LINWOOD — This story begins with a little girl who dreamed of being an artist.She would lie on her bed and nightdream,
she calls it, of her first exhibit. She visualized the inside of the gallery and what her
paintings would look like hanging on the walls.
Night after night, she called up
the images in her mind. She could see big studio lights shining on her work, showcasing
her portraits and landscape scenes.
She would be a good artist, she
dreamed. She would bring people and places to life.
The little girl had been given a
special talent from God, and she would share it with the world. Or so the nightdreams
went.
In real life, Rita Amyotte’s
art started out as doodles.
Growing up in Spartanburg, S.C.,
all she wanted to do was draw. “I started when I was knee-high to a little bullfrog,
I tell people,” she says, “and it just continued to grow and grow.”
The older she got, the more she
drew. “It was nothing for me to be sitting in high school sketching someone across
the room when class got boring,” she says.
After graduation, she was accepted
to a fashion and illustration school in Florida. Her grandmother offered to pay part of
the tuition, but Amyotte couldn’t afford the rest.
“Oh, my whole life’s
crushing down on me,” she thought at the time. “But it didn’t. Life goes
on.
“I feel like God was trying
to tell me, ‘Rita, honey, it’s not the time. It’s not the time.’”
Disappointed, but not defeated,
Amyotte began reading about art. She started with books for beginners and read everything
she could find about different styles and techniques.
“My philosophy is read, read
and read,” she says. “I’ve learned more out of books than I have
anything.”
Step by step, the books taught her
how to draw and paint portraits, landscapes and still life. She read books on photography
and took pictures to use in her work.
In 1991, she studied under Pamela
Rattray Brown, a well-known artist in her hometown.
Amyotte admired Brown’s work.
“When you looked at it, it’s like it was real,” she says. “You could
actually reach out and touch it.”
When Amyotte asked Brown how she
did it, she said, “Rita, that is watercolor.”
“I’d always painted in
oils, acrylics, anything that I could get my hands on,” she says. “But I had
never used watercolor until I went to Pam Brown.”
The key, she says, was learning
how to control the paint.
“It’s like dripping
Kool-aid on your kid’s white T-shirt,” she says. “If you don’t do
something with it quickly, it’s going to stain and will not come out.”
After she had learned all she
thought she could from Brown, Amyotte began studying under Jean Southers Jones. Another
watercolor artist, Jones did more impressionistic paintings.
“Her color, it kind of jumps
out at you,” Amyotte says. After working with her, “my paintings came to life
even more.”
It was during this time that
Amyotte started her own business doing commercial and commissioned artwork. She continued
painting on her own ,as well.
She used friends’ children
and grandchildren as models. Sometimes, she took photographs of strangers to use in her
paintings.
Others, she painted from memory.
Some brought back memories.
One, of two little girls gazing
out a window, took her back to a time when she and her sister, Gail, used to talk about
what they wanted to be when they grew up.
“I’m going to be a
nurse,” Gail would say. “I said, ‘I’m going to be an artist one
day,’” Amyotte says. “Just you wait and see.”
Years passed, and commercial and
commissioned work continued to come in.
In 1991, a scuba diver friend
asked her to paint a sunken ship using only his descriptions and the ship’s
blueprints to go by. She told him she would do it for $100.
Amyotte had the blueprints spread
out for three and a half months. The friend monitored her progress, telling her what to
add. “He was so meticulous,” she says.
When Amyotte was done, she told
him, “Danny, this thing is worth a lot more than any $100.”
He offered to pay more, but she
wouldn’t take it. “I was brought up to keep my word,” she says.
Last year, Amyotte decided to try
to paint the ship again. It took her two days.
“I remembered,” she
says. “I knew every crease and cranny on that thing, and I called it
‘Danny’s Dream’ after Danny.”
The painting hangs over her desk
in the living room she uses as a studio in her home across from High Rock Lake. Other
paintings she has done through the years are displayed throughout the room.
Some of her paintings hang on the
office walls of Dr. Jonathan Hinson in Lexington, as well as a coffee shop in Asheboro and
an accounting office in Inman, S.C., where her grandmother lives.
Photographs of her work fill the
pages of Amyotte’s portfolio. The first pages cover her commercial work —
including designs she did for the South Carolina governor’s office, the Boy Scouts of
America and the Gaston County Trade and Tourism Department.
She pauses at a photograph of a
painting of a man holding his first grandchild to his chest. The man had been dead 10
years when his daughter gave Amyotte a Polaroid picture of him.
The photograph was out of focus,
and in it, the man’s skin was washed out. “She said. “Rita, unfortunately,
this is all we have of Dad,’” she says.
Amyotte asked questions about her
father. She found out he loved to work in his garden, so she added some sun on his face.
“We worked together,”
she says, “and that’s how I brought him to life.”
“You want to meet my
grandmother back home?” Amyotte asks as she turns the page. “I’m like an
author. I tell stories with my paintings.”
A large rooster is in the
foreground of the photograph of the painting of her grandmother.
“It’s Mamaw’s
rooster,” she says. “She called it ‘Chow Chow’ because she said it
would walk her to her mailbox and it would go, ‘Chow, chow chow, chow chow chow
chow.’”
On the opposite page is her late
grandfather, sitting in front of an old country store where he congregated with the other
men in the community to gossip and play checkers. “This is the way I remember
Papaw,” she says.
In another photograph, she
captures the painting she did of Mark Amyotte, the man she married eight years ago.
He grew up in upstate New York,
but was stationed in Charleston when he was in the Navy. Mark Amyotte returned to South
Carolina when he got out of the service and went to work for Southern Norfolk Railroad.
“That’s how we
met,” she says.
Three years into the marriage, the
results of a routine Pap smear indicated something was wrong. Amyotte had cancer.
She was 4 years old when she first
heard the word. A knot arose on her mother’s forehead, and she began complaining of
severe headaches.
Doctors discovered that melanoma
had developed in her skin and spread to the brain. Thirty-two years and 46 surgeries
later, including extensive removal of tissue from the top of her forehead to her neck
area, Amyotte’s mother is a cancer survivor.
Her paternal grandmother had colon
cancer, and her maternal grandfather died of a brain tumor.
“Growing up, you didn’t
ask, ‘Will I have it?’” she says. “You asked, ‘When is it going
to be my turn?’”
Amyotte’s sister, Gail, her
only sibling, was diagnosed with cervical cancer a few years before she was. She
didn’t follow the doctor’s recommendation for treatment, Amyotte says, and
“last year, he told her it could very well be killing her.”
The treatment, as Amyotte found,
was a complete hysterectomy to curb the spread. The doctor told her the cancer could
return within five years.
It took only two.
The Amyottes had moved to Davidson
County when the disease reappeared. Mark had transferred to Linwood to a job with the
railroad that wouldn’t require as much travel.
“We fell in love with the
area,” she says. “It was like taking a trip back in time.”
Rita Amyotte was put on an oral
cancer drug for six months. It made her feel nauseous, and she didn’t have the energy
to do anything.
“You feel just like an old
blanket on the couch,” she says.
Amyotte had been off the drug only
a few months when she had her first solo exhibition at the Davidson County Museum of Art,
in April 1997.
“The reality of it
didn’t hit until I walked in and my work was hanging on the walls,” she says.
“It was like deja vu. I’ve been here before.”
Then she told her husband about
the nightdreams. “This is exactly the way it looked,” she told him. “Can
you believe it? God gave me my dream.”
Later that year, Amyotte’s
doctor put her back on the cancer drug for nine months. She had already committed to do
her second exhibition, this one at the United Arts Council of Rowan County in November of
1997. With Mark’s help, She went ahead with it even though she was sick from the
drug.
After finishing the treatment this
time, Amyotte posed a crucial question to her husband.
“Mark, do you believe in me
and my work?” she asked. “How much do you believe in me and my work,” she
continued before he could answer.
“You want to make your first
print, don’t you,” he responded.
The painting she decided on was of
the Sheets Farm, located on Shemwell Highway about two miles from their house. She had
painted it a year before after owner Mary Ruth Sheets had met Amyotte at church and
invited her to visit.
It’s a live, working farm,
Amyotte says, in a day and age when there aren’t many of them left.
“It was like a step back in
time to when I was a little girl,” she says of her visit to the farm. “When
we’re growing up, we’re fighting so hard to outgrow our childhood. We say,
‘When I grew up, I’m going to move away from here’ and so on and so on.
“Then when we become adults,
every person is fighting so hard to go back to some of those warm, wonderful memories we
had as children.”
Amyotte took photograph after
photograph of the Sheets farm, trying to capture the variations in light. She settled on
the light at the end of the day and named the painting, “Sheets Farm at Day’s
End.”
Hall Printing Co. of High Point,
which has done prints for artists Bob Timberlake and Dempsey Essick, did her prints last
year.
The 25 artist proofs and 25
remarques, on each of which she does a tiny painting on the bottom, have all been sold.
About 400 of the numbered and signed prints are still available for $50 each.
Amyotte designated 15 prints to
donate to various charities and organizations to help them raise money for programs. She
donated one to the Rowan County Arts Council, which raffled it off during the recent
Uniquely Rowan Festival as a fund-raiser.
“To me, this was a way of
giving back something to the community,” she says, “as well as to God to say,
‘Thank you, Lord, for giving me such a special blessing.’”
Today, Rita Amyotte, at age 36, is
planning her second print and trying to enjoy every moment of her life.
“I don’t take anything
for granted,” she says. “I appreciate everything. I wish to God I had never had
cancer, but it may help me to reach others to show them that life is precious.”
It’s easy to get caught up in
everything that’s wrong with the world, Amyotte says, but she chooses to concentrate
on the positives.
“Look at what God has given
us,” she says. “Look across at the lake, the peace, the beauty.”
Her paintings, she says, are her
way of adding even more beauty to the world.
When she is doing a painting,
Amyotte says, she prays for God to help her.
“Help my eyes to be able to
see what I need to be able to see,” she prays, “and help my hands to be able to
do what I need to do. Help my heart to feel what I need to feel to bring those feelings
out.”
And when she gets stuck, Amyotte
says she gets down on her knees. “Please help me,” she says. “I don’t
know what I’m doing here. I can’t do it by myself.
“When I go back to my
painting, it all starts to come to me.”
To order “Sheets Farm at
Day’s End” or to inquire about commissioned work, call Amyotte at (336)
357-7152. |
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