One summer day in 2015, I fell in love twice. I was not usually fickle, but always susceptible to paintings of the southwestern Alleghenies of Pennsylvania. About 60 years ago, my parents bought a farmhouse in Bedford County with views across fields and woods to layered mountains beyond. On summer and weekends, it’s my remaining true homeplace.
Dad was an amateur watercolorist; several of his paintings hang upstairs in the farmhouse — one, the back meadow in fall. Spare brush strokes, rusty colors; the eye familiar with the scene fills in negative space. Another, larger painting, depicts a sun-faded green barn with a red roof: a shape-study, simple blocks of color. Painted from imagination; the barn burned before we came, struck by lightning.
I know the story of the terrible night and the burning barn from my friend Jackie Kerr Hauga, last child born in this house. A professional artist, she lives in Texas. But the farm remains her true homeplace, too. Once she came and stayed, leaving us a small, closely observed watercolor of the weathered granary. I keep the painting on my writing table, with Dad’s stiff brushes and dry tubes of paint.
Two different artists, two pairs of eyes, one place shared over time. The work of their hands is visible evidence of different points of view, sensibility, and style — true in painting as in writing.
Another painter’s vision of the region was our objective that August morning: a retrospective exhibit of contemporary Bedford artist Kevin Kutz. He’d shared an image of a paintingfor the cover of my soon-to-be-published debut collection of stories. Long time admirers of his work, my husband and I left the farm, drove along the ridge, across the mountains to the Cambria County branch of the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art in Loretto. SAMA’s consortium of sites shares a collection of art in rotation and offers special exhibits.
In the main gallery, a large, luminous oil captured me. Variegated layers of deep green foliage, almost transparent roadside grasses, striated clouds above the smokey blue blur of Will’s Mountain, a burst of wildflowers beside the road. Cornflowers and Queen Anne’s Lace radiated the incandescence of a summer afternoon. Kutz might have been standing on our porch. Love at first sight. Requited months later; after the exhibition closed, we brought the painting back to the city, balm for winter homesickness.
Exploring the permanent collection, I gazed into a small, meditative 19th century landscape: Woodland Path,by an artist unknown to me, one George Hetzel of Pittsburgh.Sheer curtains of soft green-gold light, dappled shadows. I could smell leaves underfoot. A second coup de foudre struck.
Two different paintings, by two different painters from different eras, both all about the light, the color, of these Allegheny prospects.
Sitting on the porch after supper as the fireflies came out, I tapped my phone, curious. In the 1850’s, George Hetzel found good fishing and good scenery in Scalp Level, a borough on the border between Cambria and Somerset counties. He returned every summer bringing Pittsburgh painting colleagues, students, his wife and children to the Scalp Level Colony. The artists became known as the Scalp Level School. Contemporaneous with the Hudson River School, though never as famous, Hetzel and other Scalp Level artists achieved significant renown in Pittsburgh and beyond.
So far, Hetzel’s story seemed idyllic as Woodland Path. Scrolling revealed two untimely family deaths; a first hint of the deep iceberg of loss and adversity intertwined with ambition and success.
Trouble is never a surprise. Lived experience, my career as a psychotherapist, and reading and writing confirm that families, like landscapes, contain shadow as well as light. Happy families are not all the same, nor each unhappy family discontent in a unique way. On the surface or beneath, families are complicated. Retrospective family stories — biography, autobiography, memoir, reunion yarn, fiction — are slanted by point of view, omissions and redactions. But “real” or imagined, oral or written, no trouble, no story.
Sitting in twilight, I felt the premonitory tingle in my neck. My next novel was calling.
It had to wait. I’d paused and deferred writing fiction most of my adult life, engaged in work and raising a family, only started writing again a dozen years earlier. My first collection of stories and a debut novel were in final revision and the pipeline for publication; a second collection of stories and a second novel were in progress.
Not until four years later, in the summer of 2019, were desk and mind clear for a new project. The farm is my favorite place to write, quiet unless the wind is wrong, carrying the dull thrum of the turnpike. But that summer, faded wallpaper peeled off in strips, revealing crumbling horsehair plaster beyond repair. The contractor prescribed sheetrock. A dusty, noisy season began. Writing in the attic was too hot. On the porch? Too bright.
I took off for Hetzel research field trips.
Pittsburgh’s trove of documents, newspapers, and maps in the Heinz History Center began to fill in the creative, star-crossed Hetzel story. Very much a family story, replete with unexpected choices and consequences, contradictions, secrets and mysteries. The Hetzel women,–lesser known, on the sideline–fascinated me. Mary Louise was a fierce protector of her husband’s work and legacy, and their children. Over George’s objections, she insisted the youngest, talented artistic Lila, train at the Pittsburgh School of Art and Design for Women. Lila would be a working artist all her life, claiming she chose smaller scale domestic scenes because her father’s work needed space. Lila’s daughter, Dorothy, became a writer, a reporter and art critic for the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph. After Mary Louise died, Lila and Dorothy carried the torch for George.
I sleuthed out the address of the house George designed for his family in Edgewood. Visiting, I hesitated on the sidewalk. Snapped a photograph and turned away. It was too soon; the Hetzels had not yet become “my” characters.
I visited the family graves in Homewood Cemetery. George’s headstone was large, dominant. Three identical smaller stones were side by side: sons James, Charles, and daughter Ella — her marker toppled and cracked. Two much later matching plaques set apart marked Lila and Dorothy. I knew all the dates and fates by then; wished I’d brought flowers.
Leaving, I stopped at the stone gate house on my way out to report the damage to Ella’s stone. The receptionist was unfamiliar with the Hetzels. I showed her their plot on the map, explaining George was an Important Pittsburgh Artist. It was my first instance of feeling something approaching filial allegiance, responsibility to tell the family’s story.
My friend Jeanie Woods native to the area, art historian, a retired museum director, proved knowledgeable about George Hetzel. “Come with me to the Westmoreland Museum in Greensburg”, she said. She explained that as a young student, she’d worked for the Museum’s first director, Paul Chew, founder of the museum’s now outstanding collection of Scalp Level artists.
The Scalp Level Gallery in the new wing of the museum displays paintings almost floor to ceiling, salon-style as in the artists’ day, creating a collage effect of adjacent landscapes seen through multiple painters’ eyes. Trains whistle, pulling through town below, adding to the viewer’s illusion of inhabiting the 19th century scenes. After Jeanie’s introduction, I would return many times to the Westmoreland for the inspiration of the paintings, and to the documents in the Hetzel files that generous curators Barbara Jones and Doug Evans shared.
Another day, Jeanie and I junketed to Johnstown. She had paintings that needed restoring, and she was taking them to Michael Mosorjak. An artist and conservator, he has worked for The Westmoreland and restored paintings by George Hetzel, among others.
Michael had been my husband’s college roommate; they hadn’t seen each other since 1971. I knew him only from stories of his painting and cooking. In the studio Jeanie and Michael talked about his current projects. Listening, I surveyed the brushes and tools on the work bench, inhaled paint, oil, and turpentine. Conservation in process, revelatory field trip.
During a retrospective of Mosorjak’s work at SAMA Bedford, the former roommates met again. He spoke and demonstrated his painting methods; I took notes. I did so again at Kevin Kutz’s presentation during a subsequent SAMA Bedford show of his work. An art student on those evenings, but not aspiring to paint, rather to understand the process, the subjective experience of creating visual art — from the maker’s point of view. I needed to learn a new language, a synesthetic vocabulary.
Dorothy—not an artist, but the family journalist and art critic—became my translator. Her grandfather died soon after the family moved to Somerset, seven years before her birth in 1905. Nevertheless, she said he was the most important person in her life. Dorothy spent most of her childhood and adult life in the large house her uncle James had purchased for the family and christened The Hetzel Studio. Her grandmother, Mary Louise, her mother Lila, and Dorothy all championed George’s legacy. Mary Louise and Dorothy were also fiercer advocates for Lila’s work than Lila herself.
On my first visit to Somerset, I knocked on the door of the family’s former home. No one was there; I left a note. The current owners called, invited me back, opened their home and their personal Hetzel archives. Paging through a 1940 copy of The Pittsburgh Bulletin Index, I found an arresting photograph of Dorothy, on assignment for the Sun-Telegraph at a Carnegie opening, in dramatic evening dress, eyes and faux diamonds glittering. The accompanying story reported Dorothy quit the Sun the next day–her column on the important exhibition had been relegated to a back page.
It was Dorothy who grabbed me and did not let go. The novel became a fictional memoir written by Dorothy. Archives in local libraries and historical societies — clippings, columns, newsletters, unpublished fiction, correspondence and personal papers — gave me her voice, helped me imagine, through her point of view, the pieced-together backstory of unexplained, undocumented secrets, aspirations fallen short, passions and estrangements.
Together for hours every day, through many drafts, over several years, Dorothy and I uncovered and connected dots. In the following passage, she’s talking to a young curator from Westmoreland about her (our) process. I wonder, reading this now the book is finished, was she my narrator or was I hers?
“We sit in my study…The room’s my sanctuary, crowded,
cluttered like the inside of my mind…I like the luxury of
space to be messy, the solitude to write…Filling in some
blanks on our canvas. Things my mother told me…also
using what she left out. What I know, living it. Have figured out. Made up, Nana might say, denying, protecting.”
My two previous books were released during the pandemic, mostly presented at online events. It’s a joy to be in the live world talking to readers again in bookshops, libraries, and book groups.
Yet it was not altogether unfamiliar or unsatisfying to present my books in the ethereal world of virtual events. Yes, my intended audience are always readers, but also I also write and speak for a small, spectral audience. Sitting in an invisible row of chairs at the back of my mind, the back of the room, are those who believed, encouraged, and taught me — gone before I finished my first book. My child-self who knew she must be a writer is there. And Dorothy. She wanted to write a book. Now, we have.
My new friends who live in The Hetzel Studio hosted a launch party for Vanishing Point. The Dressler Arts Center in Somerset loaned a landscape by George, a self-portrait by Lila, and a sketched portrait of her daughter.
Dorothy leaned on an easel, just behind the table where I sat in her house, where she had lived and written. She watched over my shoulder as I signed our book.
