Perpetual Blue

By the time he died at 71 in 1955, Harold Osman (H.O.) Kelly had won a strange sort of fame for a man who was called by the nickname, "Cowboy." People came from far and wide to visit him at his rickety little house outside Blanket, Texas. They would listen to him reminisce, sit while his ancient phonograph scratched a favorite polka. But mostly they came to buy one of his bright and lively paintings of an oddly remote Old West (see color). Sometimes the old man gave them away as gifts--and fine presents they were, too. No less a person than the late Francis Henry Taylor, onetime director of Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art, called Cowboy Kelly "one of the few genuine primitive painters we have." He was also one of those artists who turned to painting because he had failed at everything else.

As TIME Correspondent William Weber Johnson tells it in a biography called Kelly Blue, published last week (Doubleday; $3.95.), Kelly was a rambler, a restless fiddlefoot who never stopped traveling until he was too old to roam. The son of a blacksmith of Irish descent, he was born in Ohio, lived in Iowa, Michigan and Pennsylvania before he was 16, and wandered West from New Jersey. As he himself admitted, he was always "too quick to take a notion and too quick to get charmed up" about somewhere else.

Liniment & Snake Weed. He went to Arizona, then to Oklahoma and Kansas, where he had to beg for food. He tried being a cowboy in Wyoming, a homesteader in Nebraska, a farm hand in Missouri and a stock farmer in Texas--all attempts petered out. In Arkansas, where he worked as a bullwhacker, he came down with malaria, which he tried to treat with a patent medicine called Orang Utan Liniment and teas brewed from rattlesnake weed. At 45 he bought a ranch in the Panhandle that quickly became part of the great Dust Bowl. Finally, in 1946 he turned to a whole new career.

He had always drawn and painted for his own and his friends' amusement. But one day someone actually paid cash money for some watercolors. Later, Kelly switched to oils, and before long he had a one-man show in Dallas. Sometimes he took his mood from the Bible, but his scenes came from his own youth and childhood, which he remembered as far more peaceable than they had ever been.

Poppity-Pop. A lean and toothless old man with a long nose that had been broken twice by fists and at least once by a horse's hoof. Cowboy Kelly hated the 20th century. He went to his last movie in 1929. He would fall dumb when confronted with a telephone, flatly refused to ride in airplanes, insisted that all substitutes for the horse were a danger to life and limb ("They will kill you off! They go like hell, poppity-pop and hellity-scoop"). Like Pieter Brueghel the Elder, whom he admired so much, he filled his canvases with chipper little figures going about their daily chores, drinking their beer, sparking, preparing their feasts--all under a bright sky of perpetual blue.

"Everyone,"' says Author Jehnson of Kelly's world, "was well fed and happy. Old people were dignified and respected. Women were courted with grace and courtesy. Men dealt with each other on equal terms, and small white and Negro boys swam together in the streams in naked freedom." It was a rural America that had largely disappeared more than half a century before--a world washed clean of all imperfection by the loving memory of an engaging old man.

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