Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, September 1, 1994 TAG: 9409010037
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Wendy Watkins is working on the art part.
``My life is ashes,'' Watkins said.
She is, she claims, bankrupt.
She is, quite painfully, divorced. Soon after she moved to the area several years ago, she says, her physician husband ran off. ``One day he came in with these papers and said, `I think we should get divorced.' Surprise!''
In the wreckage, Watkins lost custody of her two girls, Jordana and Samantha.
A long, downward spiral then led her to the psychiatric unit of a local hospital.
It didn't help, she says. When they released her, the nurses said she might be happier living up in Lexington
She isn't.
The truth is, Watkins has always been a mess. Talking about it - as she did readily to a staffer recently at the newspaper office, where she had come to plead for a story - she even sounds a little proud.
``I'm physically a spazz,'' she said. And, ``a classic agoraphobic.`` Were she a character in a play, she says, she'd be the one hiding under the piano.
Meet Wendy Watkins, painter.
She paints Roanoke.
And paints it. And paints it.
One hesitates to use the word ``obsession.''
Not that she minds.
```Obsession' will do,'' Watkins said.
For whatever reason, since 1989 - despite her brief hospitalization in the wake of her marriage, despite an allergy that has forced her to abandon oil-based paint, notwithstanding her life-long fear of public places, which has recently forced her to begin working from photographs - Watkins has been painting up a storm.
She has painted The Grandin Theatre.
She has painted the H&C Coffee sign.
She has painted the Hotel Roanoke, several times, once circa 1916, and St. Andrew's Catholic Church. She has painted the Walnut Street bridge.
The last especially interests her, she said. Something about the angle of the span, and the freight trains passing underneath.
``I still haven't gotten it right,'' Watkins said. ``But I'm still trying.''
In all, she has done some 35 paintings of downtown Roanoke - ranging in mood and focus from the post card lovely to the troubled.
She isn't through yet.
``It's almost like a holy mission,'' Watkins said.
\ She was born in Los Angeles - "kind of near where the earthquake was.'' When, exactly, she declined to say. ``I'll admit to 40, '' Watkins said, when asked her age. ``Forty will do.''
Her father was an illustrator, her mother a journalist.
Her childhood was rocky. A phobia about public places manifested itself early; WatKins often hid out in the nurse's office rather than go to class.
``I was always afraid I'd throw up,'' she explained.
When she was 11, they gave her a Rorschach test - the ink blots - to see why she couldn't function better among other people. But then the experts couldn't analyze the results.
Despite the hooky-playing, she was a precocious, if undiscriminating, reader - devouring Homer, Shakespeare and D.H. Lawrence along with Nancy Drew. ``I like education,'' she insists. ``I'm just not good with people.''
And she could paint. She proved this, more or less, by winning first prize in an art contest sponsored by the local Elks Club when she was 13.
Not that it answered the riddle of her life. Watkins was accepted to the University of Iowa (though she had virtually no school transcripts, she did score high on standardized tests), but did not finish. An improbable career in journalism never quite got off the ground.
She got married. The marriage fizzled out.
Before it did, though, Watkins had found Roanoke.
She remembers the night she first drove into Roanoke, where her husband was to do his medical residency, and saw the Gothic towers of St. Andrew's Catholic Church.
``It was dark,'' she said. ``I nearly swerved off the road.''
Then, of course, came the H&C coffee sign, the big bottle cap, the rest of the downtown, the lights twinkling toward Mill Mountain. The star.
``I said, `This place is for me,''' Watkins recalled.
She tries to explain its continuing appeal.
``It's old buildings,'' she says. ``Not just any old buildings. It's more like the sections of town together. I think it's the shapes. It's almost like they have a ghost. They have a soul. People respond to appearances in more ways than they really know.... To me it's like a divine calling - which, if I think about it, sounds silly.''
To which her fans might answer, ``Who cares?''
City Manager Robert Herbert has a Watkins oil painting of the Hotel Roanoke hanging in his office.
``I was just fascinated with the painting when I saw it,'' he said. The work shows the hotel under a pale, dangerous-looking sky (Watkins has told others the painting depicts the hotel during Hurricane Hugo).
Though the painting, at something over $2,000, was more than the city manager could afford, several friends of the city chipped in to make the purchase, Herbert said.
His secretary, Donna Hurd, said the painting often attracts the notice of passersby, who come in just to look.
Lawyer Jeffrey Krasnow is another fan. ``It just really caught my eye,'' Krasnow said of the Watkins cityscape hanging in his Campbell Avenue office.
Krasnow bought the piece at White House Galleries on Franklin Road. Gallery 3 on the Roanoke City Market also carries Watkins' work. ``I'd never heard of her until I walked into the gallery that day,'' Krasnow said. ``It wasn't her reputation, but the quality of the work.... They had it sitting over there on an easel. And I just fell in love with it.''
It is no surprise that Watkins` name alone attracts small interest. A recluse (for obvious reasons), she remains a somewhat pricey secret.
``Very few people know me,'' Watkins admitted recently, speaking in her spectacularly cluttered kitchen up in Lexington. It doesn't help that she does not do portraits, the bread and butter of artists through the centuries. ``I don't think I could emotionally handle it,'' she said.
About those prices.
``They're kind of expensive,'' said Watkins, who lives on what she sells and an alimony check - which she inists is small. Her paintings, on the other hand, can cost $2,000 and up. ``I'm really sorry about that. I probably couldn't afford to buy my paintings,'' she said.
She can, however, paint them.
She still plans to paint the Patrick Henry (now the Radisson Patrick Henry) Hotel someday, and other Roanoke odds and ends. ``There's more angles to it,'' Watkins says of the city. ``I think I can wring a little more out of Roanoke.''
She may have to hurry.
Watkins frets that the downtown she loves already is on the wane. No fan of recent alterations to the city's skyline, the painter typically shunts the highly prominent First Union bank building off to a sliver at one side of her paintings, or leaves it out altogether.
``I hate these new buildings,'' Watkins said. ``They're ruining, chunk by chunk, the charm Roanoke had.''
by CNB