Artist reclaims her love for farm life through her paintings

PATTON, Mo. -- When she lived in San Francisco in the 1970s, painter Vel Marshall dressed windows at a big department store and worked for the American Conservatory Theatre. She loved going to the opera and sampling the city's fine dining establishments. She was a sophisticated lady.

But a photograph from those days says something more about who Vel Marshall really is. She is wearing a long velvet dress. She might have been attending the opera later that night. In the photograph she is preparing to climb into a Dumpster.

Two miles past the spot where the Route NN pavement ends outside Patton, Marshall has filled her log cabin home with reclaimed things. An assortment of cowbells hangs from the ceiling. She calls the decor "Early Wooden Box." Friends make fun of the lack of legitimate furniture. "They don't understand I spent a great deal of time looking for this stuff," she says.

Many old buildings in Bollinger and Perry and Cape Girardeau counties now exist only in Marshall's paintings, such as a watercolor of the round barn that once stood on Sprigg Street in Cape Girardeau.

Some of her paintings will be presented in an exhibition opening today at the Arts Council of Southeast Missouri.

Most of all, Marshall has reclaimed her love for living on a farm, a life she thought she had left behind forever many years ago.

Marshall and her husband, Stan, moved back to the remote 100-acre farm in 1977 when her mother developed cancer. She grew up on the farm and couldn't imagine herself living that life again. It was difficult for her. She started coming down with illnesses. "I was going nuts," she said. Offers came to return to San Francisco.

Stan asked her what she had done as an only child to pass the time. She remembered drawing pictures. When she started making art again, she discovered "I wasn't nervous anymore."

Marshall was 13 when her father died. Her mother continued working the farm herself, mowing hay, planting corn and making quilts. She never remarried. "She said, "I've had the best." That was that.

At 19 Marshall's life changed dramatically when she married a military man and moved to Texas. In Texas she divorced and married again. She learned to operate a flatbed press, she worked in the ad department of a newspaper in Abilene and did fashion illustrations and window displays for a large department store. They arrived in San Francisco just after the Summer of Love ended. If she abhorred the hippies' free love and drug-taking, she was sympathetic to their rejection of materialism and embracing of spirituality.

"It was quite an experience for a gal born down there," she said, nodding down the hill at the 150-year-old farmhouse where she was born and now paints.

When Vel's mother died four years after they moved back to Southeast Missouri, her husband, Stan, was prepared to sell the place and move back to California even though he loved the farm. Only Vel wasn't ready to go. "I said, 'There's something else to come here,'" she recalled.

This is her second show at the Arts Council of Southeast Missouri. She also has had shows at the Gallery Triangle in Washington, D.C., at the Jefferson Memorial Gallery in St. Louis, the Hermitage in Nashville, Tenn., and at galleries in Ste. Genevieve, Mo.

Marshall at first started painting watercolors and then switched to oils. Soon she was taking commissions. For three years she painted portraits but found it too hard to please people.

"If you get them too pretty, they recognize that," she said. "If you put all the warts in, they don't like that."

Certain portraits still appeal to her. "I like to do old people better than anything in the world," she said. "... There's so much behind the eye. Old buildings are the same way."

Some of her commissions are reconstruction projects, paintings of buildings that no longer exist. "They'll give me a window and a roof," she said.

She has stopped painting the oils that are represented in her show opening today. Her lungs have developed a reaction to the linseed oil and turpentine necessary to oil painting, so she has gone back to watercolors.

Painting is only half of what was to come for Marshall. She cuts firewood and cans vegetables from their garden. The Marshalls raise beef cattle, goats and chickens. Most of their five dogs were abandoned by someone else.

Six years into their stay on the farm, Vel noticed that she wasn't missing the fancy clothes and the fine dining so much. "I noticed I was happier," she said. Now, more than 25 years since they moved back, she says: "I was able to appreciate the beauty."

sblackwell@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 182