Thomas Hart Benton: A Pattern of Life

"The Music Lesson" by Thomas Hart Benton

"My life and work commenced taking on very definite patterns. In the winter I would teach and paint in New York, with occasional sessions at some of the Eastern colleges, Dartmouth and Bryn Mawr among them. In the summer I would be for the most part at Martha's Vineyard, where married by now, my wife and I were acquiring properties. Every year in the spring or early autumn I would take a trip for several weeks into the hinterlands, generally into some mountainous country of the South - Virginia, North Carolina, east Tennessee - or westward into the Missouri Ozarks.

These were inexpensive trips, as they had to be for me. They began by train or bus, to get out of the heavily settled areas, and were continued, mostly, by foot, with occasional rides picked up in some friendly fellow's Model T. I traveled with a knapsack on my back, in which I carried a heavy Navy jacket, a few changes of light clothes, and sketching materials. 

On each trip I made quantities of drawings. Having in mind their possible use for painting, I treated these drawings somewhat as maps of form. Most could be readily turned into sculptural forms, projected in clay or plastilene. Sometimes I would make two drawings of the same subject: one to find its general form, another to describe the detail of that form. I often ended a trip with three or four filled sketchbooks. Not every drawing was successful, but the very making of it would cut a memory impression and thus help build up the general image of America which I was now searching for.

Once in a while I would find a companion for my travels, a younger student friend who liked me for myself rather than for what he might learn from me. One of these was Bill Hayden, who went on several trips with me. On the first we started out from New York in a station wagon, equipped for camping, and toured the southern mountains, the cotton and rice and sugar country of the Deep South, and the western cattle country and the Rockies. A mass of drawings came of this expedition, and a selection shown at the Delphic Gallery in New York in 1928."

To be continued

(Excerpts are from "An American in Art: A Professional and Technical Autobiography" by Thomas Hart Benton.)