Eric Sloane, Part II
Painting America’s Countryside

By Randall Decoteau
All photos courtesy of Sloane-Stanley Museum

I think that art primarily is communication in one word,” Eric Sloane asserted. “An artist is a sensitive person. The artist sees, hears, and feels things that others don’t.” Sloane suggested that it is the artist’s work to communicate this sensitivity to others so that they can have a richer life. And often he shows us that it’s not just what you see, but how you feel about it that counts. Sloane’s work is about nostalgia for the past. He felt that most people are robbed of that sentiment.
Recollection is always more colorful and bigger than life. He told us that he painted what was in his mind, his screen of remembrance. “I have often found myself painting in a vague or uninspired manner until one brush stroke, perhaps even an accidental movement, kindled or loosened a color, a mood, or a spirit that had been stored away in the attic of my mind.” Sometimes it’s like a sudden flash of sunlight on the grain in the wood of an ancient barn that he might have seen yesterday – or he might have experienced it 40 years before. In any case, remembering this tiny event evokes sufficient pleasure and inspiration to build an entire recollection around it, “so that what I paint will be a bit less of a pictorial design than an instant of my past remembrance.” He commented further that a person buying the same painting isn’t buying a picture, but a precious instant in his own memory – the same instant that the painter experienced.
Born Everard Jean Hindrichs of New York City, artist and writer Eric Sloane worked under an assumed name because he felt that people would have difficulty remembering his Dutch name. He left home at 14 to become an itinerant sign painter and in the process saw the world. His travels across America brought him an awareness of a world that he was compelled to keep alive though his painting. He saw Lancaster County, Pennsylvania and moved on to Ohio, to New Orleans, and eventually to Taos, New Mexico. He often said that he went to Taos to find independence and freedom. However, instead he found himself. Masonite was invented in 1924, the year he went to Taos. He was one of the first to paint on Masonite and continued the practice for the rest of his career.

Clouds
By 1927, Sloane returned to New York where he continued his sign painting. Eventually, he turned to mural painting, decorating the restaurant at Roosevelt Field, the Luna Ballroom at Coney Island, and other commissions. He is known to have decorated many aviators’ single engine planes during this time at both Roosevelt Field and the Floyd Bennett Aviation Field in Brooklyn.
Clouds were always a fascinating subject for Sloane. He began to paint them in the 1930s, and one of his first cloud paintings was sold to Amelia Earhart. His clouds are titanic in scale and often depict the tiniest image of a plane in contrast. It’s as if he is telling us that we are but pinpoints on the largest canvas of all – we are almost insignificant in contrast to the towering structure of the clouds. One of his most monumental cloud paintings at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum is half a block long and took him a month to paint. His interest in the sky prompted him to study meteorology at M.I.T., but he found no romance there. Instead, he felt that going to early American diaries of farmers was far more helpful.

America remembered
After collecting a hundred or so farm diaries and Almanacs, Eric Sloane admitted that his interest drifted from weather patterns to the lore of early America. “I found myself doing the same with barns, farm architecture, and covered bridges,” he said, “researching the mood and lore of the early American countryside. The old weatherwise farmer had introduced me to his wonderful America, and I have become fascinated with it for over half a century.” By 1953, he had moved to western Connecticut and concentrated on painting the farms and covered bridges there and capturing their ‘mood and lore’.
Sloane’s work is peaceful, and makes the viewer feel as if they are silent observers, alone in the presence of his pure and perfect world. “I find a certain comfort and peace in solitude,” he reminisced. “My idea of a perfect place to live is a farmstead, where I can’t see another house.” He discussed this mood in many of his works, but particularly in I Remember America. He loved the stillness before a storm, the flash of sunlight on rippling water, the heavy quiet of a decaying building, the nostalgic mood of a bygone autumn. He referred to these images as thousands of lightning-short pictures indelibly printed in each of our minds, waiting to be revived by music, or writing, or painting, or even an odor.
“Painting to me is not a ‘creative art’ at all,” he stressed, “ but a recreative art or a ‘mirror-art.” He felt that the creative arts are misnamed – that the composer, dancer, actor, writer, or painter is less a creator and more of a reflector. For him it’s all about remembrance. He tells that most of his best writing and painting were not inspired by sitting in front of a blank canvas or sheet of paper, but by operating an automobile, raking a lawn, or building a stone wall. It is then that, without effort, ideas burst forth. And he suggests that after his art or writing is long forgotten, he has, at least, built the stone wall.

Weather Hill
His move to ‘Weather Hill’ in Warren, Connecticut in 1958 helped him to achieve his ideal. It was here that he solidified his reputation as a writer and painter of Americana and created his most enduring work. Here he was intimately involved with civic responsibility and community. He worked tirelessly to help raise funds to restore the clock in Warren’s Congregational Church tower. He made appearances at civic functions, signing hundreds of books and selling paintings and drawings to raise the dollars needed to complete the project.
After his death in 1985, his painting studio was recreated at the Sloane-Stanley Museum in Kent, Connecticut just as he left it. His paints and brushes, his Masonite panels, his books, his props, and his worn office chair are all there. He painted every morning, creating a painting almost every day. He worked quickly and was often quoted on this subject. He insisted that his philosophy of working rapidly was not trite, that spontaneous is much better than labored. “I want to do a painting with the same spontaneity and freedom as my signature,” he stressed. “Working quickly makes for happy accidents and lends greatness to an artist’s creative ability.”
Greatness is one thing, but in Eric Sloane’s estimation, sensitivity, awareness, and the ability to think are far more important in the making of an artist. He insisted that Thomas Edison was being modest when he said, “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration,” because, in Sloane’s mind, these words are a perfect definition of talent.

Sloane-Stanley Museum, Route 7, P.O. Box 917, Kent, CT 06757, (860) 927-3849, open Mid-May to October.