I wasn’t seated on the sofa long before Sheila Whitelaw Ayers was up and out of her own seat. We had been talking about her artist husband Roland Ayers, who was in a nursing home with Alzheimer’s. She wanted me to see some of his beautiful works that were hanging on the walls of their home.

“I found this when I was cleaning out,” she said, referring to her de-cluttering the house after she was forced to place Ayers in a nursing home when his illness became unmanageable. The piece was a charcoal of a mass of faces, dated 1961.

Charcoal of faces, 1961.

She moved on to a painting in a far shaded corner of the living room, almost hidden, dated 1972-73. “I love this piece,” she said. “This piece I’m going to keep.”

No title, 1972-73.

She mentioned that Ayers is known mostly for his pen and ink drawings, which was suprising to me because I had seen and loved his gouaches or watercolors – I’m still not good at distinguishing these two mediums.

Several years ago, I came across a bright orange watercolor/gouache of Ayers at auction. I hung it on my wall and later mentioned his name to a friend who recognized it and thought the artist lived not far from me. I was intrigued and wanted to know more about him. I found little on the web, though.

A reader saw my blog post about the painting and gave me a lead on where he might be living. A friend located a phone number, and I made the call. I found Ayers – actually not him but his wife Sheila, who met him about 30 years ago when she managed an art center where he was teaching a design course. They have been married for 20 years, his second.

Pen and ink, 1979.

I was saddened to hear that the artist had Alzheimers because I truly wanted to interview him, but his works – on the family’s walls, and in binders and portfolios – told the story just as much as his words. Sheila took me on a journey of Ayers’ life through his works and her recollections.

“He was the gentlest man I’ve ever known,” said Sheila, who moved to this country from England in 1960. “He was very very very patient. He was always cooled out.”

Standing no taller than a little under 6 feet, he was also a small man, like the thin lines of his intricate pen and ink drawings. He followed the teachings of self-awareness espoused by the Indian writer Jiddu Krishnamurti, Sheila said.

“He was the gentlest soul,” she said again. “A poet, a writer, an artist, just a gentle soul.”

I came across one of Ayers’ poems on the back of a drawing from a college art class:

“I peered around a wall
In the deep green night
and
For the first time
Saw myself in every phase,
And I was afraid,
For such things I knew
not were there …”

Two 1952 drawings from art class at the Philadelphia College of Art.

“Basically I am a poet,” Ayers said in a 1977 newspaper article. “I even consider my art work to be poetry. I deal a lot in the reality of dreams.”

He was born July 2, 1932, the only child of Alice and Lorenzo Ayers, and grew up in Germantown, a section of Philadelphia. He attended the Joseph E. Hill School, a public elementary school named in honor of a noted black educator of the 19th century.

Ayers started drawing in the first grade, according to a biography written by Sheila, and “loved airplanes and has many drawings in his school books of all kinds of planes, from war planes to large jets.” She showed me one of his early drawings, with his name written in a child’s hand at the bottom of the page.

He was stationed in Germany for two years while in the Army and worked as a cook. After the service, he attended the Philadelphia College of Art (now the University of the Arts), excelling in pen and ink drawings, watercolors, gouaches and collages, according to Sheila. He graduated in 1954.

During the 1970s, Ayers spent some years painting in Greece and Holland, and completed much artwork there. “He felt his art was not appreciated here,” Sheila said. “He had some friends living in Holland at the time. They encouraged him to come over.”

Now Keep the Status Quo, March '60.

He managed the Friends of the Free Library bookstore until the early stages of Alzheimer’s began to appear more than a decade ago. ”He’d come home with books that cost 25 cents,” she recalled. She has sold off most of the books, which had taken up residence in bookcases lining the walls of their living room. He was also a jazz aficionado, amassing a record collection to match his books.

Sheila says his works are in the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the African American Museum in Philadelphia; the Bibliotheque Royale de Belique in Brussels, Belgium; the Concertgebouw De Doelen graphics collection in Rotterdam, Netherlands, and the Studio Museum of Harlem, among other collections.

The Ghetto, 1971.

During the 1970s, when he seemed to be getting a lot of press, Ayers’ art was described as “surrealistic” or “magically surreal.” “Each drawing is an expedition: for the artist, who finds new directions as the piece develops, and for the viewer, who discovers evidences of magic and purest whimsicality as (s)he looks deeper into the intricate detail of the drawing,” wrote a reviewer in a Philadelphia College of Art magazine in 1974.

“I see myself as a radical,” he said in a magazine article in 1976. “Some people tend to see the differences rather than the similarities between themselves and other people, or between themselves and the environment. Western culture has chosen to be an opponent of nature rather than a part of it.”

As Sheila continued the artistic tour of their home, she came across several pieces of art that were so different from Ayer’s usual drawings that they could’ve been done by someone else. What they showed to me were the stages of one artist’s life.

An oil on canvas, no date visible.

What stood out in his pen and inks were the faces, most of which were African American. His works are “earthy, human, because of the faces,” Sheila said.

She called his “piece de resistance” a finely detailed “Tree of Life” that he drew for her 60th birthday in 2000. “I watched this grow,” she recalled. “He would sit on the sofa at night and do these meticulous strokes. It’s a magnificent piece. … He’s showing the earth. He’s showing how the tree has all these roots of life.”

Tree of Life, a gift to his wife Sheila on her 60th birthday.

Sheila has many portfolios of Ayers’ pen and ink drawings, showing an artist who was both prolific and uniquely expressive. The details in them are amazing and the subject matters varied. There were a few collages, which he started assembling more than a decade ago. I had seen some of the collages at an auction house a few days earlier.

In the 1977 newspaper article, he said that his works were unplanned. “It just happens,” he said. “It is natural to me. Most of my drawings show outdoor scenes because I think of nature as having a oneness, and you cannot show that without showing lots of plants and animals and mankind.”

Watercolor or gouache, 1962.

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Related posts:

1. The works of African American artist Roland Ayers
2. Repro art of Native American chiefs