The Kerwin Kemp Collection: Remembering Kerwin

Kerwin Kemp

Kerwin's beautiful prints may grace many walls, but it is a print of a different kind that I cherish even more.

The oldest of her seven children, Mama called him her right hand man. "He always had one of you on his hip," she said. As a child he had a vivid imagination and loved to tease his younger siblings. When the family doctor made a house call, Kerwin, age 8, pretended to be giving Karen, age 5, a running account while they waited in the next room and he peeked around the door. "He's chokin' Mama with a spoon, and you're next," he said. Just then Daddy came to get Karen for her check-up. The doctor said her pulse was "awfully fast."

Karen always detested any soured milk product ("It's not cultured, it's just rotten!" she'd say) and Kerwin delighted in chasing her around the house with what she considered to be a lethal weapon — a glass of buttermilk. He'd talk her into helping him torment Lynne by having her go out of sight with him and then coming back with her tongue stuck between her bottom teeth and lower lip, talking funny and telling Lynne she was someone else. They almost convinced her.

When Judy and John were in elementary school, Kerwin went to pick them up one day in our older family car. When he got to where they were waiting on the curb, he discovered the brakes had gone out, so he just made a u-turn and headed back home. First they were bewildered, then laughed hysterically, saying, "He forgot to pick us up!"

He tried to instill a little culture in all of us (not just Karen) and took Pat, age 8, to see the San Antonio Symphony's production of Peter and the Wolf. He insisted that Pat wear a suit and helped to dress him up, loaning him a tie from his tasteful collection. Of course it was much too long, but he tied it so that only the small end was showing, the other tucked inside his shirt and trailing down the inside of one pant leg. With his suit coat buttoned, no one was the wiser and they both looked sharp. He also bought Pat the album and Pat played it so much that, like it or not, we all had it memorized.

Kerwin's gifts were evident from an early age. He became very adept at drawing cartoon characters and I remember him (years later) amusing me at the dinner table by quickly sketching Mickey Mouse on a napkin. When Mama taught an art class in our home, he would listen in the background, and painted his first house on a piece of masonite at age 11. At 13, he did a wood burning of a house by holding a rusty nail in the flame on the kitchen stove, then pressing it into a piece of a board over and over, until all the tiny dots made a whole picture. Then he painstakingly burned HOME SWEET HOME at the top. We were a big family that moved a lot and Mama said he was probably yearning for a place of our own as much as she was.

He taught himself to play the piano by tinkering around any time he was near one, after church or in someone's home. Our parents had no idea how accomplished he had become until one night at church the regular pianist was absent and the music minister asked Kerwin to accompany the congregational singing. To Mama's surprise, he agreed. She just knew he would plunk around with one finger, which is all she had ever heard him do. He sat down and played beautifully with both hands. Mama got goose bumps. She also got him a piano. His renditions of hymns lulled us to sleep many a night when he'd serenade us long after we had gone to bed. Daddy said no matter how late the hour, it was never irritating but rather soothing as he drifted off to sleep.

One of my earliest memories of Kerwin is when I was 2 or 3, and he was 15 or 16, and we were walking home from somewhere. When we'd come to a street corner, he'd offer me his forefinger and say, "Now hold on." I'd wrap my little fingers around his big one and walk as fast as I could to keep up with his long legs as we crossed the street.

I have often wished for the talent contained in just one of Kerwin's fingers. Fingers that played so intensely they left gouges in the wood above the piano keys and gave his parents goose bumps and songs in the night. Fingers that poked fun, wielded weapons, held hands, gripped steering wheels, and tied ties as he teased, chased, picked up, protected, amused and inspired his brothers and sisters. Fingers that held pens and brushes and left images on paper that will last long after we are all gone.

Every morning before we left for school Mama would pray with us and she always ended with, "...and bring them all safely home." We thought it appropriate to entitle the last painting he did before he died, "Safely Home."

I'm grown now, but feel more vulnerable to danger than crossing a busy street brings. In many ways I still need a finger to hold. You never outgrow the need for the sense of protection that family gives. And when they are gone you long for not just a house, but home.

His music still drifts through my daydreams, his artwork still has that sense of wistfulness that is so moving it makes my heart ache. He did so many things beautifully, with both hands. Yet it is the memory of the gift of that one finger that is burned into my heart and leaves the sweetest impression. And all these imprints of his fingers are ways my heart holds on, and heads for home.

~ Paula