Painter Carole Wantz struggled with self-confidence far more than the eclectic scenery in her signature, lifestyle-oriented portraits.
That explains why, even after then-Cummins Engine Co. board chairman J. Irwin Miller praised her publicly for her just-completed commissioned work about his life, she grew nervous that day in 1975 on her way to the Miller home on Highland Way in Columbus.
At Miller’s request, she was dropping off a sheet explaining all the details in the work, ranging from First Christian Church, which Miller helped make a reality, to The Commons Mall, which both Miller and wife Xenia Miller helped create.
“I knew that he had a Monet and a Picasso,” she had told herself when she worried that, as a new artist, she had no business painting for someone who served on the board of the Museum of Modern Art.
She eventually was shocked to find her painting — one done after interviewing Miller and his associates — hanging very visibly right in an entryway.
“I thought it would end up over the washer,” Wantz cracked during a recent phone interview from her home in St. Louis, where she has lived since 1985.
The 81-year-old former Columbus resident, who has made a name for herself nationwide with her primitive-style art, readily acknowledged that her joy and exuberance has been kicked up a notch lately with the planned opening Saturday of her latest exhibit, “The Artwork of Carole Wantz: Collected Stories from Columbus, Indiana,” at the Indiana State Museum’s Thomas A. King Bridge Gallery in downtown Indianapolis.
The 30-painting display, free with museum admission, runs through July 27. The Miller portrait forms the centerpiece, and Richard McCoy of the nonprofit Landmark Columbus Foundation curated the exhibit.
“This is the first time that all these pieces have been together,” Wantz said. “And it’s almost overwhelming. I’m just absolutely thrilled. Because, usually with the paintings I do, they just go off to the family.”
The past few weeks have become a time of revisiting the past for Wantz, as current and former Columbus residents she painted have warmly reached out to her.
“It’s been so wonderful; people have been calling me and emailing me,” she said.
In the 1975 to 1985 period in which she painted locally, she figures she completed about 150 works highlighting some of the area’s business and societal leaders such as Henry Schacht, former Cummins chairman and chief executive officer, and later CEO of Lucent Technologies; Laurance “Laurie” Hoagland, president and CEO of Stanford Management Company, and later chief investment officers for the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; and James Baker, the president and chair of Arvin Industries.
She broke into her trademark laugh when asked if she was gifted from the start of the lessons she took in Bloomington at age 35 from a former Herron School of Art instructor teaching classes in abstract art.
“No, no,” Wantz said, adding that the instructor eventually had to tell her point blank that she was “terrible” at abstract painting.
After months of research at Indiana University’s art library, she then found the art of Grandma Moses — and her calling.
“She painted her past,” Wantz said. “I’ll paint my present.”
Slowly, Wantz framed a future.
“Wantz’s paintings are primitive, in the genre of Grandma Moses,” said Mark Ruschman, the Indiana State Museum and Historic Sites’ senior curator of art and history. “They’re charming pieces that represent a very specific place in the world of fine art.”
But Wantz herself has never quite gotten the memo. Her special impact led McCoy to ask her a few years ago, while he toiled for five years to locate her commissioned and sold Columbus works, a simple question: “Why didn’t you keep better (sales) records?”
A bewildered Wantz answered honestly, “I didn’t know I was that important.”
Then she let go with an unbridled laugh as unmistakable as her art.
McCoy sees Wantz as a visual storyteller, infusing each of her works commissioned for a person with scenes from their life like tiny flashbacks.
“They’re almost like a genealogy, or the family Bible,” McCoy said. “You can know this family’s story. They’re better than a picture, better than a photograph, for some people. We intuitively knew the magic that could happen when all of these are together.”
Wantz, who is still painting, acknowledged that she is just beginning to appreciate that idea.
“It’s humbling, I must say,” she said.
She laughed openly when asked when she realized she had “made it” in the wide world of art.
“Well, I’ve never really thought I have,” Wantz said.
The latest exhibition seems to suggest otherwise.
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What: Former Columbus painter Carole Wantz’s latest exhibit "The Artwork of Carole Wantz: Collected Stories from Columbus, Indiana.”
When: Saturday through July 27. Opening reception is July 10.
Where: The Indiana State Museum’s Thomas A. King Bridge Gallery at 650 W. Washington St. in downtown Indianapolis.
Admission: Free with museum admission of $8 to $14.
Information: indianamuseum.org
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