By Bob Timberlake & Jerry Bledsoe
Published: Down Home Press, Asheboro, NC, 2000. FIRST EDITION.
304 pp. Hardcover in original binding and dust jacket. SIGNED by Jerry Bledsoe on the front free endpaper in bold black marker ink.
A down-home memoir by the self-taught millionaire artist and designer. Somewhere between Johnny Cash and Grandma Moses, and with sales between Martha Stewart and Bill Blass, lies this regional giant of art and design (The World of Bob Timberlake, 1979, etc.). Now, instead of paintings that evoke the weathered gray-browns and the green green grass of home, we get the corresponding prose: natural craftspeople, antebellum homes and lives, critter cuisine of squirrel and possum, and taller-than-fiction facts about the rise of this phenomenon who never painted until the age of 28. Timberlake, a Southern mallard-hunting and crappie-fishing gas company employee inspired by a magazine article on Andrew Wyeth, took up watercolors, made a name for himself as a local realist, and eventually became an icon who hobnobbed with Wyeth, Armand Hammer, Prince Charles, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan. But he maintains that hes still more concerned with friends and relatives who define love, heritage and devotion to the land on which you're born.'' While he wades knee-deep in Lexington County sincerity, he says, jealous academics will dismiss him as a `` `paint-by-numbers artist' producing `sleazy, cheap . . . plastic nostalgia.' " In fact, Timberlake canvases, neo-antique wooden furniture, and log houses aren't cheap at all, but some will see his ties to the timeless as backwards. This country road of a memoir, kept ditchless but unpaved by Jerry Bledsoe (Bitter Blood, 1988, etc.) is similarly crafted like an instant antique. It could have been slicked-up by a Manhattan publisher, but true to Timberlake it was nailed together locally, with all the knotholes showing. Ignoring the big city art world of elephant dung and the Virgin Mary, Timberlake respects history, ghosts, and God, and concludes his reminiscence by recounting the many providential people and events that allowed his miraculous career to unfold. Thirty-two pages of photos (not seen) adorn a retrospective that will be loved by regular folk and disdained by rootless cosmopolitans.
Not Ex-Lib.
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