Painter Michael Paxton was tidying up his Ravenswood studio a few years ago when his efforts were derailed–as the best cleaning efforts often are–by a couple of boxes. They were filled with articles his grandmother had scissored from two years’ worth of the Clay County Free Press, a weekly newspaper from the mountainous area of central West Virginia that the family calls home. Paxton, now 43, had happily emigrated from the region as a young man two decades ago, but enjoyed keeping up with the comings and goings of his numerous relations in a column called “From the Pen of J.C. Legg,” which covered turkey hunts, recent funerals, church picnics, and the like. He’d sifted through these columns before, but this time it was the flip side of the clippings that caught his eye.
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After studying art at Marshall University in Huntington and at the University of Georgia in Athens, Paxton did a stint as a visiting artist at the School of the Art Institute, and in 1983 he moved here for good. Shortly thereafter he set to work on a series of huge panoramas of Lake Michigan and the Chicago River. (“I guess that was sort of me finding a place in Chicago to catch my breath,” he says.) For about ten years he worked in local theater, designing sets for the Organic and occasionally performing or directing, and as a freelance video editor.
Paxton started with a series of drawings in charcoal, chalk, and ink that he calls “West Virginia Wood Hicks,” a colloquialism for timber workers; he showed them at Wood Street Gallery a little over a year ago. More recently he’s been exploring the same themes in large oil paintings, some of them nearly life size.
But first and foremost he paints to go home again. “It just makes me feel like grandma and my dad and everybody is closer to me. I can feel them,” Paxton says. “They’d really like [the paintings] if they could see them. My grandma, she was old school, and her highest praise was always, ‘It’s just so nice and plain.’ That was her biggest compliment…that’s what I’m after.”
