Resident Artist

"Most artists," says Carroll Cloar of Memphis, "are quite articulate about their philosophy of art. In fact, some have gotten to the point where they talk better than they paint." At 46, Artist Cloar himself does not like to talk much, but few artists need to less.

The son of a harddriving, hefty farmer ("I'd have preferred it if he'd been a bit smaller") whose own father settled in Earle, Ark. before it was even a town, Cloar has been recording the story of his part of the South almost all his life. Though neither his parents nor his sister nor his three brothers ever seemed to notice, he began drawing before he could write. During the war he painted mascots (girls) on Saipan bombers, at $50 apiece, later made a young artist's pilgrimage to South America and Europe. But one day in Venice, he decided that home was where he belonged.

A shy and moody man ("I always look sad in photographs"), Cloar took as his subject his own kind of people, who lived in such places as Calico Rock, Ash Flat and Evening Shade. "The family album," he has said, "was my research." Working in bright tempera because "it responds to me better," he painted everything from the Baptist Sunday school he had attended, to a memory called "The Lightning That Struck Rufo Barcliff it killed him." By last week, as his latest one-man show was being put together at Manhattan's Alan Gallery, his hand was surer than ever, but his heart was still at home.

Laconic Carroll Cloar tells simple tales of life beneath a sky he sees as both acid blue and searingly hot. "Behind some grass," says he of a painting called The Ambush, "there's a girl. She's kind of a plain Jane. Well, she's waiting for the boy coming down the gravel road. And she's going to get him." Simple? Cloar's scenes--a traveler silhouetted starkly against the sky, three farmers talking hopefully of the spring, two men wandering down a ghostly moonlit road past a giant sign saying, JESUS SAVES--happen every day. But Cloar builds each into a moment that memory finds hard to shake.

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