The art of John Ford Clymer: Imagining a more innocent time in Daydreaming on the Porch

I always loved to visit and take road trips to central Washington State years ago when I lived near Seattle. Driving over the Cascade Mountains, one enters a drier, more austere landscape, but one that is dominated by the streams and mountains that flow down from the Cascades. One of my favorites is Manastash Creek, which I remember driving along and photographing one weekend in October when the leaves were changing. There is so much beautiful scenery in and around Ellensburg, WA, a most interesting and enjoyable town to visit. I liked it especially because it is the birthplace of one of my favorite artists, John Ford Clymer, born there in 1907. The city has a museum downtown dedicated to this illustrator and landscape painter who produced a total of 80 covers for the old Saturday Evening Post magazine that was so much a part of our lives in the 1950s and 60s.

Clymer, like Norman Rockwell, who painted the most covers for the magazine in its decades-long history, sought to capture a mood, a feeling, a picture of his childhood in the beautiful rural areas around Ellensburg. His paintings are steeped in a loving nostalgia for a period in his life when the simple pleasures of boyhood and youth created memories for him that lived on in the covers he painted for the magazine.

I can’t help but wish I had experienced such an idyllic childhood in the country. His paintings are about summer reveries on days that must have stretched out endlessly in carefree succession. Oh, how I wish I had had a creek to swim in… the proverbial “old swimming hole.” Kids flew kites and got them stuck in trees. During spring, the apple orchards were a mass of billowy white blossoms. Families hiked and had picnicked in the mountains. Piles of autumn leaves were for jumping in and scattering about. Kids rode horses and had fun that didn’t involve computers and the Internet. What a life!

I can’t help it. I am a bit of an idealist still, and it’s good to be reminded of good times and the innocent days of early youth. John Clymer allowed those times from his past to live on for future generations to imagine and get a glimpse of. I like that.

Classic John Ford Clymer cvers for “The Saturday Evening Post”:

https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2010/09/john-clymers-beautiful-seasons/

Last updated February 17, 2022