The wild life of artist Eric Sloane

KENT — More than 30 people attended a lecture on the life and work of Everard Jean Hinrichs, better known as Eric Sloane, at Town Hall on Sunday, Sept. 15. The presentation was given by Karin Peterson, director of the Eric Sloane Museum in Kent, and was sponsored by the Kent Historical Society. Sloane was a larger-than-life character, whose biography reads like a novel. He was born in February 1905 to an upper middle class family in Manhattan, but he spent most of his childhood and adolescence on Long Island. He loved to draw, and he spent a fair amount of time with his neighbor, Frederic Goudy, inventor of the font called Goudy Old Style. Some of the kinder adjectives his family used to describe him were “wayward,” “idle” and “incorrigible”—mainly, it seems, because he possessed a more flexible understanding of individual property than the other members of his household. He once “borrowed” his older brother’s motorcycle and sold it to a friend; on another occasion, he “asserted temporary ownership” of a very expensive camera that belonged to his father and gave it to one of his girlfriends. His family packed him off to military boarding school, but his mother eventually rescued him out of pity. The rest of Sloane’s life played out like Saul Bellow’s “The Adventures of Augie March”: He ran away unsuccessfully to either Pennsylvania or Ohio (no one is quite sure which); then he ran away successfully to Taos, N.M., where he earned his keep by making signs and posters for various shops, businesses and Native American dance groups. He met his first wife in jail, but nobody knows exactly how either of them got to jail in the first place. Over the course of four or five marriages (even Peterson lost count), he found himself in Coney Island, where he managed to eke out a living by designing sets for rides at the amusement park. Eventually, he drew the attention of David Wagner, owner of the Half Moon Hotel in New York. Wagner invited Sloane to live there as an artist-in-residence. The promise of free room and board was irresistible to Sloane, so he accepted the offer. During his time there, Sloane met a number of pilots, who took him for rides in their planes. Thus began Sloane’s fascination with clouds and meteorology—a fascination that led him to build three-dimensional weather models for an exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History. He enrolled in meteorology courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology but he discovered that there was too much math in the curriculum for his liking, and records show that he attended few, if any, classes. Despite his truancy, he somehow managed to become one of the nation’s first television weathermen, but he and the network parted ways over “philosophical” differences.A wife or two later, Sloane came to Brookfield, Conn., where he fell in love with barns. In 1954, just one year after moving to Connecticut, he published a book of illustrations called “American Barns and Covered Bridges.” Meanwhile, Sloane painted scenes of rural New England and New Mexico, which provided him with a steady source of income. He also became obsessed with tools, and he started assembling them into displays for the New Britain Museum of Art. His exhibits there caught the eye of Don Davis, CEO of Stanley Tools, who built a barn in Kent to be used for Sloane’s tool installations. The museum opened in 1969 as the Sloane Stanley Museum; today, it is known as the Eric Sloane Museum (according to Peterson, too many people asked who Sloane Stanley was, so the museum directors changed the name). Sloane lived in Connecticut until his death in 1985, leaving an extensive body of work. Much of his art is on display at the Eric Sloane Museum, which is open Thursday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. until Oct. 27. For more information on the museum, go to www.cultureandtourism.org/cct and click on Historic Preservation and Museums.