Like
a parent with many children, we’re not supposed to have any favorites, but we
do. There are some things in the Museum’s collection that appeal to us more than
others. Maybe they remind us of a favorite childhood toy or they are marvelously
splashy and spectacular. Or maybe they are cool, really cool, like M.E. Oliver’s
picture book Strange Scenes in the Ozarks.Marvin Elmer Oliver (1888-1974) was born in a log cabin on Drakes Creek, a few miles southeast of Huntsville, Arkansas. His mother died when Elmer was a boy, so to lessen the strain on the family of eight he made a five-day, 160-mile journey, mostly on foot, to Viola, Arkansas, to live with relatives. As a young man he worked as a farmhand; later he moved to Oklahoma to work in a broom factory. Becoming interested in art, he signed up for a correspondence course only to have World War I interrupt his plans.
But art was never far from his thoughts. While serving in France as a company dispatcher and bugler with the 308th Battalion, 7th Infantry, he spent his spare time sketching. Even when he was wounded and sent to recuperate in a Little Rock hospital, he continued to sketch everything in sight. After his discharge he studied art as part of a vocational and rehabilitation program for veterans, eventually enrolling in the School of Fine and Applied Arts in New York City. Illustrator Charles Dana Gibson, famous for his “Gibson Girl” portraits, was one of his tutors.
After graduation Oliver worked as a free-lance commercial artist, illustrating book jackets and magazine covers for publisher Harper & Brothers and the Magazine of Wall Street. He also worked for a short time with a Dallas advertising agency before returning to his beloved Ozarks.
In
1927 he wed Bessie Simmons of Combs, Arkansas, and for many years the two ran a
successful 140-acre fruit farm near Japton, southeast of Huntsville. But the
remote location of the farm and the amount of money spent maintaining the dirt
roads meant that the couple rarely made a profit. They moved to Huntsville in
1940 where Oliver went to work for the Selective Service. He later served as a
state revenue inspector and as a municipal judge.Oliver retired in 1954 and once again turned his attentions to art. Wanting to preserve the old pioneering way of life that was fast disappearing, in 1955 he self-published Strange Scenes in the Ozarks. Part oral history and part “Ripley’s Believe It or Not,” Strange Scenes used wonderful images and quaint lettering to convey an Arkansas that was. With its depictions of panthers, bears, saw mills, log cabins, shooting matches, and country folk, Strange Scenes is like an early Ozark version of the "Foxfire" series of books which examined the old-time traditions of southern Appalachia.
Getting the details right was important. Oliver relied on his memory and that of his elderly country neighbors to sketch out a puncheon house (a log cabin made from halved tree trunks), a mountain rascal (a one-poster bed built into a cabin’s corner walls), and a tub mill (a perpetual-motion-like device which used water to continually mill grain). He even built a small model of the latter to make sure it would work; based on Oliver’s design, the folks at Silver Dollar City built a larger version for their pioneer-themed amusement park in Branson, Missouri.
Strange Scenes has whimsical elements as well. A stork carrying a baby in a sling flies through the title “This is where I first saw Arkansas,” above the image of the cabin where Oliver was born. An angler braces himself against the strong pull of the fish he’s managed to land in the pond near “Hawkins Mill.” A clown scampers ahead of a circus elephant in “Jumbo and Drakes Creek.” And a man covers his eyes as a bucking steer plunges its rider into a stream on the book’s final page, “Tale Ends.”
While
the book’s content is a great resource of early Ozark folkways for historians,
it’s the fabulous graphics which enchant the viewer. The simple, blocky style of
the drawings, lettering, and borders is reminiscent of the work found in
art-instruction books of the 1920s, which makes sense when one considers that’s
the decade which saw Oliver attend art school and embark on his budding art
career. But the artistic style of the illustrations was also influenced by the
needs of the printmaker. To produce "Strange Scenes" Oliver relied on a
printmaking technique that he had used during his commercial art
days -- silk-screen printing or serigraphy (seri from the Latin “silk,” graphos
from the Greek “to write”).After Oliver completed a painting or a detailed sketch of his subject he created a simpler line drawing of the image using India ink. He also made a drawing to indicate blocks of color - pale-blue for the sky, mauve for the mountains, olive green for the trees, and so on. To print each color a separate stencil was first cut from a material Oliver called “sensitized plastic” (possibly an adhesive-backed film). Once the stencil was adhered to a silk-lined wood frame, a thin layer of printer’s ink was forced through the unblocked areas of the fabric and onto a sheet of paper. After one color dried the next was added, until the final picture emerged. Oliver used two to eight sometimes vibrant, sometimes muted, handmade inks to print each of the book’s 30 illustrations.
An exacting, labor-intensive process such as this meant that Oliver could only produce a limited run of Strange Scenes in the Ozarks - 400 copies in all. Although the book in the Museum’s collection is dated 1955, it appears that Oliver added a few illustrations in later years; some of the pages are dated 1958 and 1963. Oliver later embarked on a project to draw the area’s historic water mills. Old Mills of the Ozarks, published in 1969, featured sketches, descriptions, and locations of 20 mills.
The
Museum’s copy of Strange Scenes is inscribed by the artist to “Judge Maupin
Cummings for the splendid service he has rendered to our community.” It’s likely
that the two men knew each other through Cummings’ position as a circuit court
judge of the 4th Judicial District from 1946 to 1978. A University of Arkansas
graduate, Cummings was a state representative and state senator prior to his
Army service in World War II; after the war he served as a commander with two
National Guard units.We’re so glad Judge Cummings donated his copy of Strange Scenes to the Museum. It’s a marvelous document that provides a glimpse of some of this area’s rugged pioneer traditions. But the book is also a wonderful testament to an artist who cared enough about history and creativity to leave behind a unique, personal, and visually pleasing publication.
CREDITS
M.E. Oliver’s biography in Arkansas Lives: The Opportunity Land Who’s Who (1965); Bob Edmisten’s article “Huntsville Artist Re-Creates History with Painting” in the Springdale News (March 31, 1967); Dorothy Mitchell’s article “Strange Scenes in The Ozarks” in the Ozarks Mountaineer (September 1967); the uncredited article “View from the Hill” in the Ozarks Mountaineer (December 1974); Andrea Mulder-Slater’s article “Serigraphy” for the website “What You Need to Know About” at http://arthistory.about.com/library/weekly/aa051200e.htm (2000); and Robert Edmisten’s article “Artist Recorded Ozark Way of Life” in the Morning News (December 24, 2000).