The Taos
Discussion
Saturday, September 10, 2005
Communication to one of the Pruitt collectors
Sandra,
I appreciated the phone call to the Indian Hills Inn in
Taos. Kelly will likely be migrating south
as is his custom by the end of this month.
Your phone call helps me understand part of the work that the foundation
faces, in creating the record of Kelly's paintings.
Kelly and I talked about the time in which he worked in Lanham, Texas (spelled?). Mostly he was crashing rock at some quarry. He and my mother Melvina and my older brother and sister lived in a small house. The work was hard, but during the winter of 1952 he managed to paint a few painting. The two painting that you have were perhaps two of ten or twelve painted over a period of a year (1952).
According to his recollection, your Dad was the head of the Chamber of Commerce, or a member, and had a ranch. Si Kelly felt that your dad might help sell the paintings. So the two painting were given on consignment to hang in a hotel. One of the paintings was unsigned and one was signed “A Kelly Prueitt, 1952”. One was of a large deer standing in the foreground.
When Kelly and the family, as I was a little boy seven years old then, needed to move on, Kelly settled on a very low price for the two painting. He had very little money to spend on moving and so a price of $50 was agreed to.
The story opens the subject of how starving artists endure in a system where our competitive schools and culture will take as much as possible form those who would give it all if asked. The Foundation for Creative Extension and Acquisition is being formed in New Mexico to acquire as many of the originals as we can, and to make a documentation of the provenance of each of the paintings.
Sandra, you would have been 11 years old in 1952, and will have a memory of this with some details. Kelly admired your dad and looked to him for help, and yet there was a failure. He feels that the failure is due to the way our culture was shaping each of us, and this failure is not one that individuals were responsible for.
Our cultural values still will allow a profound insensitivity to the artists, while putting the artist into a special category to be admired and yet also to be taken advantage of. The paradox is not lost in Kelly’s current life style.
Kelly told me that his life has been riddled with similar stories where his great works of art were given away at no or little compensation; and perhaps the new owner, without being aware of how Kelly felt about this; would tell others about the good deal that was gotten.
Kelly is 82 now, and seeks to not be aware of the accumulated pain that a life of struggle has brought to him. I try to help bring about events where people can be more sensitive to what has been given and what has been taken.
The story is one that is common, not only for Kelly but for all artists who wish to create in a economic/political/social environment that allows Halliburton to get the contract to take peoples’ weapons away so that the government can force people from their home (in places where the floods did not reach). He mentioned this “news” this morning to me at breakfast.
So he feels the hurt in many ways shared by everyone nowadays who looks at the continuing tragedy that insensitivity and "our system" is creating in all aspects of our lives. It is better to win the lottery than to be aware of the many thousands of people who did not buy school clothes for their children because they spent the money of lottery tickets.
It may be possible to correct this hurt and perhaps this is what we have an opportunity to do.
Paul Stephen Prueitt
September 10th 2005
Taos New Mexico