Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 1, 1990 TAG: 9006290432
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: EX1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Jeff DeBell Staff Writer
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Jim Yeatts decided long ago to pursue his art without compromise, even if it meant giving up the trappings of material success. It hasn't meant subsistence in a garret, but he is from that tradition and is greatly respected for his integrity.
He also is revered as a teacher and remembered for his prominent role in launching the institution that today is the Roanoke Museum of Fine Arts.
"I consider him without peer," said fellow painter Joni Pienkowski. "He is the dean of artists in this area. If there is anything wrong with Jim, it's that he is so lacking in self-promotion he hasn't gotten his due."
That deficiency was at least partly rectified when Yeatts' admirers gave him a five-minute ovation at the May 6 opening reception for his one-man show in the Roanoke Museum of Fine Arts, which runs through July 15. Asked how it made him feel, Yeatts grinned honestly and said, "Kinda special."
"I started to say he's waited a long time for this show," said Peyton Klein, another painter. "But really, we're the ones who have waited a long time. Jim has just been quietly dedicated to his art."
That quiet dedication exemplifies what Klein calls the "pure artist" side of Yeatts. He paints for a living, but strictly on his own terms. There are no commissions, no landscapes to match a client's drapes.
"My work is very personal," he said. "It isn't residential."
Yeatts turned 68 in March. He's slight, almost fragile in appearance. His pale reddish-brown hair is gone on top, faded at the edges and so white at the chin and jawline that his sparse beard is barely visible. His health is fragile enough to worry friends but not enough to make him forbear smoking.
James McKinney Yeatts is a Roanoke native whose father was a plumbing and heating contractor and whose mother liked her son's work but never understood why he had to draw so many pictures of undressed women.
He studied architecture at the University of Virginia, starting in 1940 and finishing after an interruption for service in World War II.
Yeatts' friend and mentor at Virginia was John Canaday, who went on to become art critic for The New York Times. He taught Yeatts that art is stitched closely into the fabric of nature and everyday life.
"You can make art doing the most menial things," Yeatts said. "You can make an art form of washing your car, as long as you're conscious of the possibility. . . . You get an aesthetic bang that's hard to explain. It was that feeling, the knowledge that something like that was possible, that got me started and kept me going for 50 years. I really don't see how people can live a full life without art."
Yeatts went on to earn a master's degree in fine arts at Princeton University, then returned to the Roanoke Valley to work for Smithey & Boynton, 5 1 YEATTS Yeatts architects. After three years he opened his own firm, operating from Memorial Avenue quarters that were part art studio and part architectural office.
"When I got tired of one I'd go to the other," Yeatts said.
As an architect, Yeatts specialized in residences and was known for ingeniously accommodating the homes to their natural settings and to their owners' lifestyles.
"His designs are absolutely sculptural," said Lyn Yeatts Gilhooly, the artist's former wife and still one of his closest friends.
Yeatts and a few other artists held informal sketching sessions in the public library during the early 1950s. At about the same time, the Roanoke Chamber of Commerce organized a fine arts committee with the objective of establishing an arts center in the city. The groups came together in 1954, when the artists proposed art classes in a Franklin Road building that the owner was willing to make available rent-free in return for having it cleaned up.
The committee approved a small budget, and the Roanoke Fine Arts Center, complete with a pot-bellied stove for heat, was born. The artist/teachers included Yeatts, Peter Wreden and the latter's late brother, Nicholas.
In addition to teaching, painting and maintaining his architecture practice, Yeatts donated his services as the center's director and continued in the job until Barbara Rogers (now Barbara Redman) took over in 1959.
"I don't know how the hell he did it," Wreden said.
The center moved to a former church at Carolina Avenue and 25th Street Southwest in 1955 and to Cherry Hill, a South Roanoke mansion, in 1966. In 1977 the art center was accredited by the American Association of Museums and renamed the Roanoke Museum of Fine Arts. It moved into Center in the Square in 1983 and recently enlarged its quarters there.i
Painting life's complexities
Yeatts' own show is his first in the museum's principal gallery since 1965. With two weeks yet to run, at last word it had drawn well over 8,000 visitors. The more than 90 paintings and drawings span his working career of five decades.
"I think the retrospective proves his power," Pienkowski said.
Wreden concurs. "It is one of the greatest shows I've ever seen," he said. "He's a fantastic artist."
Aside from its technical excellence, admirers say, Yeatts' work derives its power from its intellectual depth. The artist has been a lifelong student of philosophy and aesthetics, and his art reflects that preoccupation with the big questions.
"It's difficult to get a handle on the enormous complexity that's out there," Yeatts said. "You may not understand it, but you've got to understand how complex the interrelationships of nature are."
In the show's catalog, guest curator Betty Tisinger writes of the artist's "attempts to reconcile what seems to be irreconcilable. Yeatts moves from the world of visible reality into a world surmised. He probes natural phenomena, of which he considers the artist a part. He explores in depth the vast conundrum between sensational and spiritual experience. . . . He carefully studies the observable object - landscape and the human form have been his most common vehicles - and records it with technical mastery. Original forms evolve into abstraction and, finally, into symbolic imagery. Through the veil of these visual metaphors the personal intensity of the artist is revealed."
Yeatts works day and night in his studio, systematically solving one problem and moving on to the next as he builds his complex paintings.
"There are plenty of problems out there," he said. "And if there aren't, you'd better make a few."
"He's always exploring new ideas," Gilhooly said. "He never lets himself get stale. . . . The discipline to just keep working on the problems in more or less isolation is just extraordinary."
Yeatts and Gilhooly married in 1965. During their years together, they operated a gallery on Walnut Avenue that was known for the high quality of the art and crafts it showed. Openings there were big events in the arts community.
The couple parted amicably in 1979. Yeatts moved into a vacant downtown office building to live, work and maintain a gallery. It was a tough time for the artist. He painted steadily and as well as ever but was typically indifferent as a promoter of his work. Architecture commissions were scarce, the market for custom-designed homes having more or less evaporated.
"When we parted he said all he wanted was the Beethoven string quartets," Gilhooly said.
The memory brought a grin to Yeatts' face, because the music had gone unheard; at the time, he couldn't afford a record player.
Though solitary in his work, Yeatts is far from anti-social. He has many friends. He's a gracious host and an accomplished cook. But he is not among the artists who need the company of their fellows for inspiration.
"He told me, `Forget inspiration,' " Peyton Klein said. " `It's all discipline.' "i
Teaching others to see
Klein met Yeatts in 1965 when she enrolled in one of his classes at the art center. Though she had sketched casually since girlhood, she was essentially a beginner. Today she is one of the area's most respected artists, and she gives the credit to Yeatts.
"Jim encouraged me a lot," she said. "He seemed to take me more seriously than I took myself."
Yeatts taught his students to make art from their own lives and experiences. Borrowing from his own Gestalten creed, he taught them to broaden their resources through study in fields other than art, the better to understand how everything in nature is related.
"It's the idea of context, that `no man is an island,' " Gilhooly said. "Context is a wonderful word for him."
Yeatts rarely taught by demonstration. He wasn't interested in creating imitators. He taught ideas and he used exercises intended to make his students truly see what they were looking at.
For example, they might be told to draw a subject from memory after being allowed to study it for three minutes.
Yeatts: "I used to tell them, `I don't know what else you'll get out of this course, but one thing I guarantee is that you will see more and you will see better.' It's a matter of practice, but it's also a matter of need. If you're a painter, you have to see more."
"The students would do an exercise and then have a sort of `ah ha!' experience," Gilhooly said. "That's a very rich kind of teaching. When you get to the end of an introductory drawing course like that, you start to have something to work with."
"Jim's just about the finest teacher I've ever run into," said interior decorator Jean Feltner, another of his former students. "There's nothing hard about what he teaches. It's a natural, mind-opening process. He has helped people find what they're after in themselves."
"You can teach a medium and how to use materials," Yeatts said. "But you can't teach painting. The personal rhythms that go into it belong to the painter, and that can't be taught."
Former students remember Yeatts as a supportive yet candid critic of marginal work.
"He had a tactful way of encouraging and not completely cutting them off," recalled Harriett Stokes, a former student who today is one of the area's best known landscape painters. "Yet he didn't try to make somebody who wasn't going to be a great artist think they were."
There is an anecdote about a young student who was smitten with the mystique of painting. He asked Yeatts whether it was all right to call himself an artist.
"Yes," the teacher reportedly answered, "as long as you don't say you're a very good one." Yeatts said he doesn't remember the exchange.
Klein said Yeatts' integrity influenced her "almost too much. I have to tell myself that it's OK to sell a piece now and then to buy supplies."
Yeatts taught at the art center for 17 years, as well as at Hollins College, Washington & Lee University and other institutions in the area.
He no longer teaches, and he says he won't resume it, but clearly he hasn't lost the touch. That was evident one recent Saturday morning when he led a tour of his exhibit and held the audience spellbound with his commentary and recollections about the work and about art in general.i
No room for compromise
Yeatts perceives a communication failure between the public and modern art, a failure he says is aggravated by careless use of words like "abstract." He asks that the public make a sincere effort to understand the art, and that it do so without fear of failure.
"If one gains no insight," he wrote in an essay on the subject, "there is no reason to fret. Go on to the next picture."
In return for the public's effort, Yeatts tries to demystify the artist and his process.
"Painters should be removed from pedestals," he wrote. "They are not divinely gifted. Of a morning they go to work much as does a plumber, doctor or lawyer."
Yeatts' work is in private and corporate collections in the United States and abroad. A landscape hangs in the Virginia Governor's Mansion.
But he hasn't taken a commission in 30 years. Though everything he does is for sale, buyers must select from what is available. They usually choose smaller landscapes and figures, not the larger, more complex (and more expensive) oils. Even when he was practicing architecture, Yeatts' income never went above $15,000.
But the artist admits to no regrets. He chose his course long ago and it allows no room for compromise.
"It's just not worth it," he said.
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