PORT TOWNSEND — Jesse Watson has painted portraits of elderly blues musicians whose stories are etched in their faces.
He has painted hip-hop artists and reggae singers whose auras glow like halos around their heads. Using bold lines and intense colors, he has painted the life force flowing through the veins of subjects he has never met in person.
So when a parent of one of Andy Mackie’s music proteges suggested that Watson — an award-winning artist and illustrator for children’s books that have been on The New York Times best-seller list — paint a portrait of the North Olympic Peninsula’s music man, Watson agreed, even though he didn’t know him very well.
“His face tells such a story,” said Watson — whose father, Richard Jesse Watson, also is an artist and illustrator.
“He has all kinds of stories hidden away in that face.”
Music man
It is a face familiar to school children from Sequim to Seattle, from Port Townsend to Brinnon, who know Mackie as the man who passes out harmonicas wherever he goes.
They also know him as the man who rides his motorized scooter into their classrooms to teach them songs he learned as a boy in Scotland.
Many own strum sticks or backpack guitars because Mackie made them one in his unheated workshop in the Chimacum Valley, where he lives in a camper.
Mackie may not be able to make instruments or visit schools much longer — the health problems that triggered his desire to buy harmonicas instead of heart medicine nine years ago are catching up with him. So Watson knew if he was going to do the portrait, he couldn’t put it off.
“All the kids know him and love him,” Watson said. “I had to paint him. He means so much to the community.”
Portrait reflects dream
The result: a portrait that reflects Mackie’s dream to pass along the gift of music he received as a child in Scotland to every school child before he passes on.
“It is my favorite kind of painting, to use subtle human expression to tell a greater tale than just what appears,” Watson said.
But Watson wasn’t thinking of possible subjects when he took his 5-year-old son, Taj, to the Andy Mackie Music Festival at Memorial Field on Labor Day weekend.
That’s where Dallas Jasper saw Watson and suggested he do the portrait.
Jasper is also the mother of Sam, a gifted musician who is the youngest teacher in Mackie’s after-school music program, and also helps Mackie to publicize monthly concerts he organizes to showcase his students’ talents.
Asking Mackie for permission, Watson photographed the musician at the Labor Day festival as he showed Taj how to play a strum stick and played a tune on the harmonica.
Watson used the photographs to create the portrait of Mackie as he looked that day.
Earlier decade
But he purposely chose a muted color scheme that ages him back to an earlier decade. The idea: to give the musician a ’50s feel, Watson said, evoking a legendary Western character.
It happens to be the decade that Mackie, as a teenager, emigrated to the United States from Scotland on a cattle boat, then worked on ranches breaking horses.
That’s not a detail that Watson, who had only seen Mackie in passing in halls and parking lots when they were both teaching at schools, knew.
“Some people have enough mystery in their face that when you do a portrait, you can tell their story visually without knowing anything about them,”
Watson said. “Then when you find out their story, you can say ‘There it is.'”
Although he doesn’t do detailed paintings, Watson painted the gold flecks in Mackie’s eyes, something Steve Hartman and the CBS News camera man noticed when they were into town last spring to film an “Assignment America” segment on Mackie and his kids.
The portrait also captures the expression in Andy’s eyes, which hold the memory of sitting in a corner of the classroom in a village school in Scotland, where the teacher is showing him how to pick out a tune on the guitar.
“He’s not really looking at you,” Watson said. “He’s looking back.”
Eyes on future
But for the past year, Mackie has had to keep his eyes on the future, planning how to keep the music lessons and instruments flowing to school children when he is no longer able to do it.
The segment on CBS brought Mackie’s program to the attention of a donor on the East Coast, who is helping fund an instrument-making class at Chimacum schools starting in December.
A student at a Tacoma high school is putting on a benefit concert for Mackie’s music foundation in December as her senior project.
“She found it on the Internet,” Jasper said.
Mackie was planning to appear at the concert, but health problems related to his heart may preclude that. Plans to hold a community-wide benefit concert in January have also had to be cancelled, Jasper said.
Watson finished the portrait and showed it to Mackie, who said he liked it.
It’s now in Watson’s studio and on his Web site, www.jessewatson.com.
Jasper hopes someone will buy the portrait to exhibit in a public place as a tribute to the man who saw a way to spark joy in the eyes of children and took it.
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Port Townsend/Jefferson County reporter-columnist Jennifer Jackson can be reached at jjackson@olypen.com.
