Carl Sublett: Godfather of the Punks

Sublett joined the Army when the U.S. entered World War II. As a rifleman, he saw heavy combat throughout the Italian campaign and was listed as missing in action after a counterattack by German troops nearly wiped out his unit. Besides wielding an M-1, Sublett always had his sketchpad handy; his scenes from a foot soldier’s point of view soon made it into army publications. It was his odd fortune that the Army docked him the “missing” time and Sublett had to remain in Europe for the Occupation. He chose to spend this time studying art in Florence.

After discharge, Carl and Helen settled in Bristol to be close to Carl’s father, who died in the hospital there in 1946. By then, Sublett’s skill garnered his employment as a cartoonist with the Tri-Cities newspapers.

Sublett came to Knoxville in 1954 to work as a commercial artist. He became a full-time faculty member at the University of Tennessee in 1966 as an assistant professor under art department founder Ewing. He retired in 1982, but never stopped painting and produced thousands of watercolors over a lifetime.

Eric gives his mother credit for much of his father’s success. Just as his mother had handled the nuts-and-bolts of running that household, so did Helen manage the family with Carl. “He never had any idea about money. They were married for 63 years and he would have been totally lost without her guidance,” Sublett says. “In his later years, he fell victim to the Publisher’s Clearinghouse phenomenon. I guess he spent thousands of his hard-earned savings on this ridiculous shell game. It probably cost him his dream of going to Ireland that they always talked about and never got around to doing.”

Sublett was a painter who relished maturing in the isolation of Tennessee and Maine. Both places gave him different spectrums of light — that most fundamental element to a graphic artist. Frederick C. Moffatt, professor emeritus in art history, reading from his essay “Sublett, the Artist” (for a Tennessee State Museum exhibition in 1984), told the group “he was satisfied to forge his own versions of tradition,” and became an avid experimentalist, taking the heuristic — trial and error — approach to mastering his art.

“I think his style was to be himself and in that, he was a role model to his students and fellow artists that we all tried to emulate,” retired art professor F. Clark Stewart told a memorial gathering in March at the Laurel Theater a few weeks after “Sub’s” death. Stewart was among a stream of former students, kin and colleagues who talked about their relationship with the gentle, supportive professor. “He left us an incredible body of work as his legacy. But, he also left us his character.”

More telling about the man’s interior life was an anecdote Eric told the assembly about a night at the family’s vacation home in Port Clyde, Maine. Eric was enjoying a few puffs of marijuana when lo and behold, the Northern Lights put on a display. “It took me a while to figure out that that’s what it was …” he said, pausing for laughs from the crowd. The son returned up to the house where “Dad” was watching The Tonight Show. “He’s gonna know, he’s gonna know,” the younger Sublett fretted, still knowing he had to share the aurora borealis with his father. They watched together for almost an hour until the lights faded. After they returned to the cabin, Eric hungrily dove into a peanut butter sandwich. But not before his father made him flinch by making a monster face. Goofing on his son, letting him know everything was cool.

“Sub” would die after years of declining health in his beloved Maine at the home of his daughter, Carol Colby, with whom he and Helen were living at the time.

At the memorial service, Stewart said he never heard Sublett speak harshly to a student, even one who clearly shouldn’t have tried to pursue art as a career. Nor did he speak negatively of anyone, for that matter, in or out of class. That gentleness of spirit is reflected in a life well spent, like the long, graceful fade of a watercolor sunset.

The UT Downtown Gallery, 106 S. Gay St. (next to the Emporium building), hosts the Carl Sublett retrospective, “Image Tracks,” through June. Curated by Eric Sublett, the selection is a representative portion of Sublett’s realist and abstract work over 75 years. Coincidentally, the Knoxville Seven are celebrated as part of the Knoxville Museum of Art’s “Higher Ground: A Century of the Visual Arts in East Tennessee.” The new, permanent installation includes works created during the ’50s and ’60s by these “progressive artists … who transformed and energized the area’s artistic climate.”