Uncle Jimmy

A true story by Erick Sahler

The men in my family are builders.

They’ve built racing boats and pole sheds. Red storage barns and children’s swing sets. Beach buggies and Jeeps and muscle cars. Hundreds of houses. Furniture and bookshelves and cabinets. And a barge in a back yard.

A barge.

In a back yard.

Amid all this, my Uncle Jimmy was different. He made paintings.

James Henry Spencer was born in 1913 and married my grandmother’s sister in 1939. In the late 1970s, he retired from Delmarva Power & Light. If you called in to report an electric outage, he answered the phone. Any of his other career accomplishments are lost to history.

But on the weekends Uncle Jimmy painted.

He lived in Shad Point, next door to my grandmother, who lived next door to her parents. As a kid, I had free range in all three homes, and the lands that surround them.

I vividly recall the first time I burst in on Uncle Jimmy as he was painting.

Pulling open the kitchen door, I was hit with a rich, intoxicating bouquet of linseed oil and turpentine. He worked on a rickety easel in a dark corner of a windowless dining room.

He painted what he knew — the beach and the bay, skipjacks and wildfowl — but he didn’t limit himself to the standard Eastern Shore fodder. He made the first painting I ever saw depicting Salisbury’s City Park footbridge and bandstand. He painted the animals of Trimper’s Carousel. He returned over and over — like Cézanne to Mont Sainte-Victoire — to paint Tony Tank Pond and the Shad Point bridge that crosses it.

In addition to his expanded subject matter, Uncle Jimmy’s style strayed from the other Eastern Shore artists of that era. While representational, he worked in the loose strokes of an Impressionist, laying down broad daubs of color. He frequently used a palette knife to apply thick smeary gobs of paint that dried to form raised sculptures on the surface of the canvas.

All the while, he whistled mindless catchy tunes he made up to tickle his fancy.

It was an exhilarating spectacle to witness as young child. In fact, it was like watching another child work, lost in the gleeful flow of creativity.

Several times a year, he would load his powder blue Chevy van with paintings to exhibit at art shows across Delmarva. His work found an audience, and I remember for years seeing it hanging in businesses, restaurants and banks. Sometimes we’d go to the art shows too, and it was through Uncle Jimmy’s endeavors I was introduced to the great stable of Eastern Shore artists of the 1970s, including Henry Progar, John Moll and George Wright.

We are fortunate to own four of Uncle Jimmy’s paintings. Two are of Tony Tank Pond — one was his gift to my mother and father when they married in 1966. The other was purchased by Barry Sakemiller, who worked at Delmarva Power & Light with Uncle Jimmy. My old friend Tim Sakemiller persuaded his dad to give us the painting when we moved to our Shad Point home in 1997. The third is of City Park, a piece I endlessly rhapsodized about as a child until Uncle Jimmy presented it to me. The fourth is a tiny marsh scene, about the size of a playing card. It inspired me to paint a similar scene in high school for which I won a prize.

Uncle Jimmy had a stroke soon after he retired. His speech was affected and he lost the use of his right hand — his artist’s hand. He retaught himself to paint with his left hand and continued to produce new work for a while.

Then in 1983 his wife died. He had little choice but to sell his house and move to Florida to live with his son’s family. He died there in 1994.

I was in high school when Uncle Jimmy left the Eastern Shore and never saw him again. If I did, I’d thank him for opening my eyes to a world in which men could build with nothing more than a small brush, some tubes of paint and the spark of creativity. It still fascinates me.

James Spencer returned over and over — like Cézanne to Mont Sainte-Victoire — to paint Tony Tank Pond and the Shad Point bridge that crosses it.

Uncle Jimmy frequently used a palette knife to apply thick gobs of paint that dried to form raised sculptures on the surface of the canvas.