By Kathy Chaffin
kchaffin@salisburypost.com
Sometimes, a painting has the power to draw you in.
It can catch your eye when you’re walking down the sidewalk, and you find yourself walking into a gallery even though you’re already late getting back to work. You stand in front of it, mesmerized by the color, the depth, the absolute stillness.
David Rowland’s paintings are like that.
The bark on his trees looks so real you instinctively reach to touch it until you catch yourself and pull back your hand. The mood of his scenes are so intense, you feel yourself standing behind a lone cowboy on a massive rock.
And just for a second, you become the cowboy, looking out at a majestic sky.
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David Rowland’s mother used to say he was born with a paintbrush in his hand.
As a toddler, he used shoe polish to paint black polka dots across one side of his grandmother’s white clapboard house in Concord.
Though he got in trouble when a passerby saw what he was doing and told his grandmother, it didn’t stop Rowland from continuing to use her house as a canvas.
The next time, he solicited the help of his cousin, and together, they made a mud puddle and used the wet dirt to cover the house with hand prints. This time, their punishment was to wash it clean.
It wasn’t until Rowland painted a neighbor’s dog green that he faced more serious consequences.
“The neighbor told my mother that if she didn’t whip me, she was going to even if she had to go to jail,” he says.
After starting school, Rowland continued his artwork in classes. When teachers picked students’ drawings to display at the front of the classroom, he says they oftentimes picked his.
In high school, his father paid for him to take a correspondence course through the Washington School of Art, after which he won an honorable mention in a students’ art show in New York.
“It was called ‘Dying Day,’ ” he says, “and it was a tree on a rock with a sunset behind it. Even then, I was painting trees and rocks.”
Rowland’s art continued to receive attention. He won several contests and even sold his first painting ó a nude ó to a friend of his sister.
It wasn’t, however, until a high school aptitude test showed that Rowland was best suited for art that he considered pursuing it as a career.
After graduating from high school in 1974, he started taking classes at the Art Institute of Atlanta, but got homesick and came back to North Carolina.
Rowland continued painting, joining the Cabarrus Art Guild.
“We had juried art exhibit shows at the library and mall,” he says. “I won Best of Show one year.”
The painting was of a goldfish in a lily pond, inspired by a photograph Rowland took in California.
“I loved it,” he says. “It was one of my favorite paintings. As a matter of fact, I still have it, and that was in the ’70s.”
The second painting he sold was of a kitten looking out of a window. It brought $75 at a Cabarrus Art Guild outdoor show.
While continuing to paint on the side, Rowland was able to also use his art talent in his profession ó doing designs for two screen-printing companies. After 17 years, he started a new job as a floor designer creating showrooms for Carolina Interiors, a furniture company in Kannapolis.
It was there that Rowland met Kay Rogers, who was doing contract work in interior design at the time.
When she saw his art, Rogers began encouraging him.
After seeing even more of his paintings at his parents’ house, “I was just absolutely blown away,” she says. “His work is quite amazing.”
Rogers commissioned Rowland to paint a series of flag paintings for a car dealership she was designing out West and has several of his paintings on consignment at Wooden Stone gallery in Salisbury, which she now manages.
“He wasn’t real sure about putting his paintings here,” she says. “He didn’t think he was ready, but I insisted that he was.”
Rowland’s paintings have attracted a lot of attention.
“One comment that people always make when they see his work,” Rogers says, “is that they’re stunned with all these different styles that he seems to have mastered ó the realism, the contemporary and the abstract.
“I think that’s just very impressive.”
Some of Rowland’s paintings have a luminous quality, much like those of his favorite artist, Maxfield Parrish. In high school, Rowland first saw a print of “Daybreak,” considered by the art world to be Parrish’s masterpiece.
“It was just like it spoke to me,” he recalls. “I can’t describe it. I just loved it, the colors in it, the subject matter. It was like a dream world, a far-off place that you fantasize about, like a Shangri-la.”
Rowland was so moved by the painting that he set out to find out more about Parrish and bought every book he could find about the artist.
He became a devoted fan, traveling to different parts of the country to see exhibits of Parrish’s work and collecting some of his original prints from the 1920s.
As an artist, Rowland began studying Parrish’s techniques with oil paint and even did a painting of a tree and a red cloak hanging over a stone wall as a tribute to the artist, who died in 1966 at age 96.
“I used his technique to do that painting,” he says, “The tree was sort of a tribute to him because he was famous for the trees he painted.”
“After the Fęte” recently sold to a buyer from Charlotte.
In another painting, titled “Winter Twilight,” Rowland used glaze to achieve the luminous effect of the sunlight shining through three massive trees in a snow scene.
The painting is in one of the front display cases at Wooden Stone.
Sometimes, Rowland paints the same subject or scene several times. Four cowboy paintings at the gallery are all based on a photograph he took of a friend sitting on a picnic table.
Two of the paintings feature a cowboy sitting on a huge rock, looking out at the sky. In one, titled “Solitude,” the sky is a deep blue with a crescent moon barely visible, while the other, titled “Solitude No. 2,” is done in sepia tones.
In yet another sepia painting, titled “Jack,” the cowboy is turned slightly to the side. The fourth, “Heading Home,” is done in brilliant colors, showing only a part of the front of the cowboy’s body and face.
Rowland buys vintage frames for his paintings and has even painted pieces to match the frames. The cowboy paintings, for example, are framed in rustic wood.
Rowland, who lives in an apartment about two blocks from where he grew up in Concord, plans a painting in his head for weeks before beginning it.
“And when I finish a painting,” he says, “I’ll just sit and stare at it for weeks and see if there’s anything else I want to do to it.”
It’s difficult for Rowland to decide on his favorite painting.
“I just finished one a few months ago of a snow scene that I really love,” he says. “It’s one lone tree, a huge oak at sunset.”
Every time he steps outside, Rowland looks for scenes to paint.
“I look at clouds in the skies,” he says, “the formations, the color, the sunset, the light at sunset, the light at sunrise …”
When he goes for his two-mile walk in the mornings, he takes his camera.
“If I see anything unusual, I’ll take a picture of it,” he says.
Rowland, who is as quiet as he is intense, has never tried to promote himself. It took a lot of persuading for Rogers to get him to be interviewed.
“He’s very humble,” she says. “It’s just refreshing to see someone with that kind of talent who absolutely does not realize it.”
Rowland says his objective as an artist is for his paintings “to take you away, make you forget where you are for a while.”
See David Rowland’s paintings at Wooden Stone, 106 S. Main St.
Contact Kathy Chaffin at 704-797-4249.