Museum Corner April 2021
Flo Compton was able to continue painting after she lost her eyesight because her husband, Lester, helped her to paint. With his help she created this primitive covered-bridge painting. Passion for art and efforts to make other people happy is always a beautiful thing.
Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder
By Becky Buher
Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but in this case, beauty is also in the hearts of the creators—Flo Compton and her husband, Lester. In February, David Holtsclaw donated a Flo Compton painting to the museum. Information on the back of the painting indicates the subject is the Richland-Plummer Creek Covered Bridge in Taylor Township in Greene County, and it was painted in 2006. Details in the painting are minimal and there is a beautiful reason for its simplicity. For the last few years of her life, Flo was blind.
Holtsclaw once asked her how she could continue to paint without being able to see. She told him she would picture something in her mind and Lester would help her paint it.
Twenty years ago in 2001, Times-Mail writer, Claude Parsons featured Flo Compton when she was 83 years old and living in Fayetteville. Parsons wrote that her artistic interest began to flourish when she was 3 or 4 years old when her mother gave her a pencil, crayons and scrap paper. Her high school art teacher at Orleans High School, Omar Deich, recognized her talent and encouraged her. But that was during The Great Depression era of the 1930s, and supplies would have been hard to come by. She married Lester Compton in 1935, and they began raising a family.
As they say, life happens—so it wasn’t until the mid 1970s that she became serious about her art. She took some lessons, went to work on her paintings and learned by doing. She painted using acrylics on canvas as well as painting on wood panels and saws. She liked using acrylic paint so she could make changes in her paintings right away, no waiting for oils to dry. She thought she had completed more than 100 paintings when Parsons interviewed her in 2001.
When her sight became impaired, that didn’t stop her. She began having trouble seeing black and white images, but was still able to see colors. She became a member of the South Central Association for the Visually Impaired. Her eyesight may have slowed her down, but it didn’t diminish her passion for art.
She told Parsons that her first painting was of a rural church located between Williams and Huron. That was the area where she had grown up.
One of her favorite subjects was the covered bridge at Williams. She sold at least three of her paintings of the Williams covered bridge. She remembered playing on the bridge when she was a child. She also created paintings of the covered bridge at Medora in Jackson County, and painted a picture of the bridge that spanned Salt Creek before the bridge was torn down to make room for Lake Monroe.
She painted from her own sketches or from photos. Her husband, Lester, made most of her picture frames. She particularly liked to paint landscapes, birds, and anything in nature. She liked to paint pictures of familiar churches, and she used Bible stories as her guide to paint religious subjects.
Her kitchen was her studio, and she said a great deal of her life could be seen in her pictures. She helped friends get started in art. She was an avid gardener.
She loved to make other people happy—now that is both success and beauty.
Flo Compton was 94 when she died in 2012. She had moved to Florida to be near her daughters, Jeanette Smith and Angela Tyquiengco. She was a homemaker, and a member of the Englewood Baptist Church in Bedford where she taught Bible classes for 30 years. She was a 4-H leader for five years, sang in church choirs at Fayetteville Baptist Church for 45 years and then at the Englewood Baptist Church for 30 years, was a member of the Lawrence County Art Association, and a member of the Lawrence County Blind Association. Her husband, Lester, died a few months before her in January 2012. Flo and Lester are buried at the Port Williams Cemetery at Williams.
Her painting of the Richland-Plummer Creek Covered Bridge, painted when she was blind, is currently on display in the McReynolds Community Gallery on the second floor of the museum.
Source: Memories on canvas by Claude Parsons, Sept. 25, 2001;
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/89231612/ida-flo-compton