Realism Reflected

C. Ford Riley on his property in North Florida credit: photo by Peter Frank Edwards

I took the job of profiling a painter named C. Ford Riley in Jacksonville, Florida, because I am from Jacksonville, too, and I thought perhaps we could develop some happy harmonies owing to our common background, which, the happy harmonies of common background, would help mask my ignorance of painting and painters. Perhaps the schools C. Ford Riley went to would not be distant from the schools I went to, etc. Perhaps some striking mutual accordance would allow me to not talk about painting and painters altogether, and I could ride a cavalry of distraction around my weak knowledge and obscure it altogether. When I called C. Ford Riley and asked where he went to high school he said Lee and I said my mother taught at Lee and he said “You sound like a local boy” and I said “I went to Lake Shore Junior High” and he said “I went to Lake Shore” and I said I heard Allen Collins play a guitar when we were fourteen years old in the cafeteria and was transfixed by how good he was because all I had ever known Allen to do was walk the halls dreamily when he was not suspended, and C. Ford Riley said one day when he and Allen were suspended for sniffing glue he and Allen went to his house in Ortega and practiced their guitars in the garage and later they decided to practice as a band there and his mother, he said, took one look at Bob Burns, the original drummer for the band this would become, and said, “You will not be doing this,” or words to that effect, so C. Ford Riley formed another band, called the Chain Gang, which did nothing, and Allen and Bob were in a band called the 1%, which I followed for three years as ardently as a band can be followed by a groupie, female or male, and C. Ford Riley went on to teach himself how to paint and Allen and Bob became rock stars. Then Bob quit the band, I thought, or they kicked him out, C. Ford Riley thought, but either way he was not on the plane when Lynyrd Skynyrd crashed, to die as Ronnie Van Zant did, or to survive and die later as Allen did.

I told C. Ford Riley that I read that Bob Burns was once talked into quitting the band by a girlfriend who found it appalling that he would be having to eat a fish that he caught after being in that band for so long and I wondered if the girlfriend who persuaded him into this boneheadedness was the lovely Ann Allen, who had been his girlfriend at Lake Shore. C. Ford Riley did not know Ann Allen and I did not expect him to because despite her civility she seemed to have come from the other side of the tracks from Ortega, but she had had a somewhat more genteel-seeming friend named Sue Scherer who maybe was Ortega, and C. Ford Riley said, “I know Sue Scherer well.” It felt to me that the cavalry of distraction I wanted to run around the weak army of my main mission was very well placed and active and dependable. If I went up to Jacksonville and had my ignorance exposed in the studio I could suggest we call Bob Burns and Ann Allen and Sue Scherer and have a party.

The painters I know personally are Kathy and Jim Muehlemann of Blacksburg, Virginia; my college roommate James Pritchard of New York City when I last saw him; a fellow in New Orleans named Aaron Collier who has painted a buffalo with a human nose on it that he has offered to me; the late Dan Lomahaftewa, a Hopi Indian from whom I bought a painting of a Hopi deity; David Deutsch, a friend of William Wegman’s; and William Wegman. Of these I know William Wegman the best and I called him to ask him if he knows of C. Ford Riley and he was not there but his wife, Christine Burgin, an art dealer, was.

“Christine, are you still thin?”

“In certain places.”

“You know that kind of painting that features marshes and ducks and is popular at craft fairs? What is that called if it is not to be called realistic or wildlife art or if the painter does not want it called realistic or wildlife art?”

“Well, if it is the kind that hangs in English mansions it can be called Sporting Art. Realism is generally better than realistic.” (This makes sense: We know to never say simplistic, but we can say simple if we are careful.)

“How are the dogs?”

“They are fine.”

“Who are the dogs now?”

“Candy, and Bobbin, and Penny.”

Bill Wegman keeps a crew of Weimaraners on hand to work with and is so well known for his work with them that some people do not know he is a painter. I have heard a painter in fact resent the kind of money he can make for a painting and have reported this to Bill, who has said, “Tell him I have paid my dues.” I have watched Bill play with a canvas and make things appear out of nowhere and have been amazed at the deftness with which he can do this and at what I would call the purity of line if it did not sound so fey.

I did not know the dog Man Ray who began Bill’s career as a famous dog artist, but I knew Fay (Ray) and Batty and Chip and Chundo, and now I know Candy and Bobbin (Ray) and Penny. The dogs go everywhere Bill goes.

C. Ford Riley has a dachshund named Gator who recently suddenly went stone deaf so it is possible to sneak into the house without his knowing you are in it and your having to take him with you when you leave it. The studio, detached from the house, overlooking live-oak hammock and a ravine going down to the St. John’s River, a majestic thing up to three miles wide at this point, is a power studio. There are four guitars upright in front of four Peavey amps, six small paintings over the fireplace mantel (one of them a simple, strong study of a blue jay), a fireplace blocked by a painting of saltwater marsh, two light easels supporting small paintings in corners, a large Turkish kilim on the floor covered with deformed tubes of oil paint and paper towels and Q-tips and foam plates employed as palettes (at the end of work these plates are capped with a clean plate and stacked), five or six or seven or nine or seventeen other paintings leaned upright here and there, Solo cups half-filled with paint water, one hopes, a Beatles CD, and a gilt-framed mirror on the floor facing a large central easel, which is a Hughes 4000 of heavy and finely crafted oak suggesting cathedral furniture or artillery carriage or a medieval siege appliance or part of a ship. “That,” C. Ford Riley says, “is the best easel in the world. It will go to the ceiling.”

Of the mirror on the floor facing the easel, C. Ford Riley says, “I work through a mirror. That’s how I paint. If you look at it through there” — looking not at the painting on the easel but at the painting in the mirror — “you can see where it’s going to go, for the most part.”

He demonstrates. To work on a painting, C. Ford Riley puts it in a real frame of the sort likely to hold it in real life — say a heavy gilt frame — and he sits to the right of the canvas about two feet from it. At this working distance, looking at the painting and then at the mirror about eight feet away reflecting the painting adds about fourteen feet of light distance between the viewer and the painting; it simulates looking at the painting across a goodly sized room. The sudden vantage from being on top of the painting to seeing it as if across the billiards parlor or the main room of a lodge is a jolt, as if a visual trick is at hand. The long view conveys a sudden power and exactitude and correctness one does not see close up.

On the Hughes 4000 is a painting of a sand-bottomed black water creek in southeastern river bottom. It is ... perfect. It is the kind of image that makes you want to be there, now, or to say that you have been there, many times, or to own the creek, or to say that you own the creek — or all of the above. If you are the kind of person susceptible to this odd rush of emotions, it is also the kind of image that will make you want to buy the image. And if you do actually own the creek, as some people do, you will have to buy the image. This phenomenon, this compulsion to claim kinship with or possession of the scene in this kind of painting when it is correct, I surmise — knowing nothing of which I speak, picking up a small knife that I do know something about — is the keystone to C. Ford Riley’s success. His audience will prove to be the set of people subject to this weird land fever and the subset of people who do own the creek.

The knife I have picked up has paint on it, which would suggest it is used for apportioning paint by cutting extruded lines of it from the tube and is a Randall knockoff made by a defunct outfit called Blackjack out of Effingham, Illinois, and C. Ford Riley says, “Are you familiar with Randall knives?” and I tell him I am. “I’ve got a Randall knife. It’s this big. My father-in-law gave it to me — twenty years ago.” He shrugs. A Randall knife is a perfect symbol at the center of this passion for land and hunting on land and it is the knife for the purest enthusiasts of this sort in the United States. The knives, made in Orlando, Florida, had their formative moments in Michigan with roundabout connections to Hemingway and a circle of hunting men.

Speaking of the river-bottom painting, C. Ford Riley says, “This is on some property over in Thomasville, Georgia. I love it over there. I just love river bottom. And this is all river bottom and this is actually... well, it would be in another month from now, month, month and a half. And things are losing their leaves but you still have some greenery and you still have some stuff in there. This is actually a place called Hadley Creek, which runs into the Ochlocknee.” (A valuable aside concerning Hadley Creek, or near it, from the late boat builder Robb White of Thomasville, Georgia: “Another thing about Robert... he was in the train wreck when the shaky trestle over the Ochlocknee River at Hadley Ferry broke down and the sawmill train fell in the river and scalded all those men to death in 1925. He was the fireman in the engine and ought to have been the first one to die but he dove under the water and, though the concussion of the implosion made him bleed out the ears, he was the only survivor of the whole crew... had to walk twenty miles to tell the news and nobody believed him because he was just a (...) (I ain’t going to say that word because my Momma taught me not to).” (Excerpted from a story by Robb White, published in Messing About in Boats magazine and located on Robb White’s Web site.)

I ask C. Ford Riley if the worst thing he can be called is a wildlife artist. I do not know precisely how I have divined this might be a sore spot, but I have. (Biography from AskART: “One of two featured artists at the third annual Thomasville, Georgia, Plantation Wildlife Arts Festival, Fall 1998, he is known for his realistic paintings of songbirds, turkey, quail and bird dogs as well as for landscapes.”)

“I started painting birds, you know, thirty years ago, studying birds, I mean I studied birds and I painted them for my own benefit, just for my own studies, and then, you know, it evolved that people started buying my studies and the next thing I knew, hey, I can, I can make a living doing this, pay for my beer and do whatever. Your typical twenty-year-old mentality.

“And then I evolved into painting the habitats, which I love to paint. And from there I’ve just evolved into just so many different other facets.

“The term ‘wildlife art.’ When I see people that paint lions and tigers and they live in Colquitt, Georgia” — he shakes his head — “you know, well, I guess that’s fine with me, it’s just, I don’t know how people... with me I’ve just got to paint what I know and what I can feel, or I can smell or, you know, eat or whatever.

“I’ve got nothing against it, there’re some great artists out there that, that do very well, you know, but I’m more ... the art that I like has come down through the Old Masters.”

C. Ford Riley mentions the German Hermann Herzog, who lived and painted in Florida and whom he calls another “habitat” painter; Willard Metcalf (“He’s an impressionist. I love all the American impressionists more than I do the French impressionists because I can relate to it — I like the color scheme more”); Winslow Homer; Edward Hopper (“I love Edward Hopper’s work”); Frederic Church; John Frederick Kensett; William Trost Richards; the Ruskin movement; William Merritt Chase; Childe Hassam. If a layman glances at the work of a number of the painters on this list, he sees a style in use called luminism, which is apparently defined as a set of techniques that heighten the effects of light, and make it an element in the painting itself, for romantic purpose. He sees also painting that he would have called impressionistic if not instructed otherwise.

“You have to portray nature in the sense that it’s got to be right. You don’t just put trees in the landscape for the sake of there being trees. You’ve got to know that they’re part of that habitat. You’ve got to be true to nature.”

“Does the epithet realist or the adjective realistic bother you, or is it agreeable, and how inaccurate is it?”

“Well, photorealism is something I don’t care for at all. Not one bit at all.

“To portray something that... I don’t know how to say it: If I can convey... if someone looks at this painting... they can go, I know exactly where that is or I’ve been there.”

“There are distortions in this that make it more real than real?”

“I would say so. Because if you look close. You know, you go, well, this area, I can’t really tell what this is, but if you look there” — in the mirror — “then you can...

“And I paint for this distance anyway. And people can come up — it’s almost like playing, like you say, a broken chord on a piano. It’s more interesting to play a broken chord than it is just a straight-out chord. So I want to convey that realistic sense...”

“Is the mirror just a quick way of getting distance or is it doing something else?”

“I can see passages through this, you know, I can see like this whole thing back here, and I can pull all this up. And then I can, you know, I work, it’s easier for me get my harmonies, my values, and edges when I do this.”

Clearly the mirror is doing something else besides getting distance: I have not said anything about playing a piano, broken chord or straight (if I know less about something than painting, it is music). I take this broken-chord business to be a fair stab at the impressionistic heart in C. Ford Riley: He wants a broken reality to convey a realistic sense.

There is a large painting leaning nearby that looks to me like the backside of Cumberland Island, looking north from about Plum Orchard with the Crooked River coming in from the upper left (northwest) of the painting, and I say, “This looks like the backside of Cumberland Island, that’s the Crooked River coming in there, this is about Brick Hill or Plum Orchard …”

“That’s exactly where this is! How’d you know?”

“I know exactly where that is and I’ve been there.”

“But this is at about Greystone.”

“Greystone? You mean Greyfield?”

C. Ford Riley does mean Greyfield, Greyfield Inn, where I imagine he stayed to do this work. The last time I checked, prices at Greyfield — one of the bivouac points for the Kennedy wedding — were $275. When I am on Cumberland I go for the $4 back-country permits, having been already wounded deeply by the $17 ferry fare. C. Ford Riley’s Cumberland painting before us is also perfect, and notable in it, in the overlookable foreground, is some shallow water that is slightly disturbed exactly as it would be disturbed were mullet just below its surface. This — not the exactitude of the scene that allows one to recognize the backside of Cumberland Island looking north — is what is amazing. There is a reason that C. Ford Riley has said Greystone when he has meant Greyfield.