The Top O’ Texas Republican Women held their monthly meeting on Wednesday, September 17 at the White Deer Land Museum where guest speaker, local artist Grant Johnson, generated laughs and stirred feelings of nostalgia for a time long gone-his words speaking life into the vast collection of his beautiful paintings that canvassed the walls around the exhibit room.
“Grant is a self-taught artist who began his painting quest to express the truth he sees in the world around him better than he could in words,” TOTRW President Kathryn Green said. “He primarily paints in oils and is best known for his expressive portrait work. He also enjoys landscape painting and the occassional still-life. In addition to his studio work, Grant teaches painting and art history. He is also skilled in art conservation and restoration. He has been represented nationally and internationally and he is credited as a finalist in Artist magazine for an international competition for two years’ running. He garnered best in show and first in best of the Southwest Artist competition. He has won numerous other awards around the country. His work is represented in private collections in the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan, Germany, and Great Britain. In addition to his reputation as an esteemed artist, there is another side of Grant that is quite profound. For the past 12 years, he has counseled men with various problems. He has been the pastor for the church at the Frost Street Mission for the past 10 years leading a bible study every Wednesday. He does not accept payment because he believes it’s the least he can do considering all the Lord as done for him. You might see him talking to a street person offering words of encouragement. That is Grant Johnson in a nutshell. Please give a warm welcome to this incredible man.”
“I want to tell you a little about my artwork here first and that will kind of set a different a direction that will go towards what we prayed about earlier. Rather than just talk to you about the subject matter of my artwork, I want to tell you about the motive for it. I grew up in this town and this town is really deep, deep down inside my heart. It hurts me when I hear people say bad things about this town and you hear it a lot. That’s not my experience growing up here-it was a wonderful place to grow up as a kid. I wasn’t born here, I was born in Shamrock, but I got here as quick as I could. My dad was in the Army and we had a stint in Selfridge Air Force Base in Michigan and Fort Knox, Kentucky-he was a drill sergeant for the Army. And then we wound up back in Shamrock where he worked for Carbon Black and then we came over here. My dad grew up an orphan. From the time he was eight years old, he lived on his own. Can you imagine? He was born in Duncan, Oklahoma and both of his parents were killed in an accident and he just struck out on his own. He lived on the kindness of others and hunting for scraps along the way and learned to provide for himself and made it all the way to Shamrock and enrolled himself into school and graduated. He married my mom, joined the Army and here I am. He instilled in me and my brother, who died in a car accident in the 80s-me and my brother grew up with that strong sense of independence. That always stuck with me. Growing up, we were poor. Now the thing about it is I didn’t know we were poor. I thought we were just like everybody else. We lived in a little two-bedroom house that was really, really cold in the winter, and really, really hot in the summer. We had one car-a Volkswagon Bug-and when dad went to work and it was just us kids and mom, we didn’t have a car so if we needed to go to the grocery store, we walked. We didn’t have a washing machine or a dryer, so when we needed to go to the laundromat, we walked. I remember carrying big burlap bags of wet clothes over my shoulder and bringing them home from the laundry so mom could hang them out on the clothes line and dry them. But we were as happy as can be. We had meat on weekends usually, and during the week we had a lot of cabbage, beans and potatoes, but I never knew we were poor at all. I was shocked to find out we were poor! I was just happy as could be, and I loved this town.”
“Growing up in this town, we had our own little gangs of kids and they were based on school districts. I grew up going to Horace Mann, which is gone now. That part of town from Hobart to Price and from Alcock back over to MK Brown to that park-that area was our domain, and all of our buddies came out of that area. We didn’t like the other kids around town. If they came from Austin or Lamar, we clashed! We were strong together and we cared about each other and we stood up for each other. We were a community of little kids running all over town. Later on when we got older and went to junior high, we were buddies with all those kids that we used to despise and then we had a bigger community. I went to junior high right down the street, and then guess who we hated? The Robert E. Lee kids! But then guess what happened? We went to high school and then we loved them! We were all a bigger community then. Right here in this community that we loved and celebrated. Sometimes I’ll just walk around town and look in all the little nooks and crannies and the little alleyways and backroads and places behind the buildings and remember hanging out back there as a kid. The alleys were like our highways as kids. Back in junior high, we were allowed to leave campus for lunch and the doors would swing open and the kids would spread out all over town. Sometimes we would go to Woolworth’s, some to Moses, some to the Coney, some to Patrick’s-just everywhere. Our bikes were our cars and we were all over town. That’s how we lived and it was so fun.”
“We moved over to the 800 block of North Christy. That was when my dad put himself through correspondence class to be an insurance investigator and he did that for the rest of his life. He started making pretty good money and mom didn’t have to work, but she finally got her own car. That’s where I grew up primarily, and it was just three block from where we were, and we were just as happy because it’s in your heart where you gain happy, not on the outside. When I graduated high school, I went to the woods. I started out in Tulsa, Oklahoma and I was always kind of a mountain man type. Our dad taught us how to hunt when we were little. I remember hunting rabbits not for sport, but to put them on the table. We were taught that same spirit our dad had growing up as an orphan and we carried that with us all of our life. So when I got out of high school, I wanted to go to the mountains and stopped in Tulsa along the way to cut timber for a while. Back then when they put in a powerline, they would go through the woods, and someone has to go and cut all those trees down. And that’s what I did. I thought, ‘why do I need to spend the money to have a house to live in? Why not just live here in the woods? I’m going to work here in the woods, I’ll just live here. I’ll sleep here, build a fire, and hunt and fish.’ So that’s how I lived-that’s how I wanted to live. Then I lived out in Montana and hunted big game for a living for about a decade and a half, then when my mom and dad’s health declined, I came back here.”
“Why I did these paintings-it hit me one day: when I was a kid, you couldn’t go down one block without seeing it packed full of kids, especially in the summer when the weather was nice. There would be kids on bikes, kids on skates, up and down the sidewalks and on vacant lots playing ball of some kind, just everywhere. And so one summer day when I was coming back from Colorado from a job I had over there-I was already a painter at that time-I wanted to go through the old neighborhood where I grew up just to get that feeling back and see all the kids out playing and see the bikes flying everywhere. I came down Gwendolyn to that 800 block of Christy. It was a beautiful summer day and it looked like a ghost town. I didn’t see a kid anywhere, no one was outside playing. There were no bikes being rode up and down the street. Every park was empty, no kids out in the middle of the afternoon. What happened? That’s when it hit me: something has changed. The world we’re living in is not the world I grew up in. You’ve heard the analogy of if you put the frog in the water and you turn on the water to heat it up slowly, he’ll stay in there until he boils, but if you heat the water up and then put him in, he’ll jump right out because he knows it’s hot. But if it happens slow, you don’t know what’s happening. That’s why I wanted to paint these-for people to go back in their mind and remember, remember where we came from. Think about those times where we didn’t carry phones around with us everywhere. If you wanted to know a fact, you went down to the library and looked for it and read it in a book. You didn’t sit around and watch TV all day. Television didn’t used to be on all day-there were only three channels and they signed off at 12 o’clock! You couldn’t get up in the middle of the night to watch TV unless you wanted to watch that test pattern. We didn’t have microwaves. If you wanted to cook something, you fired up the stove where you had real flames that cooked the food. If you wanted to make a phone call, you did it with the phone attached to the wall. If you wanted to listen to music, you had the radio or an 8-track tape or record player. That’s how we operated.”
“Now it’s convenient-you can contact anyone at any time, you can find out information with the whole world at your fingertips at any moment. Everything’s quicker, more convenient, more comfortable. What I say is, ‘what have we sacrificed to get it?’ We sacrificed our soul as human beings, because the further we go down this road, the more we are moving away from the experience of life. Life is artificial now. You can see all the different advertisements and other things that have people that aren’t even real people. It’s to the point you can’t know if anything is true or not. It’s going to get exponentially worse over the next decade unless someone realizes that we’ve gone the wrong direction. We took the bad road and I don’t know if it’s even recoverable. I think there’s steps to be taken, and I’ve thought about this a lot. I’ll sit out there in the studio and I’ll think that there has to be one key element that clicked-that set us off in this direction.”
“When I was working in Oklahoma around Bartlesville, I worked for a company out of Tulsa and I was contractor for them. There was a guy who worked out there named Jule Duvall-he was probably about 45 and I was 20 at the time. He drove a machine called a skidder loader that comes in and grabs the trees when I get done cutting them.”
“We hit this patch of timber that was packed full of raccoons. Every tree I cut, raccoons would come busting out, and I told him, ‘Jule, this whole place is packed full of raccoons!’ Him and his nephew would go raccoon hunting, but he said he wanted to catch a live one and see if he could domesticate it. I was living out there not far from where we were working, and he came by one night. He had a broom stick that had been cut and put a little rope attached to it on a loop and that’s how he was going to catch one to take it back home. We turned our lights off to sneak and it was pitch black. We were going along and listening to every little sound. Suddenly Jule puts his arm up and says, ‘Stop. I can hear them whispering.’ I said, ‘What? What’s it saying?’ I had no idea what he was talking about! He said there was a big male raccoon up in the tree. I didn’t hear anything and I’m a woodland guy! I was trying to listen, but couldn’t hear anything! He said, ‘I’m going to mock him and he will walk down that tree.’ Suddenly he put his hands up and made this sound, and sure enough I start hearing something moving. Just as sure as I’m standing here today, the biggest male raccoon I’ve ever seen walked down that tree and came straight towards us. It was wild! He caught it and took it home. I asked him what he had been hearing because I didn’t hear anything. We went out to the woods again and he taught me to hear it, and what it was-it sounded like little, raspy breathing. When a male raccoon gets nervous or excited, he makes this noise just from breathing. If you don’t learn how to hear it, you’ll never hear it on your own. I couldn’t believe I had never heard that. Now I can’t go in the woods without hearing it! It’s a real thing!”
“I thought later on in life and even now-what an amazing analogy that is. We can’t hear-our society cannot hear the whisper, so we don’t know where to go. It’s whispering, sometimes it’s shouting, but we don’t hear it anymore. It reminds about what happened to Elijah when he had the incident on Mount Carmel and the prophets of Baal where God burned up his sacrifice but wouldn’t take the prophets of Baal and he thought that all of Israel was going to return to God. He ran down Mount Carmel while Ahab was going down in his chariot. Elijah ran 14 miles to get to the city, and he beat Ahab down there. Ahab told his queen, Jezebel, what had happened. She said by this tomorrow, she wanted Elijah dead. So instead of standing there in confidence, he ran until he found a cave where he hid. He said, ‘Lord, you might as well just kill me right now because I failed. It’s all over.’ The Lord told him to come to the mouth of the cave because he was going to pass by. So Elijah went over to the mouth of the cave and suddenly this terrible wind came, and thought the Lord was in the wind, but He wasn’t. Then suddenly an earthquake-the ground was shaking and the rocks were rolling, and Elijah thought, ‘there He is!’ But He wasn’t in the earthquake. Then a fire swept through the valley burning everything up and he thought this had to be it. But the Lord wasn’t in the fire. Then Elijah stood still and heard the whisper of God. That’s the whisper that we have to hear.”
“How can we go in the right way if we have no direction? If we’re not hearing where to go? Right now, we’re not hearing the whisper. How can we? Look at our kids! Their minds are going 100 miles an hour with one thing or another, so how can they hear with all the distractions? How can we all? It’s virtually impossible to hear that little voice of guidance. That one thing we need in the world we live in now is discernment more than any other thing in the world. That means that whatever we see in front of us, we don’t care-we’re going to listen to their voice and listen to what’s real. When I did these paintings, I wanted to show you how we lived. I believe in this times we heard that whisper. I wanted you to remember those years. If we didn’t do it slow, we would be shocked, but if we were there and then all of a sudden we were here, we’d think we were on different planets. I want you to think about those days and look at where we are today and ask yourself, ‘why in the world did we go down this road?’ This is one part of the series called The Pampa Project. It’s not really about Pampa, it’s about the people and Pampa is the backdrop. This is called, The Way We Were. I’m working on two parts simultaneously, and the part that comes before this one is called, High Hopes on the High Plains. That one is about the people who came and started this endeavor of building Pampa, from about 1900 to 1930. Then the last part, which I just started, is called, The Tattered Threads of the Tie That Binds. It’s about looking at we’ve done to the beautiful birthright that we had. The first painting in the series is the old Vista Theatre. I saw my first movie there when I was eight years old. That was a gorgeous theatre, but now go over there and look at it. Ask yourself, ‘Why did we come this way? Why did we have everything and sell it out for a little convenience?’ That’s what I want this work to mean when everyone sees it, and just hope it’s not too late to find our way again, and to start to listen.”
