Beanie's place

This is certainly the lazy man's way of doing it, but I want to share this in case you missed it.
Copied and pasted directly from the Treasure Coast Palm.

I HOPE THEY DON"T MIND.


ST. LUCIE COUNTY — During his lifetime, A.E. “Bean” Backus refused to allow the small art gallery on the Fort Pierce riverfront to bear his name.
The gallery wasn’t about him, he argued, it was a showcase for all local artists.
Now about to open its doors for a 50th season, these days the gallery’s reputation is inextricably linked with the Backus name. It’s the place that keeps his artistic and personal legacy alive.
“He was the most generous man I’ve ever known, a genuinely good human being,” said gallery Director Kathleen Fredrick, who spent much of her youth hanging around Backus’ studio.
But how do you do communicate that and his incredible talent almost 20 years after the man’s death?
“Our mission is to tell Bean’s story and to explain his artistic legacy,” Fredrick said, “and we need to tell it in a more compelling way than we have in the past.”
One way will be to create an expanded area of the gallery devoted to showing more of the gallery’s personal collection of Backus landscapes together with interpretative panels that describe his history and development as an artist.
To Fredrick, Backus has grown from being regarded as an interesting Florida landscape painter — a regional talent — to an important 20th century American painter in the same league as, say, Winslow Homer.
In 1958, a local businessman, Al Shapiro, persuaded Backus to support the building of a gallery in Fort Pierce. Shapiro wanted to name it after Backus; Bean would have none of it.
He wanted to showcase the burgeoning talent he saw on the Treasure Coast. Backus taught and encouraged a small army of budding area artists, including the Highwaymen.
He matched Shapiro’s $1,000 seed money, produced a rendering of a small minimalist-style building, urging the community to raise the rest of the $12,000 cost.
They responded with a flood of $50 and $100 checks. The smallest recorded contribution, Fredrick noted, was a $7 check from a lady who worked at the courthouse.
The original gallery, which opened in 1959, wasn’t much more than a roof held up with columns. There was a rock garden in the center and rainwater flowed toward the center of the open pavilion.
They hung artwork on cut nails on the outside of the building, hoping the deep roof overhang would protect paintings from summer rains.
That didn’t work, and by 1968 the gallery board decided to add walls and air conditioning and make the place a proper indoor gallery. They’ve gone from strength to strength ever since.
Whatever Backus’ reputation as an artistic pioneer, it’s the man Fredrick recalls with overwhelming affection.
“People who first met him saw the gregarious side: joking and friendly. But he was very modest, shy and retiring. He was the man with 10,000 friends. He didn’t have an abrasive bone in his body.”
Backus lived by a “pass it on” philosophy taught him by his Uncle Reg (who paid for him to attend art school in New York). In order for $1 to do any good, Uncle Reg argued, you have to give away $10. Nine dollars may go to waste, but the tenth will do the trick.
Yet Bean was pretty hopeless with money and, Fredrick is sure, if he’d ever been in charge of the business side of the gallery, they’d have had to shut the doors within a week.
“You can’t put artists in charge,” she says, “they use another whole area of their brains.”
Even though Backus rarely showed the world any ill-will, he did have his pet peeves, Fredrick recalled with laughter.
“He hated all intolerance, cigarettes, the banjo, and John Denver.”
I really wish I’d met him.

I, TOO, HATE JOHN DENVER, but damn it, I love my cigarettes. And I've liked the banjo ever since I saw "Deliverance".