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Partial to Home Down Home Press Strange and miraculous things happen in Bob Timberlake's life and have from the time he was born. One such event occurred in 1965, when he was 28, married, with three children and a job in the family gas company in his hometown, Lexington, North Carolina. Thumbing through Life magazine, he came upon an article and a series of paintings by Andrew Wyeth that left him with a feeling unlike any he'd ever known. He suddenly knew that he was supposed to be a painter, although he'd never had a lesson in art or set foot in an art museum or gallery. Within a few years, he not only was painting professionally with the encouragement of Wyeth himself, he was well on the way to becoming one of the country's most successful and acclaimed realist painters, his work displayed in prestigious museums and fetching high prices. Through a series of other wondrous events, Timberlake's painting took him into other fields, leading him to create the most successful line of furniture in history, as well as thousands of other household products, apparel, even homes and building materials, making Bob Timberlake one of the top 10 designer names in the world. In Partial to Home, Timberlake proves himself to be as adroit a storyteller as he is an artist, designer, and businessman. His tales include experiences with such famous friends as Armand Hammer, Charles Kuralt, and Iron Eyes Cody, plus Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, not to mention the Prince of Wales, who summoned him to Buckingham Palace for advice. But this is not so much a book about the rich, powerful, and famous people Timberlake has known, as it is about the extraordinary people back home who greatly influenced his life. Lonnie Smalley, the mechanic who helped him build a car from scratch; Fred Craver, the furniture maker who passed on his reverence for wood; Aunt Sallie Parnell, who made hand-loomed rugs from the age of four until 106; Dan Melton, who believed that blackberries could cure anything, and many others. Not only did Timberlake never leave home to achieve his incredible success, he made home the basis of it. Home, family, and love are the core of this intimate and inspirational look into an artist's heart.
Reviews “A down-home memoir by the self-taught millionaire artist and designer. Somewhere between Johnny Cash and Grandma Moses, and with sales between Martha Stewart and Bill Blass, lies this regional giant of art and design (The World of Bob Timberlake, 1979, etc.). Now, instead of paintings that evoke the weathered gray-browns and the green, green grass of home, we get the corresponding prose: natural craftspeople, antebellum homes and lives, critter cuisine of squirrel and possum, and taller-than-fiction facts about the rise of this phenomenon who never painted until the age of 28. Timberlake, a Southern mallard-hunting and crappie-fishing gas company employee inspired by a magazine article on Andrew Wyeth, took up watercolors, made a name for himself as a local realist, and eventually became an icon who hobnobbed with Wyeth, Armand Hammer, Prince Charles, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan. But he maintains that he’s still more concerned with friends and relatives who define love, heritage and devotion to the ‘land on which you're born.' While he wades knee-deep in Lexington County [sic] sincerity, he says, jealous academics will dismiss him as a `paint-by-numbers artist' producing `sleazy, cheap . . . plastic nostalgia.' In fact, Timberlake canvases, neo-antique wooden furniture, and log houses aren't cheap at all, but some will see his ties to the timeless as backwards. This country road of a memoir, kept ditchless but unpaved by Jerry Bledsoe (Bitter Blood, 1988, etc.) is similarly crafted like an instant antique. It could have been slicked-up by a Manhattan publisher, but true to Timberlake it was nailed together locally, with all the knotholes showing. Ignoring the big city art world of elephant dung and the Virgin Mary, Timberlake respects history, ghosts, and God, and concludes his reminiscence by recounting the many providential people and events that allowed his miraculous career to unfold. Thirty-two pages of photos adorn a retrospective that will be loved by regular folk and disdained by rootless cosmopolitans.” “This is an extremely readable book about the popular artist, Bob Timberlake. If you are from North Carolina, you will recognize many of the locations he and Jerry Bledsoe write about. If you are not from NC, you are welcome to ‘set a spell’ and watch a boy grow up in a small-town world not unlike Mayberry (yes, there were really towns like that in NC). Surprisingly, Bob was not born with a paintbrush in his hand: this is something he happened into as an adult. Many of the seemingly simple events of his life converged to make him the artist he is today. You will learn what makes Bob Timberlake stand out from the pack and the values that keep him grounded.”
Links Visit Bob Timberlake’s Web site at http://www.bobtimberlake.com/.
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