Everett Franklin Spruce, 48, is the other kind of painter. He did not spend his youth in the ateliers of Montparnasse and the arms of his models. Nor did he return wearing beard and beret. The measure of his distance from the conventional unconventional background is that he is a respectable father of four, a full professor of art, and a citizen of Texas. For the past 30 years Professor Spruce has been celebrating the flora and fauna of Texas in imaginative oils laid on with a realistic brush. Now the University of Texas is publishing an annual full-color portfolio of the works of artists portraying the Southwest. Its first choice, picked by a blue-ribbon committee of leading Texas art patrons advised by the state's most prominent art-museum directors: stocky, sobersided Everett Spruce.
The accolade was not his first. Before being selected over all regional competitors, including Dallas' Otis Dozier (TIME, Dec. 17), Painter Spruce had won recognition nationally (the Scheidt Memorial Prize, a Worcester Art Museum prize) and internationally in 1948 with the first prize at an exhibition of American paintings in Brussels.
Painting began for Spruce in back-country Arkansas with local landscapes, rabbit hunters and deer. He went to a rural Arkansas school, did farm chores, picking apples and digging sweet potatoes, soon won a county competition with his first watercolors and oils. At 18 he went to the Dallas Art Institute on a scholarship. There he studied life drawing and painting, made ends meet by doubling as school janitor and fabricator of canvases and panels that the school sold to its students. Eventually he became assistant director of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, now teaches at the University of Texas in Austin. At any time he is apt to load his family into a battered station wagon with palette and easel and take to the hills or the canyons of the Big Bend. A prolific painter, Spruce takes only a couple of days to complete a canvas, sells his paintings at $1,000 and up.
Spruce feels no sense of restriction because most of his painting is limited to Texas landscapes, believes that "it's important for the artist to have roots," and that "his duty is to communicate." Contrasting the painting in the East and in Texas, which Texans are trying to boost as one of the principal art centers in the U.S., Spruce says: "It is important that a painting at least represent something that is understandable. An artist can be very personal, as I am, and very imaginative and still deal with the intelligibly visible world. Some artists who live in the East get themselves into a kind of prison of form and expression. In Texas I have been free to do the work I like. I'm not bound."