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.
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With Margaret Austin's donation of Swearingen's paintings to the Chappell Hill Historical Society, such incongruities squirted to the surface. Which Washington County is real? The contrary portraits of the past reveal an uncertainty that runs deep, a social vertigo felt most keenly by county natives, who have seen change here accelerate.
Over the past fifty years, the region's agrarian economy—a legacy of slavery and the plantation system—has been supplanted by make-believe agrarianism and the business of leisure. The Houston Zen Community now hosts retreats on what was once part of the Austins' farm. Washington County tourists can even stay overnight in "authentic slave quarters," comfortably appointed with a four-poster bed and a fax machine. Large-scale crop farming has given way to weekend hobby ranching. Says Page Michel of the county chamber of commerce: "People refer to 'the mink-and-manure crowd,'" Houstonians who can afford second homes, horses for their preteen daughters, a few cattle, and some pastureland. These people, for the most part, were Swearingen's patrons, those he strove to please.
And they are Washington County's new citizens. "We're growing real fast," says Chappell Hill postmaster Gerald Johnson. "They're opening up subdivisions around here, and they're all exclusive." Improvements completed two years ago along U.S. 290 have trimmed the commute to Houston's northwestern edge to under an hour. "Seventy-five percent of our rural land is owned by people from out of the county," estimates Charles Gaskamp, the chief appraiser of the Washington County Appraisal District. "They've run the prices up so high that local people can't afford land." Around Chappell Hill, he says, one- to three-acre tracts are selling for $10,000 to $20,000 per acre. But what did you expect to pay for a "vanished age of elegance"?
Transformations like these are freighted with ambivalence. Jean Shoup, of the Antique Rose Emporium, has sensed mixed feelings about tourism among the county's established landowners: "I think they do welcome it, truthfully, because it brings so much business to the area. But when the bluebonnets are in full bloom and people are stopping anywhere they please and crawling under fences, there is irritation, and you can understand why." Shoup says that recently one local farmer "literally plowed up his bluebonnets" in protest. Laments Ruth Spain: "It's getting so commercial. We old-timers say, 'Every twenty minutes we have a festival.' You can't park, you can't get to church, you can't do anything." But it was this festivity (along with a Social Security check) that enabled Swearingen to trade his plow for a paintbrush.
Four members of the historical society—the trustees who stowed the works in Faske's basement—wrote to the group's board in 1992 that the paintings' value had been "obviously exaggerated, overstated." But according to Austin art dealer Randy Franklin, prices for Swearingen's paintings, which start at about $2,500, "are going up all the time." As for the Chappell Hill collection, "Nothing out there compares to the pieces they have," he says. "Some of those big early pieces are priceless." As recently as 1997, the same group of trustees recommended keeping only a dozen works, selling the rest, and using the proceeds to finance other historical society projects. With obvious exasperation, they wrote to the board, "there is not one soul in the Universe more desirous of having a decision made as to the disposition of the Johnnie Swearingen paintings than the undersigned."
Those who advocated keeping the paintings have prevailed, but the collection has had to pay its own way. With the help of Franklin's Yard Dog gallery, the society sold fourteen works to pay for framing and exhibiting the remaining paintings. "Not one nickel of society money was spent," says Middlebrooks. "None of this would have happened had we not sold some, because it never would have been passed by the members to spend the money on these paintings."
Historical society member Edward Bentley admits that the group is "not a very diverse organization at this point, unless you count Methodists and Baptists." However, since the opening of the Swearingen show, Joy McDonald has been invited to join. Will she? "Well, maybe not this year; maybe later on. I don't want to be the first one." Despite all the changes in Chappell Hill, vestiges of the Old South remain. McDonald says blacks and whites don't mix much socially. The Chappell Hill Bank, where Swearingen delivered his cotton gin painting nearly fifty years ago, ignores the federal Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday in January, but bank executive Edward A. Smith says it's the only bank he knows of that closes for Confederate Heroes Day.
Swearingen, in his emboldened paintings of the eighties, remembered the somber, less "elegant" dimensions of the plantation past. In one piece, owned by the Shoups, mothers and children have been pulled apart at a slave auction. In the historical society's collection, allusions to race are subtler. A white figure stands under an awning at Brenham's Green Grain Building, pointing, while a black man pulls sacks from a truck. In another work, a black man wipes the steps of the town's old Alamo School as white children stare from a classroom window.
McDonald says that her stepfather was scoffed at by most locals, black and white. "People were laughing at him," she says. "They never thought he was going to amount to much. They think because you're black you shouldn't know how to paint." Mary Tom Middlebrooks of the historical society has seen the same attitude: "It's always been my contention that had Johnnie Swearingen been white instead of black, these paintings would have been hung on these walls a long time ago."
Swearingen lost his wife, Murray, in 1991 and, in frail health, moved to Huntsville. Paintings he had once sold from the roadside for $25 were commanding thousands of dollars and had been featured in several major touring exhibitions of folk art. Nevertheless, "If he had lived to see this up here at this museum, it would have topped the cake," says McDonald, looking around the current exhibit. "He'd say, 'Now I've finally made it.'"
The longer you look, the more brazen it all becomes. Swearingen's art does more than depict this county's history. His transformation from a sharecropper into a Texas folk artist is Washington County's history. As the region became a retreat for Houstonians, an excursion for wildflower enthusiasts, and play-act ranchland, he could shed his identity as one of the Swearingens who had always picked cotton, instead making a name for himself through his art and a living by his wits rather than with his back. Inside the historical society's museum, one may look with horrified respect at a five-hundred-pound cotton bale. With what relief he must have greeted the demise of Chappell Hill's farming culture and the influx of nostalgic newcomers who preferred their bales on canvas. As a Jaguar pulls behind a rusted pickup truck on the town's Main Street, the bustling intersections of Swearingen's paintings seem audible, portents of things to come.
Bettie Schramme, who used to greet Swearingen from behind the counter at Norman's Pharmacy in Brenham, remembers him fondly. "He would keep us entertained," she says. What did she think of Swearingen's paintings? "That's like having Blue Bell Ice Cream in Brenham. Like the bluebonnets. You just took it for granted.
"It's sad," she says. "We just thought, 'There's Johnnie driving around town with his paintings.' I always meant to buy one."
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