Father’s Art: Works of Billy Charles Duvall [12]

Detail of a photo below

By André Duvall

Beyond the 31 works of art I’ve catalogued so far in this column, there are still other paintings in Dad’s oeuvre worthy of sharing. He recently rediscovered a few more completed works, owing to searches motivated by the evolution of our Father’s Art project. He also discovered several unfinished works from many years ago that the project has inspired him to work on completing.
    However, knowing that they would not be completed before Morris’ retirement, I decided that my final Father’s Art post here should feature a different aspect of Dad’s artistic creations from those so far presented. Dad’s primary and preferred medium is oil on canvas or canvas panel. My post from March 14 of this year shared a couple of pieces from his small collection of works with three-dimensional elements.
    Today’s post highlights another category of three-dimensional art: the many striking, beautiful, and sometimes whimsical architectural structures and ornaments Dad has added to his home. Many of these additions can be grouped into motifs by their designs, patterns, and influences.
    In my long-range planning, I always envisioned including these structural whims as a concluding set of posts after all of Dad’s paintings were presented. Perhaps I will find another venue on which to continue a little further the spirit of what Morris inspired and supported, cataloguing more of Dad’s paintings as they are finished, and sharing more architectural structures. For now, I’ve selected a few structures that epitomize the qualities and motifs of Dad’s artistic home additions.

In this first photo,

we see a wall partially dividing the living room from the dining room beyond. Over time, Dad added several structures to the doubly curved, rounded edge of this wall (which itself was his creation and has been present since my childhood). The theme of curves recurs in many of these additions.

    The first addition was the curved, textured object placed in the lower-central region of the wall’s upper curve. Dad does not have a name for this object, but he says it was strongly influenced by structures he has seen in Islamic architecture that have long held his awe and interest. For me, it has strong overtones of a snail, a seashell, a teardrop, and a stylized flame, all combined. Viewing it has always been a pleasing sensory experience, with its gentle and elegant circular motion towards the center, balanced by the sense of forward motion, as though the object is moving horizontally while rotating, much like a galaxy.

    Below this object is a curved portion of an arch with curved notches. It was added many years later. Dad first toyed with arches and notches in a sample creation that can be seen in a photo from an earlier post about the Origin of the Hattieville Bison. You can see the arch creating an umbrella over the painting and my great-grandmother Ada Voss’ Zoo. (You can read more about this painting and the Zoo in that post and the comments on it.) Dad’s experimental arch would serve as a study for the arches with notches he would one day add to the front porch, which can be seen in the photos below.

The inspiration for these structures also comes from Islamic architecture, and Moroccan.

The most recent additions to the curved wall between the living room and dining room are the pedestal and vase. Dad imagines a fountain of water pouring the path created by the notched arches, flowing into the vase, which then leads down the interior of the pedestal. Again, he was inspired by fountains he has seen in photographs and books from the Middle East.
    Dad continued the snail-like motif many years later by creating a variation of the first design and placing one on each side of a wall in one of the back rooms, pictured below. Imagine the side of the wall shown on the left as the backside of the one shown on the right, and vice versa:

Now, I return to the very beginning, before all of these additions. Notice in the next photo the off-white structure at the front tip of the roof.

I’ll let Dad explain it:

Some houses with shingle roofs have a row of roofing tiles on the top ridge line, capped with a tin piece at each end. I found my cap at a flea market long ago. It adds decoration to the roof.

This “decoration” has always reminded me of some ancient, mysterious animal or mythological creature, like a sphinx, enshrouded in clouds or rising up out of desert sands and mud. Although this did not directly influence Dad’s other creations, I find its design flows seamlessly with the theme of gently curving structures that appear throughout the house. Along with so much else described above, it is so pleasing to just stand and view it against the sky.

Although I am going to miss the opportunity to post more such creations on the Moristotle & Co. blog, I feel this is a fitting way to end this series, by sharing some of the provocative beauty my Dad (and Mom) have created in their home, through his art and through their years of gardening and landscaping efforts. I am grateful all of this survived the terrible tornado that cut across Little Rock and North Little Rock on March 31, the center of which missed their home by only a few hundred feet, destroying numerous homes and businesses in my childhood neighborhood. That was a reminder of how quickly things can change, and of the fragility of life. Every day is a gift, and there are wonderful things to take in all around us!

Copyright © 2023 by André Duvall & Billy Charles Duvall