by Henry Vermilion, text and art

One of my big challenges as a painter has been the art of Norman Rockwell and of Will James. Norman Rockwell is well-known, but condescendingly so, as the painter of bucolic All-American Saturday Evening Post magazine covers. Will James was well-known among ranch kids and other children in Texas and New Mexico as the writer-illustrator of "Smoky the Cow Horse," a standard fiction in those parts. The ethos of both artists is still unavoidably rooted in my subconscious. Yes, a person grows beyond such childhood pleasures, but their impressions remain.

Some of the other artists I knew of as a child were Frederick Remington, Charles M. Russell, and the crew of other Saturday Evening Post magazine cover artists, including Mead Schaeffer, John Falter, Ben Stahl, and Harold von Schmidt, wonderful illustrators all. Their pictures still echo in the fading mists of my recollections.

Another thing that muddied the art waters for me was my father. My father, though anti-religious, was the product of generations of hard-rock Southern Baptist stock. To invent a phrase, you can throw out the water, but the bucket is still metal. Another complicating Southern Baptist trait of his was that he was a word person, and very few of those, except for printed words. He was a newspaperman. He owned, edited, and published a series of weekly newspapers in West Texas and Southern Arizona. He never actively discouraged my interest in art. He never said anything about it at all. But that reticence on the subject said a lot in itself.

My mother was born in Marfa, Texas in one of the many years of its innocence before Donald Judd took it over with his steel art structures. She was born in Marfa because it had the only hospital within hundreds of miles of her father's ranch south of Marfa. My mother had a talent for art, a source of both great happiness and great misfortune for her.

Then, at a certain point, Picasso entered the picture. Until I already had degrees in English literature and social work, a wife, a daughter, and a regular job, he was only some weird distant foreign art deity. Then, somehow, what Picasso did began to make sense to me. He knew the rules only too well before he decided to break them, or rather, to look for other rules which made more sense in his unstable times.

But those distorted figures, those primitive faces... how did he get away with that? Well, there were those African masks, those masks from the South Pacific. They did have more authenticity, more gravitas than the pleasantries of the impressionists. In their way, they took art back to the forgotten authenticity of Giotto and van Eyck. And it took a lot of nerve to declare that those "primitive" images were relevant to modern times.

So, one of my challenges as a painter has been how to integrate the human, positive Rockwellian impulses with a more honest contemporary, but skeptical view of the world.

I can't resist a last note: a big recent show of Andy Warhol works claimed equal status for Andy with Picasso in the realm of art. Andy's work basically tells us that consumerism and advertising culture is just fine. Don't worry about it. It's all ok. On the other hand, Picasso's art challenges our values, makes us work, makes us think. There's a big difference.

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Henry Vermillion was born in El Paso, and grew up in small towns in Texas and New Mexico. He graduated from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, with degrees in English literature and biology. He studied Social Work in the MSW program at the University of Texas in Austin.

In November of 1992, Henry, his wife Britt Zaist, and five other painters opened the co-op Galeriía Izamal, which, until its closing in January of 2022, was San Miguel's oldest art gallery.

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