Partial to Home: A Memoir of the Heart - Hardcover

Timberlake, Bob; Bledsoe, Jerry

9781878086815: Partial to Home: A Memoir of the Heart

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1878086812 ISBN 13: 9781878086815

Publisher: Down Home Pr, 1999

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Partial to Home Memoir

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From Kirkus Reviews:

A down-home memoir by the self-taught millionaire artist and designer. Somewhere between Johnny Cash and Grandma Moses, and with sales between Martha Stewart and Bill Blass, lies this regional giant of art and design (The World of Bob Timberlake, 1979, etc.). Now, instead of paintings that evoke the weathered gray-browns and the green green grass of home, we get the corresponding prose: natural craftspeople, antebellum homes and lives, critter cuisine of squirrel and possum, and taller-than-fiction facts about the rise of this phenomenon who never painted until the age of 28. Timberlake, a Southern mallard-hunting and crappie-fishing gas company employee inspired by a magazine article on Andrew Wyeth, took up watercolors, made a name for himself as a local realist, and eventually became an icon who hobnobbed with Wyeth, Armand Hammer, Prince Charles, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan. But he maintains that hes still more concerned with friends and relatives who define love, heritage and devotion to the land on which you're born.'' While he wades knee-deep in Lexington County sincerity, he says, jealous academics will dismiss him as a `` `paint-by-numbers artist' producing `sleazy, cheap . . . plastic nostalgia.' " In fact, Timberlake canvases, neo-antique wooden furniture, and log houses aren't cheap at all, but some will see his ties to the timeless as backwards. This country road of a memoir, kept ditchless but unpaved by Jerry Bledsoe (Bitter Blood, 1988, etc.) is similarly crafted like an instant antique. It could have been slicked-up by a Manhattan publisher, but true to Timberlake it was nailed together locally, with all the knotholes showing. Ignoring the big city art world of elephant dung and the Virgin Mary, Timberlake respects history, ghosts, and God, and concludes his reminiscence by recounting the many providential people and events that allowed his miraculous career to unfold. Thirty-two pages of photos (not seen) adorn a retrospective that will be loved by regular folk and disdained by rootless cosmopolitans. -- Copyright �1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Library Journal:

Typically, the domain of entertainment and sports celebrities, first-person rags-to-riches narratives by artists are uncommon. In this self-absorbed rambling recital, populist painter and furniture designer Timberlake and gothicist Bledsoe (Angel Doll and Bitter Blood) credit Timberlake's seemingly effortless and endless string of good fortune and business acumen to a charmed life among eccentric and good-hearted family and friends in rural, value-laden Lexington, NC. Very little art talk robs space from incessant name-dropping adventures on both the world's stage and back home, from which the narrator invariably emerges triumphant, even heroic. Even the most charitable of readers and the most ardent of fans will soon tire of this insubstantial ode to ego. Expressly not recommended.ARussell T. Clement, Univ. of Tennessee Lib., Knoxville
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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