Kenneth Graham
Nature’s beauty inspires Butler painter, 95
by Jeff Jones
The Star
Wednesday Feb 2, 2011
BUTLER – Ken Graham finds all the inspiration he needs right outside his window. After all, what could be better than a snow-covered field or regular visits by squirrels and deer?
Graham, 95, started painting in 1964 from a correspondence course. “I’ve always been interested in art,” he explained. “I saw an ad and I wrote in for a test. I got a lot of help from that, but you learn by doing.
“I’d send in one of the lessons and they’d send it back. They would always start out with what they liked about it, but the criticism was always very good, “ Graham added.
Figure drawings always seemed to be the most difficult, he explained. Instructors emphasized using the right posture, proportion and seeing the body as shapes. Graham was told legs and arms should start as cylinders, and heads should begin as ovals and be fleshed out.
“Ever since I was a kid, I was interested in art,” he said. “My first five grades of school, I went to an old country school, and they had these Old Masters paintings hanging on the wall. Even in first grade, I just looked at them and looked at them.”
“My dad had an illustrated Bible, and I was just fascinating by a picture of Samson pulling down the columns,” Graham said.
“My dad wrote poetry and occasionally included a drawing with it or a letter,” he remembers. “I came from a big family, so he didn’t have much time for that.” That changed when Graham’s father retired. His watercolor painting of a covered bridge earned a best-of-show award one year at the DeKalb County Free Fall Fair.
As for Graham’s abilities, “I don’t consider myself to be an artist. I consider myself to be a painter,” he said. Asked how he would differentiate between the two, Graham explained, “An artist is probably a more refined painter. It’s a fine point of distinction, I guess.”
“When the need arises, Graham works from his own photographs or calls upon Cindy Wilson at the Butler Public Library if he needs to find a specific piece or picture. “I hardly end up with what I started,” Graham said with a chuckle. “I see changes to make. Paintings just kind of evolve, I guess.”
“I used to paint a lot of birds and deer,” he added. “I’ve kind of gotten away from that. I like things with a lot of trees in them.”
“I could do a lot of wonderful paintings if I could paint what I see and feel,” Graham said. “To get what I see on a piece of canvas is a different story.”
Graham usually completes at least one painting each month. Now, he is working on a painting for a resident at a nursing home. “It takes me a while to do a painting,” he said. “I have to labor over it and fuss with it.” While he keeps some paintings to hang around the house, Graham contributes others to the Butler United Methodist Church for its annual bazaar.
His favorite is a wintry field with several deer running in the background. He needs only to look out his window on a cold wintry morning for inspiration. “It gives me something to do,” Graham explained. “I can sit and paint. It makes me feel like I’m doing something to justify my extra years here,” he said with a smile.
“I never get tired of looking at the fields or the woods. In some ways, it’s always the same and never the same.”
Photo caption:
Rural Butler resident Ken Graham, 95, works on a painting for a friend. Beside his chair is a picture of his late wife, Rose, a former teacher, and a recently completed painting.
A family tradition
By Jane Kempf, Star City Editor
Auburn Evening Star
Tuesday, November 30, 1971
Shiny pots and pans, microwave ovens, TV dinners, and canned goods from the local grocer — not too unusual in the thoroughly modern kitchen. But Vesta A. Graham, 1902 S. Wayne St., Auburn, understands the value of the old, almost lost, way of living.
Mrs. Graham’s sort of tradition ought not to be lost. She is a homemaker, and the hub of a large, close-knit family.
At age 85, Mrs. Graham carries on a long-time family tradition — making apple butter…not on an automatic stove in a spotless kitchen, but in a copper kettle over a wood fire in front of her Civil War vintage cider mill.
Sparkling brown jars of spice apple butter are not the only products of her efforts. Much more important is the closeness such a tradition generates in her family. Her now-grown children begin to talk about and plan for apple-butter time a month before the big event.
Six of Mrs. Graham’s seven children live in DeKalb County. In Auburn are William, who works at Electric Motors, Garrett; Robert, an Auburn postman; John, chief deputy sheriff; Mrs. Dorothy Mortorff, who is employed in psychiatric testing for Allen County school children; and Mrs. Peter (Helen) Potts. Kenneth, a soil conservationist and artist, lives in Butler, while Ruth Lyons lives with her minister husband in Kent, Washington.
Two Graham sons have died. James was killed while serving with Merrill’s Marauders in the U.S. Army in Burma. He was 23 years old. Richard, age 4, died in an accident while crossing a road in New Mexico, where Mr. and Mrs. William L. Graham were homesteading.
Perhaps America’s splintering families can learn a valuable lesson from the old ways…when a family stayed together, worked and played together, loved each other, and spent happy harvest days smelling wood smoke and cinnamon apples under sunny skies.
Photo caption:
From a time gone by
For as long as her seven living children can remember, Vesta A. Graham has made apple butter in the fall. This year's batch cooks over a log fire in front of Mrs. Graham's cider mill, which was built during the Civil War. The coffee pot is family tradition, too, according to her children.