Father’s Art: Works of Billy Charles Duvall [1]

Detail from “October 1978”

Introductory

By André Duvall

With great respect and admiration, I am delighted to present the first in a series of posts sharing the artwork of my father, Billy Charles Duvall. Painting – primarily oil on canvas – has been one of his hobbies since 1978. A self-taught painter, he has had a lifelong interest in the work of artists from varied cultural backgrounds, and in reflecting their art in his own experiments with structural, artistic additions to his home, inside and out.
    Ever since I was a child, I have been surrounded by his paintings – hanging in the living room, set on an easel in his workshop, lying in storage. Any time we took a family road trip to a new city, Dad always included a visit to an art museum. And today I always seek out art museums myself when I visit new cities, a practice directly attributable to my father.
    Many of Dad’s paintings were completed either before I was born, or when I was child. Because he worked for decades as an electronics technician for a school district in North Little Rock, Arkansas, he often painted between 10 & 12 p.m., especially in his younger years. Towards the end of his career with the school district (when I was in high school and college), he did not paint as much, but he always had a few on display at home and would be planning or working on some addition or adjustment to his home’s artistic décor – a Moroccan-influenced podium in the living room, a balcony divider on the front porch like those seen in the French Quarter, or a unique snail/scroll-like structure of wood on a wall to play off the theme of another structure he had added to another room many years before.
    He planned to resume painting after his retirement, and now that he has recovered his manual dexterity after a minor stroke, he has indeed resumed. His activities include restoring the shine to many of his earlier works, and this series of posts grew out of my desire to catalogue and preserve background information about every item. I’m photographing each work and making notes of my father’s commentaries. Much of his art is sitting in storage, and I want to make sure their images and stories are not lost. I want to give others an opportunity to admire and enjoy his art – I think it is wonderful.

Opus 1. Dad did his first painting ever in the little garage apartment next to Mrs. Tisdale’s house, where he and my mother lived before purchasing the home on the lot next door.

September 11, 1978. 4" x 6". Oil on canvas panel

    The object in the center of the painting is based on a real object that is located on what was formerly Mrs. Tisdale’s land behind her home, at about the point where the land begins to elevate. Formerly an open field, it is now covered in undergrowth that has crept forward from the forested area on the north end of her land. While people have mistaken the cylinder-shaped object in the painting to be a telescope, it is actually a telescope mount/holder. The holder, which sits upon a cement block about 4 feet high, rotates to allow the viewer to see different angles of the sky. My father says he had never painted before, but he wanted to start, so he drove to Wal-Mart and bought some paint and supplies.

Opus 2. Dad’s second painting depicts a woman playing a lyre on an island somewhere like Greece.

October 1978. 4" x 6". Oil on canvas panel

Dad is still discovering works from his early period and can’t say for sure which one was his third painting, his fourth, etc., but he can say that the five I will show you now are from that early period.

“Flamenco Dancer,” June 6, 1979. 4" x 6". Oil on canvas panel

    “Flamenco dancer” was a study of a magazine cover: HiFi/Stereo Review, January 1966:

“Going Home” depicts a native South American in the Andes Mountains.

“Going Home,” June 30, 1979. 4" x 6". Oil on canvas panel

    I asked Dad what was depicted on the side of the mountain – waterfalls or segments of a single waterfall? He said he wasn’t thinking of water when he painted it – it could simply be the rock and dirt of the mountainside, or possibly mist. But other people have also suggested waterfall to Dad, and he agrees that it looks like a waterfall, and it could be a waterfall.
    I especially like the rich vegetation painted into the side of the mountain, how it provides depth and proportion to the painting.

The setting for this unfinished painting is twilight in a city near a bay.

Untitled and unfinished. 4" x 6". Oil on canvas

    Inspired by the City of San Francisco, with its bridge across the bay to Berkeley (where Dad spent his early years), the painting includes a bridge with ships in the background. Having visited San Francisco for the first time in May this year, I particularly enjoy this work’s depictions of sailboats, cathedral, buildings, traffic-filled road with cove/inlet, and buildings.
    Originally, Dad planned to focus on a man crossing a tightrope cable (you can see a cable in the painting). But he never figured out how he wanted the the aerialist to look. This painting would eventually serve as predecessor to a much larger painting, shown and described next.

In Dad’s first larger painting, a man, the aerialist, is balancing on a steel cable. As in the previous painting, the setting is twilight, but the mood is now more somber. It is perhaps on the darker side of twilight, and it is a dark city with no sign of life below.

“The Last Man” (originally “The Death of the Aerialist”), 1983.
48" x 24". Oil on masonite

    This painting was damaged many years ago. Dad had set it on the porch to take a photo for submission to one of the Arkansas Delta exhibitions, which at the time required a color slide photograph. He had spent money on a nice metal frame. A sudden gust of wind lifted the canvas and landed it on the ground, scratching it in several places. In an expression of anger rare for my father, he set the painting up again and rammed his foot through it, splitting it in half. He told me that normally he was able to control his anger, but on that day, he was already feeling frustrated – perhaps from trying to make the submission deadline on time – and then the wind came, damaging his creation. It was just too much.
    Years later, during which the painting lay in storage, Dad discovered that he had managed to take a few photographs before the wind blew the painting off the porch, so it’s possible that the wind scenario happened when he was doing retakes, even after submitting an earlier color slide for the exhibition. Dad says he always wondered what the flag stood for, even when he was doing the painting. And he wasn’t sure what he might have been thinking the dark city represented. At the time of the original painting’s completion, the water seemed to him to be too close to the edge of the city, and he considered moving it away a bit, but he decided to leave it that way, as though the water were about to flood the city.
    The painting lay damaged until this year (2019). In the course of repairing it, he saw a possible connection to today’s bleak climate outlook and decided to rename the painting “The Last Man.” He realized that the world he depicted in 1983 seemed to be at a crucial point, as it certainly is today, when so many things are happening relative to climate change, but world leaders continue to deny or downplay it. The city is dark and desolate with no sign of life, except for the man, who is it at a tipping point: if he doesn’t grab onto the rope, it’s all over. And Dad’s decision to leave the water at the city’s edge now supported the reference to climate change, with its rising sea levels. The painting could be a symbol, a prophecy of our time, when the world’s future appears so bleak.
    For touch-up, Dad even found the original paint tubes, which were pretty dried out. But there was enough left in their centers for him to do the job, patiently taking the very long time required to match the blends of paint.

The study shown below may have been completed after the completion of “The Death of the Aerialist,” in which he was a little unhappy with the shape of the building to the right, and he wondered what the aerialist would look like on an open frame, with the shape of the missing side of the canvas taking the place of the building.

Study for “The Death of the Aerialist.” 8½" x 6". Oil on canvas panel

    Here the aerialist is suspended in an abstract space, and the cable has already snapped (perhaps what will happen if we don’t do anything about climate change: it is “too late” in this painting). This study is the beginning of the open-frame concept that led to “Mujer Tropical,” which hangs in the Statehouse Convention Center in downtown Little Rock, on President Clinton Avenue, and then “The Journey to Paradise.” These two paintings will be featured in future posts.

Copyright © 2019 by André Duvall & Billy Charles Duvall