It was a cold and blustery January day more than a year ago when artist R.L. Lewis set up an easel in Port Richey's Waterfront Park for a show and sale.
Lewis is one of a group of 26 east Florida African-American men and one woman who painted colorful landscapes of natural Florida in the 1950s and '60s and sold them for $15 or $20 from the trunks of their cars, prompting art lover Jim Fitch to dub them the Highwaymen. That's the title of researcher/professor Gary Munroe's 2001 book about them.
Lewis had come to Port Richey at the invitation of Mayor Eloise Taylor, who appreciates the works of the Highwaymen and wanted local folks to meet one of the famed group.
He is coming back on May 15 for another show, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., again at Waterfront Park off Old Post Road on the west side of U.S. 19 just north of Grand Boulevard.
Despite last year's cold, hundreds of people turned out to see his work and talk with him. I bought a 5- by 7-inch beach scene he dashed off in a few minutes. It was $42, at least twice what he once got for a 3- by 4-foot work. His current works sell for up to $3,000; the ones he painted 40 or 50 years ago go for more than that.
I treasure my little painting and hope I can get another this time, though I suspect the price will have gone up.
It was fun to hang around and listen to Lewis' stories about his days as a young painter. He debunks apocryphal stories about that group and tells his own story.
They weren't necessarily self-taught. Most of them had professional instruction, either with high school art teacher Zenobia Jefferson or with professional artist A.L. Backus.
They didn't use house paints; they prepared their canvasses correctly and used oil paints, which is why their works look as good today as they did when they were created.
They didn't do "assembly line" work. Even though they often gathered in someone's back yard to paint alongside each other, each painting was done completely by its single creator.
And most of them didn't sell their works beside a highway. They sold door-to-door to offices, motels, doctor's offices. Lewis set up shop in a bank lobby.
Lewis didn't work side-by-side with the others in Fort Pierce. He lived up the coast in Cocoa. He went on to become a schoolteacher and adjunct instructor at a community college and an art school. Others became ministers, businessmen, engineers. A couple took bad turns. Alfred Hair was shot in a barroom. Al Black went to prison, where he paints Florida scenes on the prison walls.
I met the lone female Highwayman, Mary Ann Carroll, a couple of years ago at a Safety Harbor show. Her poinciana trees were so realistic and so perfect in perspective that they looked like cut-out, pop-up art.
She told me she had supported herself by painting most of her life, but, until the rediscovery of the Highwaymen in the 1990s, it was by painting houses.
The family also mowed lawns.
None of the Highwaymen have become fabulously wealthy through their artwork. They've exhibited in some art museums, including Ocala's Appleton, but some museum art directors and art curators don't consider their works "artsy" enough for a formal show.
What folderol. Their crashing ocean waves, swaying palm trees, orange skies, stoic cypress trees done in luminous, stark colors with a free-flowing hand can be breathtaking in their impact and beauty.
If music is what's pleasing to the ear, then art is what's pleasing to the eye.
