Editor’s note: In This State is a syndicated weekly column about Vermont’s innovators, people, ideas and places.
Warren Kimble recently painted three old rocking chairs, not your typical task, not one of those touch-up jobs in the basement, but one requiring attention to detail in a studio, one offering another opportunity for his artistry. He provide color, images and his name, of course, and then, as promised, submitted the rockers to the annual Brandon Artists Guild auction, his three works joining 27 others by area artists.
The results? Twelve thousand, five hundred dollars, all of which will help buy art supplies in local schools and finance a college scholarship. Kimble’s chairs fetched more than a third of the take.
You would expect whimsy and nostalgia from the renowned folk artist. And the top bidders got that. Among Kimble’s antique rockers is one titled “Gone Fishin’,” a work of art sporting a large fish as a headrest, “maybe a trout,” says Kimble. “Yes, maybe a trout, because the arms of the chair are speckled.”
A second chair, titled, “Moonlight in Vermont,” has a full moon rising over water. You can almost hear Jo Stafford or Frank Sinatra singing from the back porch.
And the third, “Spindle,” created with another local artist, has a polka-dotted seat and splashes of blue, but is largely “Syracuse orange,” the official color of Kimble’s beloved alma mater, Syracuse University, where he served as class president before graduating in 1957 with a fine arts degree.
As Kimble explains, he was plucked by the university from his working-class hometown in New Jersey in 1953 without having taken an entrance exam, and he is most grateful. “They took a chance,” he says.
A rocking chair, even one overwhelmingly orange, can be viewed as a metaphor – like, say, fishing gear – for aging or retirement, but Kimble, just months short of 80, will have none of that. He plainly prefers painting rockers to sitting in them, and creating a fish – whatever species – to angling for them.
Just a few days after the “Art Rocks Brandon” auction that drew more 175 people to Town Hall, the artist could be found in his studio behind his early 19th century home, on Park Street, which he shares with his wife Lorraine, going full steam on another project: a show called “House of Cards.” It was to be exhibited at the Brandon Artists Guild.
You want more whimsy? The exhibit features batches of antique playing cards Kimble collected over the years, displayed playfully in wooden assemblages, from age-old factory molds to kitchen implements.
There’s the piece titled “It’s Not Good To Be Queen,” with a queen (Marie Antoinette? Anne Boleyn?) about to lose her top feature to what looks like a century-old, counter-top apple slicer. And then there’s the work titled “Royal Flush,” the hand every poker player desires: five cards, 10 to ace, set next to a tiny toilet.
Kimble gives an informal tour of his studio on the second floor of the barn behind his home, and then of his home itself, filled with his artwork and antiques, including shelves with scores of colorful tin beach pails, decades old, some with Disney characters, some slightly rusted from exposure to the elements. For years, Kimble collected and sold antiques.
But, again, he’s not ready for the shelf himself.
“When I get out of bed in the morning, I just feel like working,” says the artist, acknowledging good fortune.
“Most people in their lives work toward retirement; but if you are doing music or theater or art, why would you ever stop?” he asks. “You do it as long as you can!”
Kimble began “doing it” back in the 1940s on the front stoop of the family home in Belleville, New Jersey, where he remembers coloring with Crayolas and making cutouts. His first foray into the commercial side of art came on a Christmas when he sold cards he designed to neighbors.
His mother was a homemaker, his father a clerk for the Prudential Insurance Co., and his childhood was secure and “fun with lots of relatives singing around the player piano” and with him and an older brother tap dancing to music. Both took dancing seriously, his brother appearing on Broadway stages and Warren appearing on the nationally televised “Ted Mack Original Amateur Hour” and on Paul Whiteman’s “TV Teen Club.”
He took his physical skills to Syracuse, broadened the repertoire with flips and cartwheels, and, with megaphone, became the head football cheerleader for the university, back when Jim Brown was tearing up the field.
You could say Kimble’s been cheerleading ever since. After a short career in advertising and teaching in New York and New Jersey, he wound up in Vermont in 1970, teaching art at Castleton State College and later buying one home, then others and opening a studio in Brandon. And in Brandon he is widely praised for cheering on local artists and for helping to make the town the arts community it has become.
Thirteen years ago he founded the Brandon Artists Guild, an organization of 50 painters and sculptors and other artists, who sell their works in a downtown gallery.
Kimble also was instrumental in establishing the annual community arts project at which artists, with established themes, always quirky, display their works throughout the business district, catching the eye of tourists and boosting local pride.
“How do you stop people? Well, you stop them with pigs,” Kimble once told a reporter, referring to the playful creations he and other artists set up for their first exhibit titled “The Really, Really Pig Show” (courtesy, 1950s TV show host Ed Sullivan).
Kimble’s art career has been supremely successful, and he gives the credit to Lorraine, whom he proudly proclaims “is still playing tennis“ at 80 and who over the years handled the business aspects of his work as he became one of America’s best-known contemporary folk artists. His barnyard scenes, his signature cats, roosters horses and cows, appear on mugs, calendars and as prints.
His paintings, cheerful and bespeaking time gone by, sell for many thousands of dollars.
But Kimble hasn’t always focused on the bright side. In 2008, troubled by the Iraq war, he surprised the arts community with a mixed-media exhibit titled “Widows of War,” a poignant exhibit first shown at the Shelburne Museum.
The artwork reflected the worry and loss suffered by mothers, wives and daughters who remained at home, though, of course many women also served. One of his works has images of barbed wire and splashes of red paint; another has lines of dark clothespins against a light background, a troubling suggestion of rising death tolls.
But what followed was upbeat: a series of some 30 acrylic paintings titled “Let the Sun Shine,” offering views of the sun in full glory, which Kimble says probably reflected his optimism after the election of Barack Obama.
“The sun suggests change, enlightenment; it makes things grow; it makes life happy.”
And then, as though surprised, Kimble adds: “And you know, I say I am not political, but maybe I am!”
The world, it seems, can be dreary, so Kimble must figure his mission as an artist is to cheer people on. “I like to focus on the good things to offset the bad,” he says.
Dirk Van Susteren of Calais is a freelance writer and editor.
