Tom's Life Bits

By Susan L. Rife

Published: Sunday, July 26, 2009 at 1:00 a.m.

SHADOWS By Harold Newton

Serendipity seems to play a significant role in the endlessly fascinating story of the Florida Highwaymen, a group of self-taught African American artists who mass-produced and self-marketed oil paintings that captured the essence of the Florida landscape from the 1950s through '70s.

Two new books have been added to the growing shelf of works documenting the stories of 26 artists, the white artist who served as their mentor, and the born salesman among them who became an artist himself.

“The Journey of the Highwaymen” by Catherine M. Enns examines the relationship between A.E. “Bean” Backus, the so-called dean of Florida landscape painting, and the group of artists led by Alfred Hair who learned the basics of oil painting in Backus's Fort Pierce studio before turning to practically assembly-line efficiency in creating somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 oil paintings. Many of them were sold, paint still wet, out of the trunks of their cars. It is lavishly illustrated with more than 200 color plates, nearly all of them reproducing works in the collection of Jonathan Otto.

“The Highwaymen Murals: Al Black's Concrete Dreams” by Gary Monroe captures an aspect of the Highwaymen story the general public may not get a chance to see. The murals are painted on interior and exterior walls of the Central Florida Reception Center in Orlando and the Tomoka Correctional Institution in Daytona Beach. Black painted them during his 12 years of incarceration on fraud charges.

Otto, Monroe and Enns came to the Highwaymen and the book projects from different angles.

Otto, a transplanted New Yorker, went into a Palm Beach gallery one day about seven years ago to buy one of David Hockney's signature “swimming pool” paintings. Instead, he encountered the Florida landscapes of Backus and his Highwaymen acolytes, became entranced, and began collecting the works, which most often show Florida as a subtropical paradise unblemished by condominium towers, clear-cut developments and theme parks.

“I moved to Florida, fell in love with Florida, fell in love with the landscape and started collecting the paintings,” he said. He now owns about 500 Highwaymen paintings.

Intrigued by the story behind the paintings, he commissioned Enns to write the text for a book that would display what Otto calls the Backus templates with the Highwaymen's interpretations of various consistent subjects, ranging from royal poinciana trees to beach scenes to backcountry pines to “fireskies,” the lurid sunsets known to all Floridians.

Each “template” section of the book opens with a Backus painting followed by paintings by the Highwaymen.

“Backus is a great American painter, a great Florida landscape painter,” said Otto. “They are studied, great paintings where he took his time, paid a lot of attention to detail and produced some great scenes.”

The Highwaymen, said Otto, “are of unequal talent, and even some of the talented ones are of unequal quality.”

Among the best-known of the Highwaymen was Alfred Hair, who “had taken lessons from Backus and could paint like Backus, but he abandoned that style and turned to art as an enterprise,” said Otto.

In Otto's opinion, the Highwaymen paintings are “uniquely American and original.”

“Backus is truer to nature, but Hair I think gives the viewer a much more energized and exciting feeling,” he said.

Author Enns brought to the book project a unique perspective: A native of Fort Pierce, she grew up knowing Backus and his artistic circle well. Her parents were friends with Backus.

“His studio was a hangout place for kids, with music, great conversation, not mainstream,” said Enns, a freelance journalist who lives in Jacksonville.

Backus's opening of his studio to blacks was all the more remarkable in the 1950s and '60s, when Florida was still largely segregated, said Enns.

“The fact that Beanie had black people in his house and entertained them, had them sit down at the same table, was pretty unusual at the time,” said Enns. “I thought that was a great way to be.”

Enns contrasts Backus' approach to landscape painting with the Highwaymen's style.

“He studied the light, he was very scientific in his approach to the painting,” she said. “He would layer his paintings, start with the blue underpainting and work toward what you see in the final painting. The Highwaymen just slapped the paint on the canvas and tried to get it right the first time. They became very adept at this shorthand.”

The Highwaymen typically painted on Upson board, sometimes with common housepaint rather than artist's oils. Their style might be epitomized by the works of Hair, who died young, gunned down in a bar on Avenue D in Fort Pierce at the age of 29.

“I love the story of Alfred Hair,” said Enns. “We wouldn't be talking about the Highwaymen if Alfred Hair hadn't entered the picture. He was the one who galvanized all these guys. They didn't all work together, they worked in concentric circles where someone knew somebody. But Hair was gifted artistically. He totally rejected going into this kind of academic way of making paintings.

“He just went outside, put the Upson board on the trees and started literally a factory. They would work at night by lightbulbs hung out. They just produced. And then he was able to get Al Black, who was this great salesman. They became this partnership that couldn't be beat, selling art in Florida.”

Part of Black's story is captured in Monroe's book, the third he has written about the Highwaymen. In 2001, University Press of Florida published “The Highwaymen: Florida's African-American Landscape Painters;” in 2007, “Harold Newton: The Original Highwayman” was published.

“I now had a well-rounded story, captured in these two books,” Monroe, a professor of fine arts and photography at Daytona State College, writes in the introduction to “The Highwaymen Murals.” “I had revealed both the lives and the art of Hair and Newton. I was finished with the Highwaymen, I thought. I could now return to the rewarding solitude of my life as a photographer. I was wrong once again. I simply could not dismiss something else that I had discovered while researching my first book. Visions of Al Black's prison murals prodded me, gnawed at me, and beckoned me.”

Black had started his affiliation with the Highwaymen as a salesman, a consummate huckster capable of selling ice to Alaskans. He would load the trunk of his car with the freshly painted works, dress himself neatly in a tucked-in, starched shirt, and head to doctor's and lawyer's offices around Florida, selling the paintings for between $35 and $65 and collecting a 35 percent commission.

It was his touching-up of the other artists' paintings, sometimes dinged in the car trunk, that led him to paint for himself. When he landed in jail, it looked like his artistic career was over.

But when the Orlando Sentinel ran a story about the Highwaymen in its Sunday magazine in 1998, a nurse at the prison suspected the inmate in her care was Black. Conversations between Black and the prison warden, a fan of the Highwaymen, led to Black applying his talents to the walls of first the CFRC and later the Tomoka Correctional Institution at Daytona Beach.

“What's significant is how these paintings transformed this bleak environment,” said Monroe.

The murals, acrylic paint applied mostly to cinderblock walls, “without a doubt are his best work,” said Monroe, “big and bold and gestural and free.”

SHADOWS By Harold Newton

WINTER SUNSET By Harold Newton

TOURISTS By Alfred Hair

WINDBLOWN PALMS By A.E. Backus

Blowing Rocks by Alfred Hair

Al Black Concrete Designs by Gary Monroe

The Journey of the Highwaymen by Catherine enns