THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, February 4, 1997 TAG: 9702020349
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY KAREN JOLLY DAVIS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CAPE CHARLES LENGTH: 120 lines
PAINTINGS LEAN against the walls of Lyn Wyatt's unheated studio. They're stacked in the shadows of a huge, half-gutted room that overlooks Cape Charles harbor and the Chesapeake Bay beyond.
A few pale colors - wisps of light - brighten the paintings. Mostly, Wyatt's pictures crackle with a thousand shades of black and white, like coal dust crystallizing on the canvas. They melt into the room's unlit corners.
``They're landscapes,'' says Wyatt, peering into his abstract art to see what it's saying to him. ``I've finally decided they're landscapes.''
Baby Ian plays with his father's paints in a patch of blue sunlight that has fallen through the studio windows. The 1-year-old quietly pulls half of Wyatt's art supplies from a cart as the adults talk.
Ian is Lyn's current work of art. About three years ago, Wyatt left New York, where his paintings have sold for as much as $5,000, and moved to Cape Charles. He wanted to protect his marriage, break away from corporate corruption and raise a family.
At 52, Wyatt is a full-time father.
``It's a performance piece, and the neighbors are the only audience,'' he said, laughing. ``I never thought I was capable of that kind of commitment. But it's a complete joy to watch him develop.''
Sometimes Wyatt works on one of the huge canvases, painting over and around the white-lettered poetry that he has integrated into some of the pictures. But he hasn't spent a lot time in the studio this winter because it's too cold and dirty for the baby.
Back home on his front porch, Wyatt eased into a rocker and talked about his life. The old leather of his jacket squeaked quietly each time he moved.
``Art is an affliction, in a way. Not unlike being an alcoholic,'' said Wyatt, sipping a cup of coffee. ``It's a compulsion that never goes away.''
He is the sixth of eight children fathered by Lacey Wyatt, now 85 and living in Chesapeake. When Lyn was born, Lacey was a West Virginia coal miner.
Wyatt remembers him coming home from a day in the mine, totally black except for his teeth and the whites of his eyes.
``We lived in one of those little boxes in a coal camp,'' said Wyatt. ``They were all the same, an outhouse and a coal bin out back.''
He leaned back in the rocker, listening for Ian, who was asleep inside the house. Hearing nothing, Wyatt readjusted his chair, tugging it against the wire he has threaded through the porch furniture to keep it from being stolen.
``We slept several to a bed. When it got cold, brothers piled up like puppies.''
He remembers thinking of himself as an artist by the time he was 5 years old and drawing on paper bags. Struggle, he insists, is the essence of creating art.
``If it's not a struggle, you've bumped into a reality that's no better than driving a damn truck,'' said Wyatt.
He drives a truck, by the way: a rusted green pickup littered with wood stove kindling, with two pipes welded to the back for a bumper.
When Wyatt was 6 years old, his father was caught in a slate fall at the mine. The family didn't expect him to live. He certainly couldn't work.
``The superintendent said, if you can't work, you have to give up the house,'' said Wyatt. Lacey didn't get any compensation for his injury. ``So they traded their electric stove for a horse, and refrigerator for a cow, and moved to Pinnacle Creek hollow.''
There, the family ate what they could catch or grow. And Wyatt's art took root.
``For me, his art has a real mythological quality,'' said Hal Himmelstein, author and professor at New York's Brooklyn College. ``It demands a lot of the viewer. He shows the part of the human soul that's connected with nature.''
In West Virginia, Wyatt created sculptures in steel, bronze, concrete and wood. He's taught art in high schools and colleges, including a stint in 1996 at Virginia Wesleyan College. For a while he was even a riverboat pilot.
But it was in New York that his life and art turned the corner into irony.
There, he was a studio assistant to Jim Rosenquist, a world-renowned painter. In 1986, Rosenquist sold a piece for $2.2 million. He knew every one of the ``500 people who really collect art,'' said Wyatt.
Through Rosenquist, Wyatt had a toehold in the world of top dollar, need-to-be-connected art - tax deductible-corporate-funding art. It was a world of endless champagne, he said, peopled with the rich, the famous, and the ``syncophantic sickies that gravitate to money and power.''
He never knew a moment of quiet in his apartment near the World Trade Center. Sirens and car alarms screamed endlessly. A homeless man slept in Wyatt's car. Once, there was a tied-up corpse in the dumpster.
One day, Wyatt found himself walking down Park Avenue. He looked up at a black glass skyscraper owned by a West Virginia coal company. And he remembered Pinnacle Creek.
``I thought, here they are. This is the seat of power, the faceless entity that treated my family like cattle,'' said Wyatt, still disgusted. ``I have a thing about capitalism and the corporate structure. And big-time art couldn't exist without the corporate structure. After all, who can afford a million-dollar painting?''
But if an artist wants to succeed, what options are there? And what is the definition of success? To make money, or to make art?
In 1992, when he was driving from New York to Chesapeake to see his father, Wyatt and his wife discovered Cape Charles.
``I thought, my God, a blue-collar bayfront town. I liked it,'' he said. Wyatt wanted his marriage to last, and his wife wanted children. But there was no having children in Manhattan, with the car exhaust at stroller level. So they bought a house in Cape Charles and moved there in 1994.
Since then, Wyatt has worked like a dog to help the town open a museum. He spends a large chunk of his time volunteering for the historical society.
``This is a gem of a community, and it needs to be saved as nearly intact as it can be,'' said Wyatt. He likes the fact that he can rely on his neighbors - that there's always someone around who's willing to lend tools or jump start the car.
``Here, people don't have their defenses up the way they do in the city,'' he said.
Wyatt expects his art to change in Cape Charles.
``I don't think it will be as dark and foreboding as the stuff I did in New York,'' he said, still rocking on the porch. By this time, the sun was sliding toward the bay, washing the sky with color.
``I'm into light and life. Look at this light,'' he said, pointing at the sky. Then he remembered his sleeping baby.
``Let me go check on my life,'' said Wyatt. Then he climbed the stairs to see Ian. ILLUSTRATION: Color photos by Martin Smith-Rodden/The
Virginian-Pilot
[Artist Lyn Wyatt moved from New York...]
[Wyatt holding his son]
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