In the Beginning: The Life and Art of Bill Hemmerling
by: Adam Falik | posted: Sep 1, 2009
It was arranged that I would visit Bill Hemmerling at his home in Ponchatoula, on the lot beside the Louisiana Furniture & Art Gallery, the building which served as the center of Hemmerling’s artistic universe. Carol Siekkinen, Hemmerling’s agent and manager, friend and adopted family member, would meet me at the gallery and take me to see Bill. Jake Siekkinen, Carol’s husband, has owned Louisiana Furniture & Art Gallery for fifteen years, and Carol and her sons cared for Bill as cancer got the better of him. They are a tight-knit group. As Carol and I sat inside the Hemmerling gallery at the rear of the building, she told me about Bill, who he was before he started painting, and who he became. She spoke about the database of more than a thousand customers who own Hemmerling paintings, most of whom own more than one, several of whom own more than a dozen. She filled me in on the details of Bill’s life, a bit about his personality, an inkling into his industry as a painter; she informed me of the specifics of his sickness, then brought me back to meet him.
When I accepted the assignment to interview Bill Hemmerling, it was with the understanding that he might no longer be living by the time this article was published, which made the assignment equally somber and beautiful. Because death can be those two things – amongst all the other things death can be. I didn’t know what to expect as Siekkinen led me to the renovated one-hundred year old warehouse designed by her husband, which served as Hemmerling’s home and studio. A beautiful building of exposed metal beams and warm polished wood, decorative throws on couches, hanging bird cages, fountains, and eastern artifacts all surrounded by many of Hemmerling’s paintings. The space was warm, whimsical, and inviting. Hemmerling sat in a chair dressed in a hospital gown. He was heavily medicated but managed to speak for more than an hour, fleshing out the story of his life and beliefs, his spiritual and artistic journeys (both of which seemed to spring from the same source). He told some wild tales. Talking to an artist usually throws a backlight on their work, illuminates it from within. Speaking with Hemmerling provided similar incandescence, though the source of that light remained difficult to determine. His story evolved from strange directions; the connections were sporadic, and a certain faith was required. Not necessarily religious faith, but faith that what Hemmerling spoke of was his truth.
Bill Hemmerling was born on April 15, 1943. “I grew up on the South Side [of Chicago], where prejudice was huge,” he recalled. “I was in a Catholic grade school in an area that was going bad. People were fleeing, the balances were breaking down. When you lose balance, you have chaos.” His education was not extensive; after high school he moved to Cedar Lane in Ponchatoula. His mother was originally from Covington and had many people down there. They were poor, and Hemmerling was troubled and sought to lose and find himself in drugs. He led, in his words, a “degenerate” life, wandering around New Orleans “smoking pot and talking to God” in St. Louis Cathedral. He finally landed a job with Sears, Roebuck and Co. where, for thirty-five years, he set interior store displays in what was called the New Orleans District, covering much of Louisiana and Mississippi and extending into Florida. When Sears wanted to expand Hemmerling’s position and give him managerial responsibilities, he retired. He was living in a decrepit mill house on Cedar Lane for $25 a month. It was sub-standard, with inadequate heating and air conditioning, and holes in the floors. The building was ultimately condemned. But however humble his demands, he needed money. He was fifty-nine years old and without ever having attempted to formally paint before, without any schooling or training and probably only a thimbleful of ambition, he decided to become a painter, thinking he could make some money at it. He approached Carol Siekkinen, who was directing a mentoring program from an office in the Louisiana Furniture & Art Gallery, and asked if he could hang some paintings in their window. In the next six year’s Hemmerling would become an established and much sought after Southern artist.
To speak about Hemmerling’s art requires reaching into the more esoteric experiences of his past, while at the same time following the progression of his artistic success. His paintings are most easily identified as Folk Art, a diverse term whose characteristics are dependent on geography. The folk art of Guatemala is not the folk art of the Swiss Alps, yet we can define a collective identity with the term. Humble images; broad strokes versus fine details; images of peasant or working class subjects of modest origins. Many of Hemmerling’s paintings are religious themed and framed with words, prayers and wishes. They mostly depict African Americans, characters set in gardens and fields in one painting who will suddenly sprout wings and congregate above a church spire in another. It’s unique for a white male to paint predominately African American – mostly female – images, but attests to Hemmerling’s origins and beliefs. His meek, Ponchatoula home was surrounded by five black churches. He lived a lifestyle of almost total seclusion. The simple life of poor and working class African Americans was all that Hemmerling knew. Siekkinen recalled that when she first met Hemmerling he had “never used a cell phone, never used a computer, never had a credit card, never been to a fast food restaurant, never been to a movie theater – maybe when he was a little boy, but not as an adult. He had never held a baby.” This seclusion gave Hemmerling a sort of childish innocence. In his world people went to church and prayed; they wore simple-patterned coarse clothing. The complexities of the world were something you bumped into when you wandered too far from your front door, and Hemmerling’s paintings depict that sort of innocence. Many people claim to have made soothing connections with his calm, Southern images which are filled with faith, hope, prayer and joy. Simple words brought simply to form, though Hemmerling went through tumultuous inner-travels to arrive at a place where he was capable of creating such images. Sometime in the 1970’s, before he was hired by Sears, he suffered a nervous breakdown. Under his aunt June’s direction, he began to pray at St. Jude’s shrine on Rampart Street, when, as he recalled, “things started getting very weird.” He went to Café Du Monde for coffee; a man sat across from him and “all the people disappeared into a gray cloud so it was just him and me. He stared at me, his eyes went into my body. I don’t know whether to call it my heart, my soul, my knowledge, but he made me judge myself. I didn’t like it and said ‘I’ve got to go.’” But Hemmerling didn’t get far before turning back. He found the man reading a book on a Riverwalk bench not far from the café. “I tapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘hey, pardon me,’ but when I said pardon me his face grew into a non-skinned face. He knew me as I was, I belonged to him; this guy had a predisposition for unconditional love, he showed me love that even my parents could never show. God had used a man to manifest what I needed to hear. It was powerfully wordless, it was all done through the spirit.” From that bench Hemmerling crossed Jackson Square to St. Louis Cathedral where he went into the confessional and said to the priest, “Father, I just had coffee with Jesus at Café Du Monde.”
This was not the last seemingly mystical happening for Hemmerling. He would later call the experiences acts of “synchronicity.” After the Café Du Monde incident he tried becoming a monk, but while on retreat dropped a coffee mug through a toilet bowl, puncturing a waterline. He interpreted the accident as a sign that he was on the wrong path. Later, while maintaining his position at Sears, he joined the Dominican Laity for eight years. “Frustrated people will choose an occupation that helps take that frustration from them,” Hemmerling said of the order, and of himself. He was seeking. Painting would finally serve to settle his frustration.
It began with some planks of discarded wood rescued from the side of the road that Hemmerling began painting on with surplus house paints. “People responded to his artwork immediately,” Siekkinen recalled. Hemmerling took to his calling with industry, pulling Siekkinen in with him. After painting for just six months they took a booth at Jazz Fest where they set a record, selling more art than any artist in Jazz Fest history. The second year they doubled that record and in 2005 Hemmerling was selected to create the Jazz Fest poster, joining the honored ranks of such signature New Orleans artists as James Michalopoulos and George Rodrigue.
Just as Rodrigue has his blue dog, Hemmerling developed and would become identified with the character of Sweet Olive, an African American woman making offerings of peace with olive branches, rosaries or flowers. She was immediately iconic, serene and faceless – universal. “I painted her with no face because I couldn’t paint faces,” Hemmerling admitted. “I tried to make her as pretty as I could without a face, capturing Southern beauty in a very simple, plain way.” Though he would learn to paint faces and capture some moving, revered expressions, he would continue to maintain Sweet Olive’s faceless identity.
Hemmerling would never alter the habits or work ethics that spawned his late calling. All his materials were found: discarded wood, shutters, doors, window frames, anything available. “He’d paint on you if you sat long enough,” Siekkinen half-chided. He would only paint on canvas if it was already used and he could paint over it, usually incorporating some part of the under-painting into his own. Even after his paintings started to sell for thousands of dollars, he never upgraded. “Driveway sealant makes a good brown,” Hemmerling said of his preferred materials, all of which he could purchase at a hardware store. “I painted with coffee, beet juice, but that phased out. Jennifer Blow, Michalopoulos’ agent, gave me a whole big basket of leftover oils, but I wasn’t keen on it because I paint with my hands and the oil was leaving stains everywhere.”
His images came from two places: the simple life around him, and the shapes and faces he trained himself to see in his found wood materials. He painted flat on the floor until he got a table. “Never an easel, they never interested me. I never capped any of the paints, and I never cleaned the brushes. I’d go from one color to the other, I wouldn’t bother changing brushes, I let the color that’s there work its way in.”
Neither Hemmerling nor Siekkinen have any idea just how many paintings Hemmerling has made. “He’s painted at least three-hundred a year, times six years,” Siekkinen said. “The most he ever painted in a day was seven.”
Artists are always seeking beginnings, fresh directions, to defy their predecessors with new roads of perception. Had Hemmerling lived longer he likely would have encountered the artistic challenges and discoveries which terrify and empower a painter. Instead, his career was sealed in its beginning, and perhaps it’s the freshness of that beginning, the childish, joyful purity of a hand excitedly casting its first brushstrokes, which have drawn so many to his work. Hemmerling had painted for four years when he was diagnosed with colon cancer. Once his colon was removed, it was thought that he might live for another three to six months. He carried on for two years more.
After Hemmerling tired from talking he rose from his chair and said that he wanted to sit outside, so we moved to his Spanish Moss-draped patio which overlooks the pond Bill was having installed. In the sunlight I could better see his state, how jaundiced his skin appeared and the discolored whites of his eyes, but his spirits seemed secure and he filled me with enough confidence to ask if he felt angry when he was first diagnosed with cancer. “No reason to be angry,” he said. “It’s part of fulfilling a life. My brother died in my arms and I saw his spirit leave the body; I knew then that the body is not the person. The spirit is the person. The spirit is what you like about the person, not the body.”
Bill Hemmerling died five days later, on June 15th, 2009. He was sixty-six years old.
