The Watercolors Of Harlan Hubbard

Harlan Hubbard (1900–1988), a Kentucky writer, environmentalist, and artist, spent many years trying to rediscover and revive the vanishing language of landscape in his watercolor paintings. Known for their sense of drifting movement and their depiction of the natural way of life fondly associated with Hubbard, they inexplicably remain his least studied artworks, despite presenting some of the best evidence of Hubbard's place in the history of landscape painting. The Watercolors of Harlan Hubbard not only argues for Hubbard's place in the art historical canon but also highlights and analyzes the artist's own voice. In this unique collection, more than two hundred watercolors are interspersed with anecdotes from those who knew Hubbard or drew inspiration from his work, offering a personal meditation on a deeply influential artist and serving as an invitation to those who have yet to discover him.

By examining the life and work of celebrated painter, Harlan Hubbard, author Wendell Berry creates the perfect vehicle for emphasizing the themes of his other writings: the value of self-sufficiency, our responsibility to the environment, the holiness of everyday life, and the preference of simplicity over modern, mechanized life. Includes 20 color plates of Hubbard's own paintings, along with several photographs of Anna and Harlan Hubbard.

Shantyboat is the story of a leisurely journey down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans. For most people such a journey is the stuff that dreams are made of, but for Harlan and Anna Hubbard, it became a cherished reality. In their small river craft, the Hubbards became one with the flowing river and its changing weathers. This book mirrors a life that is simple and independent, strenuous at times, but joyous, with leisure for painting and music, for observation and contemplation.

" Hubbard was a gifted writer, but during his lifetime he was better known as an artist. He painted in both oil and watercolor, but over the years he also cut and printed approximately 170 woodcuts. It was in this medium that his potential as an artist was most full realized."

Few individuals have lived such quiet and unassuming lives only to find their way into historical memory quite like writer and artist Harlan Hubbard (1900-1988). While some know of the Kentuckian's sojourn with his wife, Anna, and their determination to living outside the mainstream in a shantyboat on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, few know of his artistry with watercolors or that his simple-life mentality did not evolve until he was in his late thirties. Much like his revered predecessor Henry David Thoreau, Hubbard retreated into the wilderness to live a life of simplicity, sustainability, and purpose. In this comprehensive biography, Jessica Whitehead reveals the importance of Hubbard's place in American history and the impact of his legacy on modern environmentalist and sustainability movements. Driftwood delves into Hubbard's family genealogy and relationships, his education and creative development, and his theories on art, literature, and philosophy. Using journals, an unpublished manuscript, and other primary sources, Whitehead pieces together the various stages of Hubbard's early life, from his education to his relationships with his parents and brother, and how they helped shape the mentality that Hubbard is so well-known for today. Before Hubbard chose a life beyond capitalism and modern technology, he struggled deeply with his identity and lifestyle. By examining Hubbard's perspective of American culture through literature and art, Whitehead helps draw the line between the person sitting on the riverbank grappling with his purpose to the man floating down the Ohio pursuing a life of sacrifice and intentionality. Going beyond Wendell Berry's nearly thirty-year-old biography, Whitehead expands upon Hubbard's personal life and casts a wider cultural net to associate Hubbard with other iconic American thinkers and artists. Presented is a vivid and legible portrait of the man and traces he left behind—books, journals, watercolor sketches, a handcrafted and rustic homestead in Trimble County at Payne Hollow, and a template for a sustainable, simple life.

Harlan Hubbard was Kentucky's Thoreau, and his journals are intimate records of a life lived in harmony with nature. For more than fifty years the artist, writer, and homesteader described daily activities and recorded keen observations as he sought to live simply and authentically. The third and climactic volume of his journals, Payne Hollow Journal, contains entries from the years he and his wife, Anna, lived at their Payne Hollow home along the Ohio River's Kentucky shore. There they mastered the arts of country life, building their own stone and timber house in 1952 and raising their own food. To live with nature was not a novel experience for the couple; earlier they had floated down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans on their homemade shantyboat. Hubbard described this journey in Shantyboat Journal, the basis for his Shantyboat and Shantyboat on the Bayous. By turns poetic and practical, Payne Hollow Journal celebrates nature's intense beauty and sometimes harsh realities as perhaps only an artist can see them. Here Hubbard reveals how dedication to work that provides sustenance -- gardening, wood chopping, fishing, foraging, and raising goats-can also be fulfilling. Don Wallis's arrangement of the Payne Hollow entries reflects the seasonal changes in Hubbard and his life as well as in the natural world around him. At the beginning of this volume Hubbard writes, "When we are away from Payne Hollow, that place does not seem real or possible.... It is hard to explain our situation, to give reasons for our living this way to people who have no understanding or sympathy." A visit to the Hubbards' home through Payne Hollow Journal is ample explanation for anyone who has yearned to lead a life of simplicity and purpose.

Nonfiction. Harlan Hubbard's PAYNE HOLLOW: LIFE ON THE FRINGE OF SOCIETY provides an account of a self-made alternative lifestyle in early 1950's America. Anna and Harlan Hubbard, refusing to adopt the industrial positioning provided, built a simple home at Payne Hollow and documented their "basic relationship of need to fulfillment within the carefully circumscribed wholeness of [their] honest, sensitive, extraordinary lives"--Edward Lueders. PAYNE HOLLOW creates its own self-referential world written as "a painter's prose" that fills its environment with a Thoreau-esque "ecstasy...expressed with sober simplicity"--The Louisville Courier-Journal.