mountain holes

Coming Home From The Creek," with barn paints on a piece of corrugated cardboard at the age of thirteen. Part of the great Appalachian outmigration that started for him with World War II, Troy eventually settled on Long Island where for almost twenty years he was a commercial artist and pressman for the the A&P food chain. It was his drawings of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Thanksgiving Gobbler that graced every A&P window from Maine to Virginia. Company policy dictated that the works go unsigned, but in later years he assured me, a sly smile filling his face, that he worked his name or initials into every sketch. By the late 1960s a severe mental depression set in that caused the demise of his marriage and that resulted in three suicide attempts, institutionalization, and a battery of shock treatments. During this period he limped home to Richwood , West Virginia, where he tried to rehabilitate himself by painting, drawing , and painting Olde English signs for local merchants. It was in this period that the scratchboard piece was likely created. I do know that it hung for a number of years in the little tarpaper house on Cranberry Street, but that around 1 975 he gave it to a local friend, Joanie Barrett, who now resides in Lexington , Kentucky. The piece remained with her and her husband Joe, the poet, until 1989 when the City of Richwood posthumously honored Baber as the featured artist in their Fall Color Tour Exhibition and the Barretts offered the piece for display. Throughout his life Troy gave away, or sold for a pittance, his portraits of Appalachia . He knew firsthand that most people here couldn't afford art, though they loved it just as dearly as their more properous fellow-Americans. His specialities were fall and winter scenes, livestock, dogs, deer, and birds. Like the people who ended up owning his works, Baber' s art was devoid of pretense—it didn't pretend to be anything other than what it was: representational art that was meant to depict, in vivid color, his love of the beauty and perseverance of the Appalachian mountains and the people that live in them. Troy Nash Baber was truly a child of Appalachia. He never achieved his childhood goal of being a professional artist, he never got to go to Paris after the war to study art under the G.I. bill, and he never even had a show of his work while he was living. But amongst the public and his fellow central West Virginia artists, such as Gale Surface or Sterling Spencer, his art won accolades and respect. And when, after he died, the public generously lent their canvases and watercolors to be exhibited, it was a clear testament to the love people felt in the works by this relatively unknown, but admired, local artist. mountain holes trees, top-edging my fall mountains, flaunt crewcuts, sudden holes appear as powerline slash openings are widened by leaf loss, eroding paths lie bare for rains to cut more deeply toward quartzite cores bent millenia ago and relaxing only when broken by slow and almost silent wind and rain. -Charles Rampp 4 ...