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A Special Sort of Stubbornness  

From Flint River Review

by Joan Curtis
　

    I first met Lamar Dodd over 15 years ago in Athens, Ga., at the Georgia Museum of Art. The Museum was hosting an exhibition of his paintings, and everyone in our community was going to be there.

    Dodd was a legend in Athens, where he'd inspired a generation of young artists and created, at the University of Georgia, one of the most renowned art departments in the country. But to me he was more than an eminent educator； he was a man who had dared to live his dream, a goal I was still struggling to achieve. For years I had worked as a management trainer at the state university, but the routine and the bureaucracy had begun to stifle me. Now I faced a crossroads in my career. I could remain where I was, secure but without hope for growth, or I could open my own business, which had long been my secret ambition.

As my husband and I crossed the museum's marble floors, I watched men in dinner jackets and women in chiffon chatting familiarly. Among those confident achievers I felt out of place. In the exhibition room, Dodd stood surrounded by admirers. He wasn't a big man, five-foot-nine or so, but he commanded attention. Fluffy white hair crowned his head, and he leaned on a gold-topped cane.

    As we approached, I was struck by the brilliance of Dodd's light-blue eyes. We had talked for only a few moments when I noticed how he focused all his attention on me while he spoke. Something in his manner made me feel strong and included.

    I looked at his canvases commissioned by NASA to commemorate space exploration. They were large works filled with dominant lines and splashes of brilliant color. The artist's concepts and powerful movements were as audacious as the exploits they celebrated.

    After that night, I didn't expect to see Dodd again. But a week later he telephoned. He invited my husband and me to see sketches for a painting and talk about his work.

    Dodd met us at the door of his home and guided us to his studio. In the center stood an easel with a huge canvas. Jars, brushes and palettes of paints rested on a small table to the right of the easel. Hundreds of canvases were tucked in cubbies, and still more filled empty spaces in the room.

    Dodd wanted to portray in his painting the emergence of the soul from illness. He talked about how to best create a vision of the turmoil, trial and healing that is at the heart of human existence. He and my husband discussed the images that might capture that vision. "And what do you think, my dear?" he asked me.

    He so naturally included women in the discussion that later, over coffee, I found myself talking about my dream to start a business that would allow me to teach and write, the two things I loved most.

    "You're frightened," he said matter-of-factly. "I know the symptoms."

    "That's hard for me to imagine," I replied.

    "Why? I've plenty of that. It means getting up each day and doing what you have to, going on when circumstances get you down, pushing ahead when others hold you back."

    "When I graduated from high school," he continued, "I went to Georgia Tech to study architecture. But my heart wasn't in it. I was trying to please others, not myself. I went home after less than a year feeling like a failure. I stayed in my room."

    "How did you break out?"

    "I got an offer to teach art in a small Alabama school. Working with young people, I threw off the doubts and fears and plunged into painting. I promised myself I'd work every day, no matter how I felt."

And the rest was history, I thought. I wish it could that easy for me.

Apparently, however, the rest wasn't history - or easy - for Lamar Dodd. After his year of teaching, he went to New York, where he struggled with loneliness, poverty and teachers who disparaged his work. His life, I discovered, was filled with the same irritations and doubts that plagued us all. Still, he managed to overcome the barriers.

    Lamar Dodd and I became friends, and I found he had a flintier side. One time it was raining after we had lunched at a restaurant, and Lamar walked me to my car. I then offered to drive him up the hill to his car. "No, no," he replied. "A little rain never hurts anyone."

    He wouldn't even take my umbrella. Thinking I could match his obstinacy, I trudged with him to his car, holding the umbrella over his head. Then Lamar declared that it grieved his Southern manhood to let a lady walk alone to her car, and he insisted on returning with me.

    So back we passed, to the immense curiosity of some diners under the restaurant's awning. Finally I let him go, dripping like a derelict but with pride intact.

    I often visited him at his home, and he always encouraged me to take the dare I was setting for myself. But I still made no attempt to begin the business I dreamed of. Meanwhile, Lamar unleashed a series of brilliant watercolors. The scenes came from memories of sunflowers he had seen in Cortona, Italy, and fishermen off Maine's coast. His imagination and ability to create seemed endless.

    Then Lamar had a stroke.

    For weeks I feared seeing him again. His right hand, the hand with which he painted, was paralyzed, and along with it, I was sure, his courage crushed.

    Finally I went to visit him. I knocked at his door and heard sluggish footsteps approaching. When he opened the screen, I saw the familiar crop of white hair. His eyes were cloudier, but the distinctive gleam was still there.

    "Such a pleasure, my dear," he said. His voice was like a recording played slightly off speed. He leaned on the gold-topped cane, his right hand resting on the head. We went into the sitting room adjacent to his studio and talked about many things, but not his devastating transformation. And gradually, like the Southern gentleman he was, he turned the conversation to me, my concerns and ambitions.

    Before leaving I visited the powder room. When I returned to say farewell, I found Lamar in his studio. He had shuffled over to his easel and was standing before it in intense concentration. Sitting on the large frame was a magnificent oil painting of an island jutting out of a turbulent blue-green sea. As I watched in silence from the hallway, my heart broke for him. How sad it must be to contemplate the work you can no longer do.

    Then something remarkable happened. Lamar picked up a paintbrush in his left hand and inched toward the canvas. He placed the brush in his lifeless right hand. With extreme effort, he trapped the brushy between two fingers and rested the shaft against his palm. Then, with his left hand guiding - and with agonizing care - he pushed the brush across the surface, leaving a perfect line of color.

    After a few moments, he turned to see me watching. He slowly put down the brush.

    "Just try, my dear," he said. "Courage is nothing more than cussed stubbornness." With tears in my eyes, I went over to him, kissed his cheek and found my way out.

    My life changed after that visit. I quit my job and opened a small consulting business, just as I had always dreamed. Like Lamar, I faced the challenge of leaving everything behind to chase something unknown. Like Lamar, who continued to paint until he passed away last year at age 86, I hope I'll overcome the obstacles that life places before me.

    My dear friend and mentor was so right about courage being a special sort of stubbornness. And I've since come to understand it much more. It's the essence of the creative spirit, the vital force of the human heart.
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