Art That Saw Past Color

For James Gibson, a black college dropout in the 1950s, the future seemed dreary. Gibson, living here in what was an outpost of the Jim Crow South, saw few opportunities besides hard, monotonous work on the railroad, or picking oranges and grapefruit.

Then a friend told him of a lucrative, if improbable, alternative to menial labor. Paint a Florida outdoor scene, then sell it, the friend told Gibson. It was advice -- and it was a dare.

Gibson, 19, had never taken an art class, but the son of a church custodian decided to try a view of the St. Lucie River, a glistening body of water framed by palm trees nearby on Florida’s east coast. It took a weekend and some of that Monday morning to paint it, and then Gibson went door to door in quest of a buyer. Impressed, a dentist bought the piece for $20 and asked to see more. Gibson dashed off two other landscapes and sold them too.

“I was an artist then,” Gibson said, thinking back. “I could make it.”

Gibson, now 67, has produced thousands of paintings, and is honored as a member of one of America’s most unusual artistic movements. From the mid-1950s to the ‘70s, along a stretch of the Atlantic seaboard 120 miles north of Miami, more than two dozen black Floridians including Gibson worked as landscape artists, together churning out at least 200,000 gaudily hued images of Florida’s coastline, lush interior, royal poinciana trees and fiery sunsets.

They frequently sold the hurriedly painted scenes, sometimes with the paint still wet, out of their cars along U.S. Highway 1 and other roads, hence the name later given them: the Highwaymen.

It was a good business and a good life.

“You didn’t want to go into the groves and stuff,” Gibson said. “People worked all day in the groves for $5, $10, $15 and $20, where I can paint a painting and get $20 or $25 out of it.”

Today, some of the briskly executed scenes by these mostly self-taught artists command tens of thousands of dollars and could go much higher, say collectors and students of the art. The Highwaymen also are enjoying newfound recognition.

Last year, all 26 Highwaymen, 20 of them still living, were inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame, joining such cultural luminaries as Ray Charles, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams and painter Robert Rauschenberg. This February, during Black History Month celebrations, their paintings were featured at the Florida Capitol. Gibson and Mary Ann Carroll, the lone woman in the painters group, were among the guests at a reception held by Gov. Jeb Bush.

According to Carol Crown, an art history professor at the University of Memphis, the case of a group of young, untrained black painters creating regional art, and making good money from it, is unusual. The Highwaymen were successful, Crown theorized, because their paintings, usually rendered in pink, green, purple and other vibrant hues, created a romanticized image of a state that was being transformed by the developer’s bulldozer.

“They got the right formula, and when they figured out the formula that would sell, that’s what they painted,” said Crown, a specialist in contemporary folk art. “Their work is campy, kitschy, very popular. They are attractive images that remind me of the days of my youth when I went on vacation.”

Carroll, 64, who now lives in Port St. Lucie, said: “I don’t think any of us was looking for fame or fortune or anything like that. Making a decent living, that was the only thing that mattered.”

The painters were not part of an organization or a school. In essence, the Highwaymen represented an artistic style, as well as a lifestyle. In Fort Pierce and in Gifford, to the north, word spread that there was money to be made in art. Many of the painters were in their early 20s, and some had taken art classes at school.

To find appealing subjects, Gibson said, the Highwaymen copied or adapted scenes from tinted postcards that were sold 20 for a dollar and from a series of how-to-paint books. The artists knew tourists wanted to remember their vacation spot as an unspoiled, sun-kissed Eden, so they painted deserted beaches and Amazonian tangles of vegetation. They found that locals craved colorful hangings to enliven the walls of the Florida-style ranch houses being built by the thousands.

The artists often painted on Upson board, a building material, because it was cheaper than canvas, and sometimes they used house paints instead of oils. The Highwaymen focused on producing art that would find a buyer, and fast.

“You can’t be selfish. Got to paint what the customer wants,” said Gibson, who still paints. “The most important thing is selling.”

That meant being aware of the colors in vogue for rugs and draperies -- such as avocado green in the ‘60s -- so the palette would echo or complement them. Gibson visited a rug dealer in Miami to get a peek at the colors coming into fashion. If he visited a home or office decorated in earth tones, he’d return with a painting to match. If commissioned to do a landscape, he would often do three, then inform his customer, “by the way, I got a couple more paintings here too that match your decor.” Often, he sold all three.

A key influence was A.E. “Bean” Backus, an artist from Fort Pierce. The creator of a regional Florida school of landscape painting, Backus opened his studio to many of the Highwaymen, and gave lessons to Alfred Hair, the friend who coaxed Gibson to paint.

Such colorblind generosity was noteworthy in an era when a canal demarcated neighborhoods in Fort Pierce for blacks, who weren’t allowed through the front doors of many restaurants.

“All that a young black kid could aspire to was basically to be a teacher or a preacher or a farm-labor contractor,” said Larry Lee Jr., a local insurance agent. “Guys like James Gibson, [fellow Highwayman] Hezekiah Baker -- it was nice of Mr. Backus, who was white, to take them under his wing and expand their world.”

Backus, who died in 1990, remains for Gibson the standard of artistic excellence.

In grade school, Gibson had drawn cowboys and stagecoaches and sold the sketches for a nickel or a dime to other children so he could buy ice cream. After graduating from high school, he went off to study biology at Tennessee State University, where he earned a bit of cash making anatomy diagrams. He had to return home when his family’s funds ran out. It was then that Hair wrote him, boasting that he had sold a painting.

“And he said, ‘James, if I did it, you can do it,’ ” Gibson recalled. “Alfred was telling me this so he had some competition. That’s what he thrived on.”

Gibson said his friend offered enough pointers so he could paint something that would sell -- but Hair didn’t share all he had learned from Backus.

“Alfred and I were always competitive: football, basketball, sketching, whatever -- we’d try to outdo one another,” Gibson said. “The reason he didn’t teach me everything was so that he could stay a step ahead of me.”

The ambitious, charismatic Hair was the leader and entrepreneurial genius of the bunch, developing techniques to increase output, including tacking up boards in rows to work on a score of paintings at a time, said Gary Monroe, professor of visual art at Daytona Beach Community College and author of a 2001 book that helped revive interest in the Highwaymen. The fastest Highwayman of all, Hair hired helpers to slather on the paint, which he would then spread and blend with a palette knife.

In 1970, at age 29, Hair was shot dead in a barroom quarrel in Fort Pierce’s Blacktown neighborhood. That day, Gibson recalled, Hair had completed 35 paintings. Though many of the Highwaymen would continue to produce art, Hair’s death seems to have marked the end of whatever cohesiveness the painters had as a group.

“We used to get together every once in a while to see who could paint the best, who could paint the fastest,” Mary Ann Carroll said. During those soirees of art, beer and barbecue, she said, “we were the same body of people, laughing and talking.”

For some of the painters, the income was a welcome supplement to what they earned elsewhere -- Carroll and George Buckner did yard work; Isaac Knight worked as an assistant production foreman for an aerospace company; Baker owned a small restaurant; Willie C. Reagan, who had received art training at Florida A&M; University, taught in the public schools.

For others, including Hair and Gibson, painting was a full-time, and remunerative, craft. Among the neighbors, Gibson recalled, a Highwayman became known as “the man with the money.”

Nobody kept written financial records, and some seasons were leaner than others, but Gibson figures he averaged $250 to $300 a week, a large sum in a community where people struggled to get by. Hair, whose goal had been to make $1 million, was able to buy a Cadillac. Gibson quickly made enough to purchase a nearly new Chevrolet Impala.

A young black male at the wheel of such a car was a rarity then in this largely agricultural area, and Gibson once was stopped by a white state trooper who wanted to know who he was. Sensing a business opportunity, Gibson opened the trunk to show his wares. The trooper bought two landscapes, the artist recalled, then escorted Gibson back to the highway patrol station, where he sold 15 more.

As recently as six years ago, works by Highwaymen could routinely be bought at yard sales and flea markets across Florida for $50 to $100 apiece, said Ric Emmett, an art appraiser in Coral Gables, Fla., but “then prices started to explode.” Only in the last year, said Emmett, has the market begun to sort out the painters according to their technical proficiency and individual style.

“I saw these guys as bluesmen with a paintbrush,” is how Tim Jacobs, 51, a zealous collector, explained his passion for the Highwaymen.

A lead technician at Kennedy Space Center, Jacobs paid $125 for a bucolic river scene painted in blues and greens. A later purchase, Jacobs believes, may someday be quite valuable. One reason: It is by the late Harold Newton, whom many consider the most talented of the Highwaymen. Another reason: The boxy, one-story building depicted is thought to be Eddie’s Place, the Fort Pierce juke joint where Hair was fatally shot.

To date, Scott Schlesinger, a Fort Lauderdale lawyer, is believed to have paid the most for a Highwayman work: $30,000 for a piece by Newton. Schlesinger says he’s “nuts” about the artists, but that many collectors have doubts about the aesthetic and commercial value of the paintings, which are costing them more and more money to acquire.

“Are we collecting things that have no more significance than painting on velvet?” Schlesinger asked. “All of us have that insecurity.”

However, for Jim Fitch, director of the South Florida Community College Museum of Florida Art and Culture in Avon Park, Fla., the Highwaymen are no less than the “beginning of Florida’s contemporary art tradition.”

It was Fitch who, in a 1994 magazine article, coined the “Highwaymen” label that did much to ignite curiosity about the painters outside the Fort Pierce area and feed the hunger of collectors. For Fitch, the 26 painters were genuine folk artists -- that is, “people painting what they know, the best way they know how.”

Gibson reflected recently: “It’s real amazing. You know, I had no idea it would come to where it is now.”

So far, he estimated, he has created more than 10,000 Florida landscapes. The top price paid for one of his paintings, a backwoods scene, was $14,000, he said. Half a dozen of his works hang in Gov. Jeb Bush’s executive office. The artist who once drove a used Chevy now has a new Cadillac Escalade.

“I liked the money. That’s really why I kept painting, because of the money,” Gibson said. But a dozen or so years ago, he said, he had a “change of heart” when he saw one of his works hanging alongside creations by Newton and other Highwaymen.

“I just looked at my painting. It looked real empty, just the palm trees and the water. I really found out what art was about. Detail and taking your time.” Now, he said, “every palm tree I try to make better.”

In scrubland west of Fort Pierce, amid cabbage palms and beside an irrigation canal, Gibson paints in a barn-like studio. One recent morning, he was at work by 5:30, painting a series of flame-red poinciana trees using a Backus reproduction as a model.

In 35 hours, Gibson said, he can complete six paintings, each of which may sell for $1,000. There is no shortage of demand.

“I used to go to the people,” he said. “Now they come to me.”