Artist Doug Hall lives in a remote cabin in the woods near Pineville. He has been painting all his life.
Hall recalls selling his first piece when he was 9 or 10 years old at an art show at the Big Spring Park in Neosho. It was a painting of a white horse with a black mane and tail.
"It looked like the Goodyear blimp with legs," Hall laughed.
He sold the painting for $2.50, and the couple who bought it wrote him a check.
"I thought it was a million dollars," he said. "It made a huge impression on me. My parents forced me to cash it. I thought it was worth more because it was a check."
Hall paints Eastern Woodland Indians from the French and Indian War period, about 1750.
"I travel a lot, photograph people and paint them," he said. He dresses up his friends like Indians and takes their photos and works from the photos to create paintings, he added.
"I try to do it very accurately. I'm sure I've messed some things up, but it's not from a lack of effort," he said.
Before going into painting full-time, Hall built a log cabin sporting goods store near Neosho in 1987. A tornado hit it in 2001. The store was on old Highway 71, and after the tornado, the new I-49 was opened. Hall knew reopening the store wouldn't work because there would not be any traffic, so he decided to paint. He built a log cabin gallery on the same spot.
One of Hall's passions is living in the woods.
"I moved to this patch of woods when I was 19. I built my first cabin. I lived there 16, 17 years," he said. He had no running water but used rainwater instead. The next to the last year he lived there he had a well put in. The log cabin he lives in now has running water.
"I wanted to live out all my life," he said. "As a little kid I could not wait until I was old enough to go live in the woods. When I step outside, I want to hear Mother Nature. I love seeing the way God made it. It's inspiring, I guess."
Hall said when he first started selling paintings he was happy for anyone to look at them. He ended up painting for a gallery in Santa Fe and got accepted to the Phippen Museum in Prescott, Ariz.
"I was nervous," he said. "I can't even describe how nervous I was. I had applied to this, and now I was trying to think of ways to get out of it."
He won the George Phippen Museum Award for his painting, "The Looking Glass," and he sold it for $10,000 and became friends with the buyers. He has become friends with a lot of collectors, he said.
Now he mainly paints for museums and the pieces go up for auction.
"I feel successful at it -- to be invited to those venues that sell art," he said.
He remembers seeing a Charlie Russell painting sell for $1 million. Russell lived and painted during the time when there were cowboys and he painted them. One of Hall's paintings was sold at the same auction.
"It's nice to be invited to something like that, to be a part of it," he said.
General News on 07/27/2017