The Call of the Road

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In his book Bound for Glory, Woody Guthrie muses on a calling as artist, as a painter. He doesn't take that route in life, of course, but the idea was not unreasonable. The many drawings made by Guthrie illustrating his own story testify to his natural talent for art. But for a lack of encouragement to get the training necessary for an art career, he might have been a great artist. Woody Guthrie was born in 1912...the same year as Jackson Pollock. A coincidence, perhaps, but consider the many similarities in their backgrounds. Without the early encouragement Jackson Pollock received, he might be remembered today as a drinker, a drifter, and as a singer worse than Guthrie.

    For the next few months I took a spell of spending all of the money I could rake and scrape for brushes, hunks of canvas, and all kinds of oil paints. Whole days would go by and I wouldn't know where they went. I put my whole mind and every single thought to the business of painting pictures, mostly people.
    I made copies of Whistler's ”Mother,” “The Song of the Lark,” “The Angelus,” and lots of babies and boys and dogs, snow and green trees, birds singing on all kinds of limbs, and pictures of the dust across the oil fields and wheat country. I made a couple of dozen heads of Christ, and the cops that killed Him.
    Things was starting to stack up in my head and I just felt like I was going out of my wits if I didn't find some way of saying what I was thinking. The world didn't mean any more than a smear to me if I couldn't find ways of putting it down on something. I painted cheap signs and pictures on store windows, warehouses, barns and hotels, hock shops, funeral parlors, and blacksmith shops, and I spent the money I made for more tubes of oil colors. “I'll make 'em good an' tough,” I said to myself, “so's they'll last a thousand years.”
    But canvas is too high priced, and so is paint and costly oils, and brushes that you've got to chase a camel or a seal or a Russian red sable forty miles to get.
    An Uncle of mine taught me to play the guitar and I got to going out a couple of nights a week to the cow ranches around to play for the square dances. I made up new words to old tunes and sung them everywhere I'd go. I had to give my pictures away to get anybody to hang them on their wall, but for singing a song, or a few songs at a country dance, they paid me as high as three dollars a night. A picture--you buy it once, and it bothers you for forty years; but with a song, you sing it out, and it soaks in people's ears and they all jump up and down and sing it with you, and then when you quit singing it, it's gone, and you get a job singing it again. On top of that, you can sing out what you think. You can tell tales of all kinds to put your idea across to the other fellow. 
    And this has held me ever since. 

(Transcribed verbatim from pages 177 & 178 of the Penguin Books 2004 edition of Bound for Glory, by Woody Guthrie; the volume borrowed from the local Public Library, which, through inter-library loan, borrowed it from the Shawnee State University Library, Portsmouth, Ohio.)

The graphic art of Brian Higgins can be viewed at: https://fineartamerica.com/profiles/8-brian-higgins
One-of-a-kind works of art can be viewed at: https://www.saatchiart.com/account/artworks/1840403

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