An artist's rebirth; Jean Amos trades the apron for art
by Johnathan L. Wright Outpost Staff
The Dream
You could understand if Carson City, Nev. artist Jean Amos were bitter. Putting on hold her dream of going to art school and becoming a painter couldn't have been easy, especially after a delay of 25 years.
Like many women of her generation, Amos, 75, did what society expected of her &emdash; instead of going to college, she got married and had three children. But the experience didn't prove corrosive. Amos happily raised her children and maintained her artistic skills by painting and drawing in her spare time.
At 41, her children grown,
Amos completed her GED, enrolled in college art courses and
began in earnest her life as an artist. Amos never became a
famous painter, or even a professional one. But her story is
compelling all the same because it's an inspiring reminder
that youthful hopes can be realized, even in middle age. A
dream deferred doesn't have to be a dream
denied. Links
to the art world
Nevada
Institute for Contemporary Art
Nothing Special
Amos laughs and modestly swats away any attempt to characterize her life as inspirational.
"I'm not special," she says. "I didn't really overcome any huge obstacles. I didn't fulfill some of my ambitions until I was older, but so what? I have no regrets about being a wife and mother first &emdash; I loved it. And when I was young, there weren't really any other social roles open to women."
Amos wasn't the only woman of her generation to have ambitions. So I ask her why many of her generational sisters put away their dreams once they got married and started raising families.
"They were discouraged and demoralized, and understandably so," Amos answered. "But I always knew I would really be able to concentrate on my art once my children were older. And I'm very disciplined by nature, so I sketched and painted as often as I could."
Amos' discipline is reflected in her tightly composed paintings. Composition refers to the way the parts of an image are arranged or planned. It is also the structure underlying what's on the canvas.
Amos, clearly preferring talk of her art to talk of her past, says that rigorous composition is central to most of her paintings.
"Some painters don't do a lot of work beforehand, and sometimes I don't either," Amos says. "But usually I make a lot of preparatory sketches before putting paint on the canvas. And the elements in my pictures are always precisely placed."
Landscapes
While Amos has painted everything from portraits to still lifes to copies of Old Master mythological scenes, her specialty is landscapes, particularly those that depict pristine mountain meadows or meandering country paths or charming tumble-down fences, barns and structures.
Such a landscape is idealized, unrealistically bucolic, an improvement upon nature. No rural scene could ever be this perfect. And that, says Amos, is exactly the effect she's striving for.
"My style is called naturalistic or realistic, but many of my paintings aren't meant to represent actual places. They aren't realistic in that sense. Some scenes are totally imaginary."
The enhancement of nature through art has a long history in the painting of Western culture. I asked Amos why she chose to paint the world as more orderly than it really is.
Childhood
Jean Amos, 75, said her artistic choices were influenced by her "gypsy-ish" childhood.
Her father, a gas station franchiser for Shell Oil Co., moved the family every year, sometimes more often, because of his job. Amos lived everywhere from a house abutting an orange grove in Los Angeles to an apartment overlooking Central Park in New York. She attended 16 schools by the time she was 15 years old.
"Art was an anchor for me, something stable when everything around me was always changing," Amos said. "No matter where I was, I could create some security through art. That's how I made friends. The other kids would come over and watch me draw."
Amos said she preferred art supplies to dolls or games when she was young.
"Besides what my parents bought me, I saved every scrap of paper I could find," Amos recalled. "This was during the Depression, so everything was in short supply. My father sometimes threw away business forms, and I took them out of the wastebasket, ironed them and then drew or painted on the backs."
Amos took all the art courses she could in school. In 1938, at age 16, she fell in love with her husband, Edward, who is now deceased. She dropped out of high school and eloped to Reno, Nev., to be married. Her formal art training ended at that point and wouldn't begin again for 25 years.
"I wanted to go to the Art Institute of Chicago after high school," Amos said. "But whatever money my parents had was saved for my brother's education. College was for men. So dropping out of school to be married really wasn't considered all that bad."
But Sandra Walker, one of Amos' granddaughters, wonders what Amos might have achieved with more early formal education.
"My grandmother is one of the smartest people I know, even though she never really went to college. It's too bad that when she was younger, brains and talent in women didn't always count for a lot. It had to be frustrating. She's had a happy life, but who knows what she could have become."
Perhaps that frustration is one reason Amos made sure her children and five grandchildren all graduated from college. Two of her granddaughters are enrolled in Ph.D. programs, which Amos is helping to finance.
Love
After being married in Reno, Jean Amos and her husband moved to Oakland, Calif. in 1940. Edward Amos enlisted in the Navy right after Pearl Harbor. When he returned home from World War II, he joined the ranks of managerial trainees at Crown Zellerbach Corp., the international paper giant. Amos became pregnant with their first child. Sometimes images she created reflect the young family's budget.
"I made my first sale right after World War II," Amos remembered proudly. "About $80 for a series of eight charcoal sketches. This was at a time when my husband only made $27.50 a week!"
The company transferred the Amos family to Antioch, Calif., in the mid 1950s. In 1964 at age 41, still living in Antioch but with her children grown, Amos received her GED. Art courses taken at a local college helped her branch out from working mainly with drawing pencils and acrylic and oil pants on canvas to working with watercolors and with paint on burlap.
In 1966, Amos and three other Antioch artists founded the Delta Art Association, a gallery and exhibition space housed in a renovated bank building. Amos exhibited her own work, curated shows of others' work and judged area art competitions. Amos has also judged art shows at the Nevada State Fair and the Capitol City Fair in Carson City.
While living in Antioch, Amos began accepting commissions. Since then, she has been hired to paint such images as pet portraits, family portraits, views of the Northern Nevada desert and abstract murals for a child's bedroom.
After Crown Zellerbach transferred Amos and her husband from Antioch to Houston in 1978, Amos became well-known for a certain type of commission: pictures of oil wells and oil refineries.
"When I was first asked to paint an oil well, I could barely keep a straight face," Amos said, laughing. "The idea seemed ludicrous to me &emdash; a cliché of everything Texas. But I painted it and the client liked it and the word spread from there. I had cowboys lining up for me to paint oil wells, even ones who had nothing to do with oil."
Like many of her landscapes, the oil well pictures were products of imagination. Amos said to paint a picture of an oil well as it actually appeared would have been "dull and compositionally uninteresting."
Their Life's Sunset
When Amos and her husband retired to Carson City in 1982, she joined the Nevada Art Association. Although she doesn't paint as frequently as she did when younger, Amos has exhibited and sold paintings from the association's gallery in the Brewery Arts Center building in Carson City.
A sale scrapbook contains photographs of those paintings and every other painting Amos has ever sold, more than 100 photographs at last count. We leaf through it together in her living room, comparing images. Like many artists, Amos is never satisfied with what she creates.
"I can rework a painting but that can quickly become unproductive if you aren't careful. Sometimes things just don't work."
Walker, who as a girl watched her grandmother paint, says that Amos is "an incredible perfectionist.
" I've seen her toss away paintings that looked finished to me because something wasn't quite right to her," Walker said.
On the walls around us, as in every other room of Amos' home, paintings she's created that have made the cut, are displayed in rows. This is how pictures used to be hung before the modern habit of giving one image an acre of wall space became the norm.
Though the arrangement seems haphazard, closer examination reveals that's not so. For instance, a painting of a thirsty cowboy and his horse in the desert is wittily placed next to a view of a perfect mountain lake, rider and mount endlessly traveling to refreshment that's always just a picture frame out of reach.
"I like people to find relationships between the paintings," Amos said. "Not only in the themes but also in the play of paint textures and colors and light."
And what is Amos favorite painting amidst the swirl of images?
"I don't have a favorite. Once I've completed a painting, I can't think of it that way. Painting is often such hard work. I've painted 18 hours at a stretch before. Sometimes you're just glad to have the damn thing done because a blank canvas can be terrifying."
Posted March 4,
2000
Copyright 2000 Nevada
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