The Gift of the Stranger: The Pine Mountain Prints of John A. Spelman III

X ?' ^ \ 3,> / S / y The Gift ofthe Stranger THE PINE MOUNTAIN PRINTS OF JOHN A. SPELMAN III For at least as long as this magazine's existence I have wanted to present a sampling of the prints John A. Spelman made during his years (1937-1941) as worker at the Pine Mountain Settlement School in Harlan County, Kentucky. For a much longer time—going back to the late 1930s and early 1940s and the old Mountain Life & Work magazine of those days in which some of his prints appeared—I have had an abiding appreciation for his renderings of mountain cabin scenes and landscapes by means of linoleum and wood block cuts. It may be that patience is a catalyzer after all—as well as an endurance—for almost as 4 gratuitously as those prints were made, all that diverted formerly converged recently to make this sampling possible. JohnA. Spelman was twenty-five years old when he came to Pine Mountain. He had graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1934 with at least one of his interests represented by a major in English, but according to his own words he had been drawing houses for years, not thinking of them as art, but very much influenced by his father, a landscape painter, who had spent much time in the Southern Appalachians sketching and painting. This explains to some extent why a young man born in Oak Park, Illinois, a graduate ofOak Park High School, who had spent the summers of early years along the North Shore, appeared in Southern Appalachia with a deep, almost unexplainable passion for rendering mountain scenes, especially mountain homes, in other art forms. At Pine Mountain Spelman had a full round of duties, including such seemingly extras as Sunday chapel talks. This meant that his sketching and wood and linoleum cuts had to be done during "off' hours. Friends ofthose days remember his devoted use of his spare time. Yet his view of art was not limited to the print, the sketch, or painting but extended to include the very act of living itself. Some of the written texts for his talks make this quite clear. I do not know how many "talks" he made nor how many prints he completed in those years. Copies of three of these talks have been made available—all of them dealing with his views on art. Of these, two were chapel talks, the first with the date of February 19, 1939, has no title and I assigned to it the title of "The Stranger" because of its subject matter; the second with the date of December 3, 1939, has the title of "The Pattern of Life." The third, with the date of August 26, 1940, and the title of "Art and Life", seems to have been delivered at a teachers' institute. As to the prints, many cuts and prints remain in storage at Pine Mountain Settlement School, and there are the forty linoleum and wood block prints in his book At Home in the Hills: A Cross Section of Harlan County, Kentucky, which he designed and which was printed by the Pine Mountain Press in 1939. Spelman wrote a Preface, an introduction to each of the four sections of the book, and the captions or cutlines for each of the prints. These not only show that he had an excellent understanding of what he was doing, and of the time and place and conditions, but they have literary merit as well. The written words and the prints compliment and illuminate each other. They have an "at-oneness", to use a good phrase of his. The first sentence of his Preface was this: "The whole purpose of this collection of prints is to show by line and mass the simple beauty of the mountain home, even in its state of delapidation." Spelman also did the block cuts for the illustrations of Tlie Kentucky (Rivers of America Series) by Thomas 5 D. Clark. There seems to be some stylistic differences in the prints used here, and one is different in technique, but they are all the work ofJohn A. Spelman III. The quotes immediately following and those used with prints elsewhere...