse died, but I still got a pair of mules." McDonald remembers when federal loans for small farmers began drying up. "That just pushed the little small farmers out of the way," she says. "They couldn't compete." The industry as a whole was being mechanized. As Chappell Hill resident and former field hand Eddie Dorsey puts it, "That's when we put the sack down. They stopped making cotton and corn and all like that and went into ranching."
Its planter economy crumbling, Chappell Hill found a way to profit from its loss. Beginning in the sixties, the town put a new coat of paint on its anachronism and sold the past to present-day tourists. The Chappell Hill Historical Society, which was organized in 1964 with Spain as its first president, held an antiques sale to raise money for its first project: restoration of the local library.
As savvy in his own way as any chamber of commerce executive, Johnnie Swearingen saw the traffic along U.S. 290 and sensed Chappell Hill's incipient rebirth as a tourist destination. "He figured he'd make more money painting than he did farming," McDonald says, and he was right. Swearingen began nailing his paintings, sometimes as many as a dozen at a time, all over his car and parking across from the Chappell Hill post office, near Brenham's town square, or along the highway, anywhere he could catch the public eye.
"The first burst of energy to spruce up the town occurred right before the antiques show, when practically everybody got in the grass mowing, stoop sweeping spirit of things," reported the Houston Post. In Swearingen's paintings, one sees this custodial fury. Women with hedge clippers tidy the greenery along a front porch. A couple push lawn mowers below towering palm trees.
The spruce-a-thon never stopped. Twelve buildings have been declared state historic landmarks. Ten sites have made the National Register of Historic Places. The Providence Baptist Church's former parsonage, now caved in like a rotten bird's nest, will be turned into a visitors center. And as if its own architectural past weren't rich enough, Chappell Hill has become a kind of plein air cabinet of architectural keepsakes. Buildings that once stood in LaGrange, Industry, Ellinger, and Huntsville have been wrenched off the ground and resettled among their antebellum and Victorian relatives here.
Swearingen too caught the fever for architectural grandeur. Most of his paintings portray what McDonald calls "majestic buildings," many of them animated with a sinister power. High windows stare over the yard. Doorways moan from the jaws of wraparound porches. Where people do appear, they're faceless, scurrying errand-runners or Pac-Men in a crowd. By some accounts, Swearingen's approach compensated for clumsy draftsmanship, his inability to paint the human face. But isn't it more likely that he showed what he saw: people dominated by buildings, and a town whose fortunes had come to revolve around immense plantation homes?
As with the sidewalk painters of Montmartre and Rome's Piazza Navona, Swearingen's artistic fortunes were bound up with tourism. He became an attraction himself, part of the local color, a genial spirit in a cap that read "I Love EVERYBODY . . . You're NEXT." "When they started having these bluebonnet fests," McDonald says, "he'd pick him a little spot where he'd have his paintings, mostly on 290." One painting sees through the walls of a house, showing an empty living room; the people have rushed out-of-doors onto the hillsides, where bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush bloom knee-high. Here, as elsewhere, he exaggerates Washington County wonderfully, turning its rolling pastures into bullet-shaped buttes.
Local people seem to have more or less dismissed him. Larry Boehnemann remembers him as a fixture in downtown Brenham, stationed on the lot where Michalak's Garage now stands. "I know he was there quite a bit during the sixties, because when I was a kid, we'd ride our bikes down there and go watch him, pester him more than anything. We were a little afraid of him but not really. He was a nice, harmless old man." Says Karin King, the proprietor of Brenhamwwwired, a new Internet cafe across from the courthouse: "I remember him from when I was kid. He was just some old black guy in a beat-up truck trying to peddle his paintings."
Even in the late eighties, after Swearingen had achieved some statewide and national acclaim through touring exhibitions, he met mainly with local indifference. Willie Bennett, a former school principal and a leader of Washington County's African American community, remarks, "I knew him. I used to see him by the side of the road, but I never took the time to stop."
Swearingen's early pieces showed workaday life, but in the seventies his attention turned to sport and recreation: couples on speedboats, the buffet line at a barbecue, youngsters in a frothy swimming pool. After all, it was among fun-seekers, outsiders primarily, that Swearingen found his early patrons. Says Mike Shoup, who with his wife, Jean, owns the Antique Rose Emporium, near Independence: "A lot of the customers were people like us, people who had moved from Houston and had come in with kind of new eyes. I think that's where he made his money."
In fact, the collection that now belongs to the Chappell Hill Historical Society was purchased in the early seventies by a wealthy Houstonian, Margaret Austin, who, with her husband, Don, owned a farm just south of Chappell Hill. "Mrs. Austin would commission him, give him three months to paint eight pictures—just paint what he liked—and she would come get them," says McDonald. "That was his first big break."
Margaret Austin introduced her Houston friends to Swearingen's paintings, selling some but keeping a sizable collection herself. In 1991, after her husband's death, she left her Swearingen paintings to the historical society. It was after her death the following year that discord over the Johnnie Swearingen Collection arose.
Especially for longtime residents of Washington County, the paintings have caused uneasiness, belying as they do Chappell Hill's sit-down-and-mind-your-manners portrait of a "gentler era." In contrast to the daffodil wind socks of the town's gift shops, the ruffled curtains and stick candy of its cafe, Swearingen shows men lining up at a beer barrel the size of a small grain silo, people loitering at a dingy drive-through gas station, and striped hogs jostling at a trough. Even his paintings of country pastimes feel raucous rather than bucolic, and nearly all his pieces shout with his signature color: Heinz tomato red.
My Library
