April 19, 1998|By Kelly Daniel | Kelly Daniel,SPECIAL TO THE SUN
THOMSON, Ga. -- Drizzle falls for a second straight day as Jake McCord sits in his threadbare house, the tink-tinking of drops on the roof drowned out by noise from his television. He is alone, his usual state. He lives alone. He watches TV alone. He works alone. But one day 12 years ago he did the unusual for a man of solitude. He nailed his new passion to his front porch, and the world began stopping by.
`See, that's my showcase,` he says in honeyed tones no louder than a murmur. He gestures to the porch, where rain puddles on the steps. Four paintings hang there, brightly colored works of a clock, a snake and two girls that live in his imagination. `That's my outside showcase.`
McCord paints. His works prompt phrasing as simple as that. He paints on plywood boards, mostly, in bright acrylic colors shaped into two-dimensional figures he conjures up while working as the cemetery caretaker in this town of 6,100.
He paints the people he does not meet. He paints the animals he remembers from his boyhood farm. He paints the images of a world he does not live in. Then he shares them on the showcase.
"I thinks 'em up in my head, what kind of hair they're going to have, what kind of pocketbook they're going to be toting, this and that," McCord says. "This and that" is a favorite phrase, a space filler for a shy man. "I just think them up in my head and just paint it."
As quietly as he speaks, as simply as he works, McCord, 53, the son of a sharecropper with little education and no formal art training, is crafting a national reputation in the folk-art world. His paintings hang in museums, galleries and private collections. His phone jangles constantly with requests for more paintings. McCord is becoming as well known as Zebedee B. Armstrong, the late Thomson artist obsessed with time, whose quirky clocks are on exhibit at the Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore.
Tom Wells, an affable antiques and folk-art dealer here, discovered McCord. "He always has a hole in his paintings because they've been nailed on his house," Wells says. "Jake is so unique, the way he uses colors, and his paintings are real individual."
Each painting has a story. A recent one shows a woman wearing pink, carrying a pink purse and smiling broadly.
"That's a business lady," McCord says, a smile turning his dark face into a river of wrinkles. "She's going to her office with her pocketbook and everything. She's a real-estate woman, sells houses, this and that. I thought her up."
Two women in New York seek financing for a documentary film about McCord. A family from California pleads with him to sell five paintings that later mysteriously disappear when he refuses. A woman from New Orleans asks for a painting of a yellow cat chasing a mouse. The National Museum of Folk Art in New York calls his work "deceptively simple." He has one-man shows in Washington and Atlanta on his resume.
And yet he is apt to draw more attention for his eccentricities than for his art.
First, there's his trademark cowboy hat. McCord owns six colors of 10-gallon hats -- nice hats, too, the kind that cost $150 and draw envious glances from others. He folds each brim into four corners and peers out from beneath perpendicular angles. It looks like he sits under a rectangle with a tower perched atop his head.
The hat changes with each painting. "I decided to wear brown to paint this because the horse has brown hair, so I decided to wear brown," he says as he finishes a cowgirl on a horse and thinks about painting a cat next.
"When I paint the yellow cat, I'm going to wear the black one. I wear a different hat when I'm painting. That's to get me through it better, to give me the will to do it, the will to paint and everything."
Then there's his devotion to television. He's owned as many as seven sets at once, but now is down to just two. They are always on, one muted, one blaring, set on different channels that reflect his interests: Tinkering, crafts and artwork on Home and Garden TV, soap operas on CBS.
"We were there on a Saturday and thought we would come by and see him, but it was his day to watch Julia Child," says Susan Spitz, a New York psychotherapist who became so fascinated with McCord's work that she's co-producing the documentary.
Finally, there's his house. He lives just off the main stretch of town in a home polite Southerners call "unique," with a nodding, knowing expression. Just inside the creaking screen door, the front hallway is covered in Polaroids of his paintings, clippings from articles, a Dottie West album cover he favors and random notes. Fabric that smells decades old separates a back room from view. His larger TV set, which fills the house with sound, blocks the doorway to a second room, kept dark.
