Tennessee artist captures portraits of hundreds in his small, coalfield community

The small town of Petros in East Tennessee is best known for coal mining, and a now-closed state penitentiary that housed 500 to 600 prisoners, about equal to the number of permanent Petrosians. But the town has its own public portraitist, a lifelong resident who has been capturing the town and its people in paint and also serving as unofficial archivist, Dale Mackey and Shawn Poynter report for the Daily Yonder. His name is Ricky Beene, but most people call him Bear. And his art has helped a struggling community attain a new vision of itself. (Poynter photo)

Ricky "Bear" Beene

Beene, who began his foray into art by taking photographs of local residents after his wife bought him a digital camera in 1993, told the Yonder, “There were actually only two stores here when I was growing up. Now there's really not a store downtown. Downtown is a misnomer, sorta, ’cause all it is really is a wide place in the road. I understand that the world goes on and the world changes. That doesn't mean it always goes on and changes in the best ways, I don't think.”

But in artistic terms, the town is prospering. Even though he had no formal training in painting, he just decided to start doing it, using computer-altered photos as his bases, and "has painted more than 300 portraits: mothers and daughters, great grandfathers and their grandsons," the writers report. "He’s painted the same person multiple times over several years, each portrait portraying the man’s descent into drug addiction. He’s been asked to photograph a man on his death bed, and plans to create a painting from those photographs."

Beene told the Yonder, “When I'm painting, I may be looking and thinking a whole lot about color, but I'm also thinking about other things as well – the tragedies of the people's lives I'm working on or their victories, or a combination of the two, and how sometimes one is hard to be delineated from the other.” Each time he has a show, Beene says, the people of Petros try their best to see it. "They feel a sense of pride that someone in their community paints – and wants to represent them." (Read more) (Video from Center for Rural Strategies)