Label Type
Artist CommentaryLabel
Untitled watercolor of miners at Battle of Blair Mountain
Andy Willis, c.1976-1989
This original watercolor painting depicts two men in the forest, partially covered by foliage, both carrying rifles and wearing red bandanas tied to their necks. Red bandanas were a battlefield signifier for unionist coal miners during the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain, which saw two irregular armies fighting with no other common uniform with which to tell each other apart.
Andy Willis painted this watercolor while active in the Miner's Art Group, which “celebrated the lives and history of coal mining families” in central Appalachia through painting and other expressive mediums from the mid 1970s through the late 1980s. He states that the painting references the Ralph Chaplin poem "When The Leaves Come Out" (1913), a work which speaks of revenge during a miners' strike in the winter: the green spring leaves on the trees in the surrounding hills will soon give cover to the striking miners' armed “vengeful wandering”.
Chaplin, a socialist artist, poet and journalist, wrote the poem during his time in West Virginia covering the Paint Creek Cabin Creek Strikes as a reporter for Huntington's Socialist & Labor Star. This experience also influenced his later penning of the widely-known labor anthem “Solidarity Forever”, with the encouragement of fellow journalist and friend Elmer Rumbaugh, in 1915.
You can read "When The Leaves Come Out" in it's entirety over in our Paint Creek & Cabin Creek Strikes exhibit.
gift of Sandra Barkey, Fred Barkey Collection
collection of West Virginia Mine Wars Museum
