Living legend retires from VWC

For the last 30 years, Virginia Wesleyan art students have been blessed with the wisdom and talent of Professor Barclay Sheaks. However, beginning next fall, this 76-year-old artist will no longer offer his extensive knowledge to aspiring art students. Sheaks is retiring from teaching to spend long days working on his own projects.

“I leave regretfully,” said the tall, gray-haired painter. “I have been here so long that the school is a part of me. It was a hard choice, but my experience has been a pure pleasure.”

Sheaks, who grew up in New Market, Va., near the Shenandoah Valley, has not forgotten one ounce of his childhood. After all, everything he paints is practically a replica of his memories.

Imagine a perfect summer day, running through dense forests and bright green prairies; up one side of a steep mountain and down the back side into a flush green valley that had a light blue stream running through the center of it; fishing all day under a massive blue sky and setting up a campfire at night that lit up the surrounding area and the millions of tiny stars that burned brightly above your head.

Can you imagine that?

Sheaks can.

He not only can imagine it; he lived it.

He not only lived it, but he can create a painting of a landscape that is so sharp, and yet surreal at the same time, that the picture immediately transports you back to your earliest memory of frolicking Huck Finn-like through dry marshes and open fields during a beautiful sunny day.

“I had ideal days as a child,” said Sheaks as he chewed on a ham sandwich from his dark blue cooler. “I would run wild through the mountains and valleys, hike through the forests and fish until it was time for supper.”

This self-described “idealized realism” artist leans back in his desk chair wearing a pair of silver-framed glasses, a plain white tee shirt, blue corduroy pants and light brown street sneakers. He pans across his many art books that sit atop his dark black book shelf and then looks at two paintings he has on the wall behind him. One is of a white, portable oven against a dark black background created by former student Scott Hines; the other is a pearl-white and light-gray surrealist painting his “engineer friend” Arthur gave him.

His desk is cluttered with old, used paintbrushes, sketchpads, a large, black dictionary and a picture of his second wife Debra. He places his lunch cooler down and begins to recount his childhood.

He explains his mother was a major influence and played a huge role in his life as a child. It was her flower bed that inspired him at a young age to cut a chunk of his sister’s hair out, attach it to a stick and begin painting.

His mother then bought him a brush kit to save her daughter from becoming bald. From as far back as Sheaks could remember, he knew he wanted to write books and paint. At the age of 16 his job was to paint bulls on the side of farm trucks. A typical Sheaks painting at this time would be of a rural, rundown farmhouse with massive landscape surrounding it.

As Sheaks kept honing his skill at painting the environment, his mother kept supporting him.

“Mother gave me a great amount of encouragement,” said Sheaks. “She also sacrificed a lot. She pinched every penny to send me to the Richmond Professional Institute [now Virginia Commonwealth University].”

After graduating, Sheaks got a job at a local high school teaching art. There he met the choral music instructor, Edna.

Friendship turned into love, then marriage. Sheaks said that their attraction for each other grew from the mutual respect and love for each other’s artwork.

Eventually the couple moved to Newport News, Va., and Sheaks found a new love – the Chesapeake Bay.

He had been there before a few times but, now, deeper into his artistic career, he found inspiration and uniqueness. The bay became his muse.

Sheaks loved the personal appeal the bay had. The boats, the lowland marshes and the local scenes all inspired him to produce grand landscape pictures. He spent many hours on that bay, not only for art, but for recreation as well – he is an avid fisherman and duck hunter.

One of his most famous landscape-bay paintings, “Still and Cold,” came to him while on vacation. Sheaks said he was duck hunting up on Assateague Island when he noticed a portion of the bay had frozen over.

“I sketched it,” Sheaks said, chuckling, “and took photos. It was real cold up there, so I drew it from the warmth of my studio.”

Beginning in the 1960s, Sheaks moved on to a different style he called his “Watcher Series.”

Sheaks explained: “One day, riding back on the Cape May-Lewes, Del. ferry with my wife Edna, I decided to go get a cup of coffee, and she said she was going to stay and look out over the bow. I came back out and saw her standing there. It was a mystic experience.

“Once we got back home, I couldn’t get the image out of my head of her silhouetted figure against a vast backdrop. So I painted it.”

Thus the Watcher Series began; however, Sheaks set a few rules for himself.

“I always drew the ‘watcher’ [who was usually Edna] from behind,” said Sheaks, “but if I drew them from the front, they had to wear glasses. I didn’t want the observer to get involved with the watcher’s personality; I wanted them to see what the watcher saw.”

On the verge of retirement, Sheaks has much to look forward to. He plans to spend his days reading, writing and painting in his summer studio in Poquoson.

With over eight museums, including Christopher Newport University and VWC, exhibiting his artwork, the “idealized realism” art form will live on in the Hampton Roads area for years to come.

A retrospective exhibit of Sheaks’ work is currently exhibited at the Peninsula Fine Arts Center in Newport News until June 12.