ABSTON , O.D. - age 98, of Powell, went to be with the Lord Wednesday, October 4, 2000, at Lake City Health Care Center. He was a member of the Covenant Life Worship Center. He received the inaugural Excellence in Ministry Award by the Administration of Covenant Life Christian College. He was a very talented artist, his work can be seen at the Museum of Appalachia, Ciderville and many churches both locally and throughout Tennessee. His enjoyment of music was heard in his mandolin playing. Preceded in death by loving wife, Pearl Wilson Abston . He leaves to mourn his passing many local and out-of-town family members and a host of friends. The body will lie in state at Woodhaven Funeral Home from 4-7 p.m. Thursday with the service to follow at 7 p.m., Pastor Tony McAfee and Rev. Don Hensley officiating. Family and friends will meet at 12:45 p.m. Friday at Lynch Bethel Cemetery for a 1 p.m. graveside service. In lieu of flowers, memorial donations may be made to Knoxville Rescue Mission. Arrangements by Woodhaven Funeral Home, 160 Edgemoor Rd., Claxton.
The Knoxville News-Sentinel - Thursday, October 5, 2000
======================
O.D. Abston, one of Appalachia's best-known folk artists, dies in Lake City at 98
The Knoxville News-Sentinel - Thursday, October 5, 2000
O.D. Abston , born the year the Wright Brothers flew the first airplane and one of the best-known folk artists in Appalachia, died Wednesday at Lake City Health Care Center at the age of 98.
Mr. Abston, born in Leonard, Texas, grew up in England Cove south of Cookeville, Tenn., on the Cumberland Plateau after being given to a foster family by his father.
Mr. Abston was never formally trained as an artist, but he learned lettering while traveling with a meat salesman in Texas. He painted his way across the West and finally into Knoxville in 1930.
In 1931, Mr. Abston, a deeply religious man, met World War I hero Sgt. Alvin York of Jamestown. York asked the artist to paint him a biblical scene of the Daniel in the lion's den. That painting is still in the York home in Jamestown.
That painting started Mr. Abston on the road to what would eventually make his reputation in the folk art world.
His paintings, usually on large roll-up canvases depicting a Sunday school lesson, wound up in churches across Tennessee.
He once painted a backdrop scene for the late Cas Walker's television show in Knoxville. That backdrop for the Knoxville grocer is now in the Museum of Appalachia Hall of Fame in Norris.
In addition to his artwork, Mr. Abston was also a musician who played frequently at the Museum of Appalachia. He also wrote his life story in 1988 in a book titled, "Story of God's Handwork."
Mr. Abston was a member of the Lake City Health Care Covenant Life Worship Center and had received the Inaugural Excellence in Ministry Award by the administration of Covenant Life Christian College of Lake City.
His wife, Pearl Morrow Abston, died about two years ago.
Funeral services will be at 7 p.m. today at McCarty's Woodhaven Chapel & Memorial Gardens, 160 Edgemoor in Claxton. He will lie in state from 4 to 7 p.m. today at the funeral home.
Burial will be at Lynch-Bethel Cemetery at 1 p.m. Friday, Oct. 6.
Memorials may be made to the Knoxville Rescue Mission.
================
The next article was published in the News Sentinel before his death in 2000...
O.D. ABSTON LOOKS TO THE HORIZON -- AND RECORDS HIS . . . VISION ON CANVAS
Knoxville News-Sentinel, The (TN) - Sunday, June 1, 1997
Author: FRED BROWN
O.D. Abston was born 94 years ago in Leonard, Texas, between Nobility and nowhere.
In 1903, the year the Wright Brothers flew the first airplane, Leonard was like most Texas prairie towns south of the Red River. It was at the end of a wagon-rutted road. Nobility was north, and Commerce was south, and the prairie grass blew in between.
A photograph of Leonard taken the year after O.D. was born shows a traffic jam of mule-drawn covered wagons and men on horseback. No automobiles. There weren't any. There weren't even any paved roads in Dallas. Abston knows, because he worked with the crew that took Dallas from dirt roads to highways.
His long life has swerved in a variety of directions, but he and God haven't quite finished figuring out what his final purpose is to be before he is through.
Until then, O.D. Abston will continue painting folk art. He also loves meeting new friends, which he says is better than having money. ``You can lose all of your money at once," he says, smiling at you from behind his near-century of experience. ``But you lose friends one at a time."
Abston has been earning a living painting in one form or another for longer than most people live.
Looking at his art, which is painted on large rolled-up, wrinkled canvases, is like looking into the pages of a Sunday school lesson.
But biblical stories do not represent all of his repertoire. Abston paints scenes from memory, many from his rough and ragged childhood. He was only 6 years old when his mother, Edna Burnfield, died in Leonard in 1909. The oldest of six children, O.D. was one of two to survive past childhood.
``When your mother dies, you lose your family," O.D. Abston says.
Because O.D.'s father, George Abston , worked cutting crossties and was away from home much of the time, he decided he could no longer take care of his boys.
So when O.D. was about 7 and his brother Ellis was about 5, their father gave them away.
O.D. was sent to a family south of Cookeville in England Cove, near Calfkiller River, where his father grew up. His brother was given to another family close by.
However, his father's orders were for the two families to keep the brothers apart until they were 21 years old. To this day, O.D. Abston does not know why his father made that stipulation, and his fading blue eyes cloud up when he thinks of that time long ago.
On that farm in England Cove, an area he describes as wild, O.D. believes he was given into slavery. He was worked unmercifully, as if he were a stock animal.
``They were unloving people, and a child needs love," he says. The prayers taught him by his mother helped him survive the ordeal, and he hasn't stopped praying since.
He recalls harsh Cumberland Plateau winter mornings when he was made to chop firewood at 2 a.m., or to haul water all day from a spring, and when he fell asleep from exhaustion, he was flogged with a braided whip.
The brothers were kept apart for about three years until an uncle came to check on them and saw the deplorable conditions the boys lived in. He contacted their grandmother back in Leonard and said he was sending them home.
The trip that freed the brothers took more than three days by train. At station depots along the way they were fed by railroad men who had been alerted by telegraph to look out for the boys.
But not even his return to Leonard could soften the hard edge of O.D.'s life. As a teenager during World War I, he was taken from school and put on road gangs and railroad crews to help fill in for men who were going to France to fight in the trenches.
O.D. spent his days slamming a hammer into railroad spikes and shoveling dirt, making way for cars.
``We worked with wagons, picks and shovels. That's how we got out of the mud. That will give you muscles," he says, looking down at his hands. ``That sort of work will make a man of you or a wreck."
Young and sledge-hammer hard, he returned to Tennessee believing that his father was dead, but his uncle took him to his father's house, and George Abston did not recognize the son standing before him, not even when the two played a game of checkers that night. It wasn't until the next day when John Abston , the same uncle who had rescued the brothers from slavery, told O.D.'s father who his guest was.
``My uncle pointed to a picture on the mantel of a boy and a dog. He said, `Who is that?' And my father said it was his boy who had left a long time ago.
``My uncle said, `Well, there he stands.'
``My father couldn't believe it." Neither could he look O.D. in the eye.
``But it was all right. I forgave him. It was hard in those days. Hard to make a living, and he didn't have a wife then.
``And, you can't make another dad.''
It was one of many memorable moments in O.D.'s life.
But, then, there have been many pages of experiences in his life: from working with a traveling roadside magician named Willard the Wizard to laboring in a meatpacking plant at the start of the Great Depression.
Through all of this, his talent for painting endured. Though O.D. Abston was never formally trained, he learned lettering while traveling with meat salesmen in Texas.
He lettered grocery storefront windows, painting in a ham or a vegetable for the proprietor. While traveling about, he got the idea that he might sell blocks of advertising space around the artwork.
``That was before radio or television advertising. I got the idea, and I'd sell these little blocks around. I started decorating windows. I could swing a brush pretty good. I'd draw crowds when I painted the windows,'' he says.
He painted his way up to Louisiana, Mississippi and West Tennessee before arriving in Knoxville about 1930.
In 1931, O.D. Abston met Sgt. Alvin York, one of America's great heroes.
The famous World War I soldier was so absorbed by Abston 's artwork that he asked if he would paint him a rendition of the biblical scene of the prophet Daniel in the lion's den.
The resulting painting still hangs in York's home in Jamestown, not far from the place Abston worked in slavery as a child.
It was that painting, O.D. says, that gave him the idea that he could paint large scenes.
So, in a way, York was instrumental in O.D.'s career as a fine artist.
Painting took him across the country to Augusta, Ga., in 1932, where he watched a performance of the National Symphony Orchestra in only its second year of operation under the baton of its founder, Hans Kindler.
He was there to paint backdrops for set scenery for the symphony.
``I listened as they twiddled and fiddled. And then the conductor is there,'' he says, as if he can hear the notes in his head even now.
``All that loose sound. And he gathers it up and organizes it. It is the most alluring thing I have ever seen."
He has thought about that scene many times over the past 60 years.
In everything he has ever done, O.D. Abston says, he has always learned a lesson.
And the lesson of Hans Kindler?
``There was all that sound. Like wild geese. How could he put that sound together? If I could just organize my paints like that, I could paint better pictures."
In 1932 in Knoxville, Abston also painted for a number of other enterprises and bakery companies before contracting with legendary grocer/entrepreneur/politician Cas Walker.
He painted a backdrop scene for the Cas Walker television show in Knoxville. That backdrop, says Museum of Appalachia creator John Rice Irwin, became so recognizable that just about everyone who has grown up in the region since the 1940s knows the scene. It now hangs in Irwin's Hall of Fame in Norris. Irwin also owns other Abston paintings, one of Walker's coonhound cemetery and a large mural of England Cove.
In 1982 at the end of the World's Fair in Knoxville, Abston didn't exactly retire.
He now paints in his small cinder block and wood studio beside his modest trailer home in Claxton.
Large canvases seem to materialize about every two years.
Not long ago, he painted a piece he entitled ``Beyond the Horizon."
It is based on a fishing trip he took in the 1940s. He became seasick and the ship's captain told him to grab the upper deck and not to look at the water but out at the horizon.
When he turned 88 years old, O.D. began thinking about people and the horizon line of life.
``I realized that all of our troubles are on the horizon line,'' says Abston .
``Your troubles are over,'' he adds, ``when you get above the horizon.''
Caption: photo
(Color) O.D Abston , 94, with a pastoral scene he painted on an outdoor panel at his home in Claxton. A painting he did for Sgt. Alvin York in 1931 convinced him he could paint large scenes.
Paul Efird/News-Sentinel staff; O.D. ABSTON
Edition: EDITION: Final
Section: Living
Page: E1
Column: Southern Voices/ Southern Voices
Index Terms: ARTISTS
Record Number: 1997152123
Copyright (c) 1997 The Knoxville News-Sentinel
The Knoxville News-Sentinel - Thursday, October 5, 2000
======================
O.D. Abston, one of Appalachia's best-known folk artists, dies in Lake City at 98
The Knoxville News-Sentinel - Thursday, October 5, 2000
O.D. Abston , born the year the Wright Brothers flew the first airplane and one of the best-known folk artists in Appalachia, died Wednesday at Lake City Health Care Center at the age of 98.
Mr. Abston, born in Leonard, Texas, grew up in England Cove south of Cookeville, Tenn., on the Cumberland Plateau after being given to a foster family by his father.
Mr. Abston was never formally trained as an artist, but he learned lettering while traveling with a meat salesman in Texas. He painted his way across the West and finally into Knoxville in 1930.
In 1931, Mr. Abston, a deeply religious man, met World War I hero Sgt. Alvin York of Jamestown. York asked the artist to paint him a biblical scene of the Daniel in the lion's den. That painting is still in the York home in Jamestown.
That painting started Mr. Abston on the road to what would eventually make his reputation in the folk art world.
His paintings, usually on large roll-up canvases depicting a Sunday school lesson, wound up in churches across Tennessee.
He once painted a backdrop scene for the late Cas Walker's television show in Knoxville. That backdrop for the Knoxville grocer is now in the Museum of Appalachia Hall of Fame in Norris.
In addition to his artwork, Mr. Abston was also a musician who played frequently at the Museum of Appalachia. He also wrote his life story in 1988 in a book titled, "Story of God's Handwork."
Mr. Abston was a member of the Lake City Health Care Covenant Life Worship Center and had received the Inaugural Excellence in Ministry Award by the administration of Covenant Life Christian College of Lake City.
His wife, Pearl Morrow Abston, died about two years ago.
Funeral services will be at 7 p.m. today at McCarty's Woodhaven Chapel & Memorial Gardens, 160 Edgemoor in Claxton. He will lie in state from 4 to 7 p.m. today at the funeral home.
Burial will be at Lynch-Bethel Cemetery at 1 p.m. Friday, Oct. 6.
Memorials may be made to the Knoxville Rescue Mission.
================
The next article was published in the News Sentinel before his death in 2000...
O.D. ABSTON LOOKS TO THE HORIZON -- AND RECORDS HIS . . . VISION ON CANVAS
Knoxville News-Sentinel, The (TN) - Sunday, June 1, 1997
Author: FRED BROWN
O.D. Abston was born 94 years ago in Leonard, Texas, between Nobility and nowhere.
In 1903, the year the Wright Brothers flew the first airplane, Leonard was like most Texas prairie towns south of the Red River. It was at the end of a wagon-rutted road. Nobility was north, and Commerce was south, and the prairie grass blew in between.
A photograph of Leonard taken the year after O.D. was born shows a traffic jam of mule-drawn covered wagons and men on horseback. No automobiles. There weren't any. There weren't even any paved roads in Dallas. Abston knows, because he worked with the crew that took Dallas from dirt roads to highways.
His long life has swerved in a variety of directions, but he and God haven't quite finished figuring out what his final purpose is to be before he is through.
Until then, O.D. Abston will continue painting folk art. He also loves meeting new friends, which he says is better than having money. ``You can lose all of your money at once," he says, smiling at you from behind his near-century of experience. ``But you lose friends one at a time."
Abston has been earning a living painting in one form or another for longer than most people live.
Looking at his art, which is painted on large rolled-up, wrinkled canvases, is like looking into the pages of a Sunday school lesson.
But biblical stories do not represent all of his repertoire. Abston paints scenes from memory, many from his rough and ragged childhood. He was only 6 years old when his mother, Edna Burnfield, died in Leonard in 1909. The oldest of six children, O.D. was one of two to survive past childhood.
``When your mother dies, you lose your family," O.D. Abston says.
Because O.D.'s father, George Abston , worked cutting crossties and was away from home much of the time, he decided he could no longer take care of his boys.
So when O.D. was about 7 and his brother Ellis was about 5, their father gave them away.
O.D. was sent to a family south of Cookeville in England Cove, near Calfkiller River, where his father grew up. His brother was given to another family close by.
However, his father's orders were for the two families to keep the brothers apart until they were 21 years old. To this day, O.D. Abston does not know why his father made that stipulation, and his fading blue eyes cloud up when he thinks of that time long ago.
On that farm in England Cove, an area he describes as wild, O.D. believes he was given into slavery. He was worked unmercifully, as if he were a stock animal.
``They were unloving people, and a child needs love," he says. The prayers taught him by his mother helped him survive the ordeal, and he hasn't stopped praying since.
He recalls harsh Cumberland Plateau winter mornings when he was made to chop firewood at 2 a.m., or to haul water all day from a spring, and when he fell asleep from exhaustion, he was flogged with a braided whip.
The brothers were kept apart for about three years until an uncle came to check on them and saw the deplorable conditions the boys lived in. He contacted their grandmother back in Leonard and said he was sending them home.
The trip that freed the brothers took more than three days by train. At station depots along the way they were fed by railroad men who had been alerted by telegraph to look out for the boys.
But not even his return to Leonard could soften the hard edge of O.D.'s life. As a teenager during World War I, he was taken from school and put on road gangs and railroad crews to help fill in for men who were going to France to fight in the trenches.
O.D. spent his days slamming a hammer into railroad spikes and shoveling dirt, making way for cars.
``We worked with wagons, picks and shovels. That's how we got out of the mud. That will give you muscles," he says, looking down at his hands. ``That sort of work will make a man of you or a wreck."
Young and sledge-hammer hard, he returned to Tennessee believing that his father was dead, but his uncle took him to his father's house, and George Abston did not recognize the son standing before him, not even when the two played a game of checkers that night. It wasn't until the next day when John Abston , the same uncle who had rescued the brothers from slavery, told O.D.'s father who his guest was.
``My uncle pointed to a picture on the mantel of a boy and a dog. He said, `Who is that?' And my father said it was his boy who had left a long time ago.
``My uncle said, `Well, there he stands.'
``My father couldn't believe it." Neither could he look O.D. in the eye.
``But it was all right. I forgave him. It was hard in those days. Hard to make a living, and he didn't have a wife then.
``And, you can't make another dad.''
It was one of many memorable moments in O.D.'s life.
But, then, there have been many pages of experiences in his life: from working with a traveling roadside magician named Willard the Wizard to laboring in a meatpacking plant at the start of the Great Depression.
Through all of this, his talent for painting endured. Though O.D. Abston was never formally trained, he learned lettering while traveling with meat salesmen in Texas.
He lettered grocery storefront windows, painting in a ham or a vegetable for the proprietor. While traveling about, he got the idea that he might sell blocks of advertising space around the artwork.
``That was before radio or television advertising. I got the idea, and I'd sell these little blocks around. I started decorating windows. I could swing a brush pretty good. I'd draw crowds when I painted the windows,'' he says.
He painted his way up to Louisiana, Mississippi and West Tennessee before arriving in Knoxville about 1930.
In 1931, O.D. Abston met Sgt. Alvin York, one of America's great heroes.
The famous World War I soldier was so absorbed by Abston 's artwork that he asked if he would paint him a rendition of the biblical scene of the prophet Daniel in the lion's den.
The resulting painting still hangs in York's home in Jamestown, not far from the place Abston worked in slavery as a child.
It was that painting, O.D. says, that gave him the idea that he could paint large scenes.
So, in a way, York was instrumental in O.D.'s career as a fine artist.
Painting took him across the country to Augusta, Ga., in 1932, where he watched a performance of the National Symphony Orchestra in only its second year of operation under the baton of its founder, Hans Kindler.
He was there to paint backdrops for set scenery for the symphony.
``I listened as they twiddled and fiddled. And then the conductor is there,'' he says, as if he can hear the notes in his head even now.
``All that loose sound. And he gathers it up and organizes it. It is the most alluring thing I have ever seen."
He has thought about that scene many times over the past 60 years.
In everything he has ever done, O.D. Abston says, he has always learned a lesson.
And the lesson of Hans Kindler?
``There was all that sound. Like wild geese. How could he put that sound together? If I could just organize my paints like that, I could paint better pictures."
In 1932 in Knoxville, Abston also painted for a number of other enterprises and bakery companies before contracting with legendary grocer/entrepreneur/politician Cas Walker.
He painted a backdrop scene for the Cas Walker television show in Knoxville. That backdrop, says Museum of Appalachia creator John Rice Irwin, became so recognizable that just about everyone who has grown up in the region since the 1940s knows the scene. It now hangs in Irwin's Hall of Fame in Norris. Irwin also owns other Abston paintings, one of Walker's coonhound cemetery and a large mural of England Cove.
In 1982 at the end of the World's Fair in Knoxville, Abston didn't exactly retire.
He now paints in his small cinder block and wood studio beside his modest trailer home in Claxton.
Large canvases seem to materialize about every two years.
Not long ago, he painted a piece he entitled ``Beyond the Horizon."
It is based on a fishing trip he took in the 1940s. He became seasick and the ship's captain told him to grab the upper deck and not to look at the water but out at the horizon.
When he turned 88 years old, O.D. began thinking about people and the horizon line of life.
``I realized that all of our troubles are on the horizon line,'' says Abston .
``Your troubles are over,'' he adds, ``when you get above the horizon.''
Caption: photo
(Color) O.D Abston , 94, with a pastoral scene he painted on an outdoor panel at his home in Claxton. A painting he did for Sgt. Alvin York in 1931 convinced him he could paint large scenes.
Paul Efird/News-Sentinel staff; O.D. ABSTON
Edition: EDITION: Final
Section: Living
Page: E1
Column: Southern Voices/ Southern Voices
Index Terms: ARTISTS
Record Number: 1997152123
Copyright (c) 1997 The Knoxville News-Sentinel
ABSTON , O.D. - age 98, of Powell, went to be with the Lord Wednesday, October 4, 2000, at Lake City Health Care Center. He was a member of the Covenant Life Worship Center. He received the inaugural Excellence in Ministry Award by the Administration of Covenant Life Christian College. He was a very talented artist, his work can be seen at the Museum of Appalachia, Ciderville and many churches both locally and throughout Tennessee. His enjoyment of music was heard in his mandolin playing. Preceded in death by loving wife, Pearl Wilson Abston . He leaves to mourn his passing many local and out-of-town family members and a host of friends. The body will lie in state at Woodhaven Funeral Home from 4-7 p.m. Thursday with the service to follow at 7 p.m., Pastor Tony McAfee and Rev. Don Hensley officiating. Family and friends will meet at 12:45 p.m. Friday at Lynch Bethel Cemetery for a 1 p.m. graveside service. In lieu of flowers, memorial donations may be made to Knoxville Rescue Mission. Arrangements by Woodhaven Funeral Home, 160 Edgemoor Rd., Claxton.
The Knoxville News-Sentinel - Thursday, October 5, 2000
======================
O.D. Abston, one of Appalachia's best-known folk artists, dies in Lake City at 98
The Knoxville News-Sentinel - Thursday, October 5, 2000
O.D. Abston , born the year the Wright Brothers flew the first airplane and one of the best-known folk artists in Appalachia, died Wednesday at Lake City Health Care Center at the age of 98.
Mr. Abston, born in Leonard, Texas, grew up in England Cove south of Cookeville, Tenn., on the Cumberland Plateau after being given to a foster family by his father.
Mr. Abston was never formally trained as an artist, but he learned lettering while traveling with a meat salesman in Texas. He painted his way across the West and finally into Knoxville in 1930.
In 1931, Mr. Abston, a deeply religious man, met World War I hero Sgt. Alvin York of Jamestown. York asked the artist to paint him a biblical scene of the Daniel in the lion's den. That painting is still in the York home in Jamestown.
That painting started Mr. Abston on the road to what would eventually make his reputation in the folk art world.
His paintings, usually on large roll-up canvases depicting a Sunday school lesson, wound up in churches across Tennessee.
He once painted a backdrop scene for the late Cas Walker's television show in Knoxville. That backdrop for the Knoxville grocer is now in the Museum of Appalachia Hall of Fame in Norris.
In addition to his artwork, Mr. Abston was also a musician who played frequently at the Museum of Appalachia. He also wrote his life story in 1988 in a book titled, "Story of God's Handwork."
Mr. Abston was a member of the Lake City Health Care Covenant Life Worship Center and had received the Inaugural Excellence in Ministry Award by the administration of Covenant Life Christian College of Lake City.
His wife, Pearl Morrow Abston, died about two years ago.
Funeral services will be at 7 p.m. today at McCarty's Woodhaven Chapel & Memorial Gardens, 160 Edgemoor in Claxton. He will lie in state from 4 to 7 p.m. today at the funeral home.
Burial will be at Lynch-Bethel Cemetery at 1 p.m. Friday, Oct. 6.
Memorials may be made to the Knoxville Rescue Mission.
================
The next article was published in the News Sentinel before his death in 2000...
O.D. ABSTON LOOKS TO THE HORIZON -- AND RECORDS HIS . . . VISION ON CANVAS
Knoxville News-Sentinel, The (TN) - Sunday, June 1, 1997
Author: FRED BROWN
O.D. Abston was born 94 years ago in Leonard, Texas, between Nobility and nowhere.
In 1903, the year the Wright Brothers flew the first airplane, Leonard was like most Texas prairie towns south of the Red River. It was at the end of a wagon-rutted road. Nobility was north, and Commerce was south, and the prairie grass blew in between.
A photograph of Leonard taken the year after O.D. was born shows a traffic jam of mule-drawn covered wagons and men on horseback. No automobiles. There weren't any. There weren't even any paved roads in Dallas. Abston knows, because he worked with the crew that took Dallas from dirt roads to highways.
His long life has swerved in a variety of directions, but he and God haven't quite finished figuring out what his final purpose is to be before he is through.
Until then, O.D. Abston will continue painting folk art. He also loves meeting new friends, which he says is better than having money. ``You can lose all of your money at once," he says, smiling at you from behind his near-century of experience. ``But you lose friends one at a time."
Abston has been earning a living painting in one form or another for longer than most people live.
Looking at his art, which is painted on large rolled-up, wrinkled canvases, is like looking into the pages of a Sunday school lesson.
But biblical stories do not represent all of his repertoire. Abston paints scenes from memory, many from his rough and ragged childhood. He was only 6 years old when his mother, Edna Burnfield, died in Leonard in 1909. The oldest of six children, O.D. was one of two to survive past childhood.
``When your mother dies, you lose your family," O.D. Abston says.
Because O.D.'s father, George Abston , worked cutting crossties and was away from home much of the time, he decided he could no longer take care of his boys.
So when O.D. was about 7 and his brother Ellis was about 5, their father gave them away.
O.D. was sent to a family south of Cookeville in England Cove, near Calfkiller River, where his father grew up. His brother was given to another family close by.
However, his father's orders were for the two families to keep the brothers apart until they were 21 years old. To this day, O.D. Abston does not know why his father made that stipulation, and his fading blue eyes cloud up when he thinks of that time long ago.
On that farm in England Cove, an area he describes as wild, O.D. believes he was given into slavery. He was worked unmercifully, as if he were a stock animal.
``They were unloving people, and a child needs love," he says. The prayers taught him by his mother helped him survive the ordeal, and he hasn't stopped praying since.
He recalls harsh Cumberland Plateau winter mornings when he was made to chop firewood at 2 a.m., or to haul water all day from a spring, and when he fell asleep from exhaustion, he was flogged with a braided whip.
The brothers were kept apart for about three years until an uncle came to check on them and saw the deplorable conditions the boys lived in. He contacted their grandmother back in Leonard and said he was sending them home.
The trip that freed the brothers took more than three days by train. At station depots along the way they were fed by railroad men who had been alerted by telegraph to look out for the boys.
But not even his return to Leonard could soften the hard edge of O.D.'s life. As a teenager during World War I, he was taken from school and put on road gangs and railroad crews to help fill in for men who were going to France to fight in the trenches.
O.D. spent his days slamming a hammer into railroad spikes and shoveling dirt, making way for cars.
``We worked with wagons, picks and shovels. That's how we got out of the mud. That will give you muscles," he says, looking down at his hands. ``That sort of work will make a man of you or a wreck."
Young and sledge-hammer hard, he returned to Tennessee believing that his father was dead, but his uncle took him to his father's house, and George Abston did not recognize the son standing before him, not even when the two played a game of checkers that night. It wasn't until the next day when John Abston , the same uncle who had rescued the brothers from slavery, told O.D.'s father who his guest was.
``My uncle pointed to a picture on the mantel of a boy and a dog. He said, `Who is that?' And my father said it was his boy who had left a long time ago.
``My uncle said, `Well, there he stands.'
``My father couldn't believe it." Neither could he look O.D. in the eye.
``But it was all right. I forgave him. It was hard in those days. Hard to make a living, and he didn't have a wife then.
``And, you can't make another dad.''
It was one of many memorable moments in O.D.'s life.
But, then, there have been many pages of experiences in his life: from working with a traveling roadside magician named Willard the Wizard to laboring in a meatpacking plant at the start of the Great Depression.
Through all of this, his talent for painting endured. Though O.D. Abston was never formally trained, he learned lettering while traveling with meat salesmen in Texas.
He lettered grocery storefront windows, painting in a ham or a vegetable for the proprietor. While traveling about, he got the idea that he might sell blocks of advertising space around the artwork.
``That was before radio or television advertising. I got the idea, and I'd sell these little blocks around. I started decorating windows. I could swing a brush pretty good. I'd draw crowds when I painted the windows,'' he says.
He painted his way up to Louisiana, Mississippi and West Tennessee before arriving in Knoxville about 1930.
In 1931, O.D. Abston met Sgt. Alvin York, one of America's great heroes.
The famous World War I soldier was so absorbed by Abston 's artwork that he asked if he would paint him a rendition of the biblical scene of the prophet Daniel in the lion's den.
The resulting painting still hangs in York's home in Jamestown, not far from the place Abston worked in slavery as a child.
It was that painting, O.D. says, that gave him the idea that he could paint large scenes.
So, in a way, York was instrumental in O.D.'s career as a fine artist.
Painting took him across the country to Augusta, Ga., in 1932, where he watched a performance of the National Symphony Orchestra in only its second year of operation under the baton of its founder, Hans Kindler.
He was there to paint backdrops for set scenery for the symphony.
``I listened as they twiddled and fiddled. And then the conductor is there,'' he says, as if he can hear the notes in his head even now.
``All that loose sound. And he gathers it up and organizes it. It is the most alluring thing I have ever seen."
He has thought about that scene many times over the past 60 years.
In everything he has ever done, O.D. Abston says, he has always learned a lesson.
And the lesson of Hans Kindler?
``There was all that sound. Like wild geese. How could he put that sound together? If I could just organize my paints like that, I could paint better pictures."
In 1932 in Knoxville, Abston also painted for a number of other enterprises and bakery companies before contracting with legendary grocer/entrepreneur/politician Cas Walker.
He painted a backdrop scene for the Cas Walker television show in Knoxville. That backdrop, says Museum of Appalachia creator John Rice Irwin, became so recognizable that just about everyone who has grown up in the region since the 1940s knows the scene. It now hangs in Irwin's Hall of Fame in Norris. Irwin also owns other Abston paintings, one of Walker's coonhound cemetery and a large mural of England Cove.
In 1982 at the end of the World's Fair in Knoxville, Abston didn't exactly retire.
He now paints in his small cinder block and wood studio beside his modest trailer home in Claxton.
Large canvases seem to materialize about every two years.
Not long ago, he painted a piece he entitled ``Beyond the Horizon."
It is based on a fishing trip he took in the 1940s. He became seasick and the ship's captain told him to grab the upper deck and not to look at the water but out at the horizon.
When he turned 88 years old, O.D. began thinking about people and the horizon line of life.
``I realized that all of our troubles are on the horizon line,'' says Abston .
``Your troubles are over,'' he adds, ``when you get above the horizon.''
Caption: photo
(Color) O.D Abston , 94, with a pastoral scene he painted on an outdoor panel at his home in Claxton. A painting he did for Sgt. Alvin York in 1931 convinced him he could paint large scenes.
Paul Efird/News-Sentinel staff; O.D. ABSTON
Edition: EDITION: Final
Section: Living
Page: E1
Column: Southern Voices/ Southern Voices
Index Terms: ARTISTS
Record Number: 1997152123
Copyright (c) 1997 The Knoxville News-Sentinel
The Knoxville News-Sentinel - Thursday, October 5, 2000
======================
O.D. Abston, one of Appalachia's best-known folk artists, dies in Lake City at 98
The Knoxville News-Sentinel - Thursday, October 5, 2000
O.D. Abston , born the year the Wright Brothers flew the first airplane and one of the best-known folk artists in Appalachia, died Wednesday at Lake City Health Care Center at the age of 98.
Mr. Abston, born in Leonard, Texas, grew up in England Cove south of Cookeville, Tenn., on the Cumberland Plateau after being given to a foster family by his father.
Mr. Abston was never formally trained as an artist, but he learned lettering while traveling with a meat salesman in Texas. He painted his way across the West and finally into Knoxville in 1930.
In 1931, Mr. Abston, a deeply religious man, met World War I hero Sgt. Alvin York of Jamestown. York asked the artist to paint him a biblical scene of the Daniel in the lion's den. That painting is still in the York home in Jamestown.
That painting started Mr. Abston on the road to what would eventually make his reputation in the folk art world.
His paintings, usually on large roll-up canvases depicting a Sunday school lesson, wound up in churches across Tennessee.
He once painted a backdrop scene for the late Cas Walker's television show in Knoxville. That backdrop for the Knoxville grocer is now in the Museum of Appalachia Hall of Fame in Norris.
In addition to his artwork, Mr. Abston was also a musician who played frequently at the Museum of Appalachia. He also wrote his life story in 1988 in a book titled, "Story of God's Handwork."
Mr. Abston was a member of the Lake City Health Care Covenant Life Worship Center and had received the Inaugural Excellence in Ministry Award by the administration of Covenant Life Christian College of Lake City.
His wife, Pearl Morrow Abston, died about two years ago.
Funeral services will be at 7 p.m. today at McCarty's Woodhaven Chapel & Memorial Gardens, 160 Edgemoor in Claxton. He will lie in state from 4 to 7 p.m. today at the funeral home.
Burial will be at Lynch-Bethel Cemetery at 1 p.m. Friday, Oct. 6.
Memorials may be made to the Knoxville Rescue Mission.
================
The next article was published in the News Sentinel before his death in 2000...
O.D. ABSTON LOOKS TO THE HORIZON -- AND RECORDS HIS . . . VISION ON CANVAS
Knoxville News-Sentinel, The (TN) - Sunday, June 1, 1997
Author: FRED BROWN
O.D. Abston was born 94 years ago in Leonard, Texas, between Nobility and nowhere.
In 1903, the year the Wright Brothers flew the first airplane, Leonard was like most Texas prairie towns south of the Red River. It was at the end of a wagon-rutted road. Nobility was north, and Commerce was south, and the prairie grass blew in between.
A photograph of Leonard taken the year after O.D. was born shows a traffic jam of mule-drawn covered wagons and men on horseback. No automobiles. There weren't any. There weren't even any paved roads in Dallas. Abston knows, because he worked with the crew that took Dallas from dirt roads to highways.
His long life has swerved in a variety of directions, but he and God haven't quite finished figuring out what his final purpose is to be before he is through.
Until then, O.D. Abston will continue painting folk art. He also loves meeting new friends, which he says is better than having money. ``You can lose all of your money at once," he says, smiling at you from behind his near-century of experience. ``But you lose friends one at a time."
Abston has been earning a living painting in one form or another for longer than most people live.
Looking at his art, which is painted on large rolled-up, wrinkled canvases, is like looking into the pages of a Sunday school lesson.
But biblical stories do not represent all of his repertoire. Abston paints scenes from memory, many from his rough and ragged childhood. He was only 6 years old when his mother, Edna Burnfield, died in Leonard in 1909. The oldest of six children, O.D. was one of two to survive past childhood.
``When your mother dies, you lose your family," O.D. Abston says.
Because O.D.'s father, George Abston , worked cutting crossties and was away from home much of the time, he decided he could no longer take care of his boys.
So when O.D. was about 7 and his brother Ellis was about 5, their father gave them away.
O.D. was sent to a family south of Cookeville in England Cove, near Calfkiller River, where his father grew up. His brother was given to another family close by.
However, his father's orders were for the two families to keep the brothers apart until they were 21 years old. To this day, O.D. Abston does not know why his father made that stipulation, and his fading blue eyes cloud up when he thinks of that time long ago.
On that farm in England Cove, an area he describes as wild, O.D. believes he was given into slavery. He was worked unmercifully, as if he were a stock animal.
``They were unloving people, and a child needs love," he says. The prayers taught him by his mother helped him survive the ordeal, and he hasn't stopped praying since.
He recalls harsh Cumberland Plateau winter mornings when he was made to chop firewood at 2 a.m., or to haul water all day from a spring, and when he fell asleep from exhaustion, he was flogged with a braided whip.
The brothers were kept apart for about three years until an uncle came to check on them and saw the deplorable conditions the boys lived in. He contacted their grandmother back in Leonard and said he was sending them home.
The trip that freed the brothers took more than three days by train. At station depots along the way they were fed by railroad men who had been alerted by telegraph to look out for the boys.
But not even his return to Leonard could soften the hard edge of O.D.'s life. As a teenager during World War I, he was taken from school and put on road gangs and railroad crews to help fill in for men who were going to France to fight in the trenches.
O.D. spent his days slamming a hammer into railroad spikes and shoveling dirt, making way for cars.
``We worked with wagons, picks and shovels. That's how we got out of the mud. That will give you muscles," he says, looking down at his hands. ``That sort of work will make a man of you or a wreck."
Young and sledge-hammer hard, he returned to Tennessee believing that his father was dead, but his uncle took him to his father's house, and George Abston did not recognize the son standing before him, not even when the two played a game of checkers that night. It wasn't until the next day when John Abston , the same uncle who had rescued the brothers from slavery, told O.D.'s father who his guest was.
``My uncle pointed to a picture on the mantel of a boy and a dog. He said, `Who is that?' And my father said it was his boy who had left a long time ago.
``My uncle said, `Well, there he stands.'
``My father couldn't believe it." Neither could he look O.D. in the eye.
``But it was all right. I forgave him. It was hard in those days. Hard to make a living, and he didn't have a wife then.
``And, you can't make another dad.''
It was one of many memorable moments in O.D.'s life.
But, then, there have been many pages of experiences in his life: from working with a traveling roadside magician named Willard the Wizard to laboring in a meatpacking plant at the start of the Great Depression.
Through all of this, his talent for painting endured. Though O.D. Abston was never formally trained, he learned lettering while traveling with meat salesmen in Texas.
He lettered grocery storefront windows, painting in a ham or a vegetable for the proprietor. While traveling about, he got the idea that he might sell blocks of advertising space around the artwork.
``That was before radio or television advertising. I got the idea, and I'd sell these little blocks around. I started decorating windows. I could swing a brush pretty good. I'd draw crowds when I painted the windows,'' he says.
He painted his way up to Louisiana, Mississippi and West Tennessee before arriving in Knoxville about 1930.
In 1931, O.D. Abston met Sgt. Alvin York, one of America's great heroes.
The famous World War I soldier was so absorbed by Abston 's artwork that he asked if he would paint him a rendition of the biblical scene of the prophet Daniel in the lion's den.
The resulting painting still hangs in York's home in Jamestown, not far from the place Abston worked in slavery as a child.
It was that painting, O.D. says, that gave him the idea that he could paint large scenes.
So, in a way, York was instrumental in O.D.'s career as a fine artist.
Painting took him across the country to Augusta, Ga., in 1932, where he watched a performance of the National Symphony Orchestra in only its second year of operation under the baton of its founder, Hans Kindler.
He was there to paint backdrops for set scenery for the symphony.
``I listened as they twiddled and fiddled. And then the conductor is there,'' he says, as if he can hear the notes in his head even now.
``All that loose sound. And he gathers it up and organizes it. It is the most alluring thing I have ever seen."
He has thought about that scene many times over the past 60 years.
In everything he has ever done, O.D. Abston says, he has always learned a lesson.
And the lesson of Hans Kindler?
``There was all that sound. Like wild geese. How could he put that sound together? If I could just organize my paints like that, I could paint better pictures."
In 1932 in Knoxville, Abston also painted for a number of other enterprises and bakery companies before contracting with legendary grocer/entrepreneur/politician Cas Walker.
He painted a backdrop scene for the Cas Walker television show in Knoxville. That backdrop, says Museum of Appalachia creator John Rice Irwin, became so recognizable that just about everyone who has grown up in the region since the 1940s knows the scene. It now hangs in Irwin's Hall of Fame in Norris. Irwin also owns other Abston paintings, one of Walker's coonhound cemetery and a large mural of England Cove.
In 1982 at the end of the World's Fair in Knoxville, Abston didn't exactly retire.
He now paints in his small cinder block and wood studio beside his modest trailer home in Claxton.
Large canvases seem to materialize about every two years.
Not long ago, he painted a piece he entitled ``Beyond the Horizon."
It is based on a fishing trip he took in the 1940s. He became seasick and the ship's captain told him to grab the upper deck and not to look at the water but out at the horizon.
When he turned 88 years old, O.D. began thinking about people and the horizon line of life.
``I realized that all of our troubles are on the horizon line,'' says Abston .
``Your troubles are over,'' he adds, ``when you get above the horizon.''
Caption: photo
(Color) O.D Abston , 94, with a pastoral scene he painted on an outdoor panel at his home in Claxton. A painting he did for Sgt. Alvin York in 1931 convinced him he could paint large scenes.
Paul Efird/News-Sentinel staff; O.D. ABSTON
Edition: EDITION: Final
Section: Living
Page: E1
Column: Southern Voices/ Southern Voices
Index Terms: ARTISTS
Record Number: 1997152123
Copyright (c) 1997 The Knoxville News-Sentinel
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