Arkansas Traveler

"The Ghost, sometimes she came and stood at the foot of the bed . . . The tree that fell on John Perry, it cut off his leg . . . The lightning that struck Rufo Bar-cliff, it killed him."

Using such homely sentences for the titles of his paintings, Arkansas-born Carroll Cloar, 42, has unlocked a world of childhood memories, set down in sharply drawn scenes that combine the nostalgia of fading photographs with the surrealistic overtones of the artist's recollections of his boyhood days. On view last week at Manhattan's Alan Gallery, the results have the dreamlike quality of childhood remembered a long way from home.

Up from the Farm. Painter Cloar's own home was the family farm in Arkansas. The sixth child of seven, young Cloar had a farm boy's hard upbringing, went to school in nearby Earle, Ark. (pop. 2,036). On his own, Cloar began drawing before he could write. At 18 he left his brothers on the farm and set off for college in Memphis, mainly to study art.

Cloar moved on to New York to study drawing and lithography at the Art Students' League, then to Mexico for a year. In World War II he ended up in Saipan as a private, first class, with the U.S. Army Air Forces, painted murals for the enlisted men's clubhouse, and cheesecake figures (at $50 apiece) on the noses of B-29s. But even the Army failed to cure Cloar's wanderlust. Out of uniform, he took off for Mexico and South America, then on to Europe.

Long Voyage Home. The turning point for Cloar came one hot summer day in 1954. While sitting in a cafe on one of Venice's back canals, Cloar realized: "For the first time in my life, I was homesick." Cloar began a long voyage home, a year later was back in Arkansas. "I tried to imagine how things seemed to me when I was a child," he says. He found his mother's old picture album a rich lode to mine. Setting up his studio in nearby Memphis, Cloar painted My father was big as a tree, recording his boyhood image of his looming (200 Ibs., 6 ft. 1 in.) father, Charlie Cloar. Arrival of the Germans in Crittenden County, if they won the war they would be over here shows spiked-helmeted soldiers of the Kaiser's army wandering in greatcoats through a rolling Arkansas landscape. Garden of Love, all the little girls had brown eyes is Cloar's homage to all the small girls that he silently admired in their summer dresses.

When Cloar's paintings were first shown late last year in Memphis, the event was announced from the pulpit in his home town, and 300 of his old neighbors made the 30-mile trip to see the show. In Manhattan Cloar's reception has been just as warm. In the first week 13 of his 14 paintings were sold. But even with money in his pocket, Cloar this time is going back home again. He says: "For the first time in my life, I don't want to travel any more." '

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