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Scott Husby and Tracey Cullen have written a book about the late John Spelman lll, a Cook County High School art teacher and artist of great acclaim. Spelman’s artwork will be featured at the Johnson Heritage Post from July 2 to September 5.
Scott Husby and Tracey Cullen have created a wonderful book about an artist many of us knew—or thought we knew—John Spelman lll. This book bears reading and adding to the burgeoning book collection.
While John’s father, who was called Jack, was a renowned landscape and rural scenes oil painter, John became a draftsman and tried watercolor painting, but mainly focused on relief printing, using wood and linoleum blocks.
This beautiful 104-page book is filled with John’s bold block prints. Spelman created many of them in the 1930s and 1940s. There are also drawings and a few paintings included in these delightful pages.
Inside these pages are depictions of fish houses, farms, logging camps, churches, cabins and homes, lodges, resorts, and landscapes. The collection includes images from his richly creative time in Appalachia.
One of four children, John was born July 16, 1912, in Oak Park, Illinois. His father bought land in Hovland in 1908. Over the next few years, Jack built a cabin he named Spruce Point near the lake in Hovland, a place John would visit many times in his youth.
Growing up with a father who was a renowned painter must have been difficult for a young artist who hoped to make his own way, but John found his creative outlet through creating block prints. This process involves carving a reverse image on the surface of a block of wood or linoleum. These carved surfaces receive the ink, then the ink is transferred to a sheet of paper using hand rubbing or a printing press. No easy task.
After graduating high school in Oak Park, Illinois, John enrolled at the University of Minnesota and picked English as his major, but he also took classes in architecture. Upon graduation, John moved to western North Carolina and southeastern Kentucky, the southern area of Appalachia that his father had often visited and detailed in his landscape paintings.
John became the Pine Mountain Settlement School art teacher in Harlan County in Kentucky in 1937, receiving only room and board as reimbursement. Eventually he was paid $20 a month, half of which he sent home to his parents, according to his sister Barb. In 1941, Barbara became the bookkeeper for the school’s office.
Relief printings created by Spelman were used in the school’s newsletter, The Pine Cone.
In 1939, John authored a book, At Home in the Hills: Glimpses of Harlan County, Kentucky, with the linoleum block and woodcut prints he had made. The book was printed and bound by his students at the school. As wonderful as those relief prints were, Spelman’s short prose was captivating as well. This book received positive reviews from newspapers in Boston, New York, Austin, Texas, and The Christian Science Monitor, which devoted nearly half a page to extolling Spelman’s artistic skill.
John’s prints and drawings were included in calendars at the Pine Mountain school in 1938, 1940, and 1941. Alumni and friends of the school received the calendars. In First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s syndicated newspaper column, she wrote, “I am delighted with the linoleum cuts which have been used… Mr. John A. Spelman lll made them, and he has chosen to portray scenes from the mountain environment and has done it delightfully.”
John taught art at Cook County High School for nine years. During this period, he produced little art. He was an outstanding high school teacher. Somewhat flamboyant and loud at times, his passion about his subject spilled over and imprinted onto many of his students, even some with little or no talent (like me). He encouraged us to learn to appreciate art and to understand the skill it took to create art.
John died young at age 57; he is buried in the Hovland cemetery next to his father.
The Loyd K. Johnson Foundation provided funding to produce the book, and many of the paintings and prints came from the Eliasen Family collection. Much appreciation is owed to Scott Husby and Tracey Cullen. Their excellent work has brought back a legacy, life, and talent for a new generation to learn about and appreciate and will prompt some of his former neighbors and students to learn a lot more about.
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