The Star News

Mississippi Connections

by Britt Aamodt

Elk River is a Mississippi River town. And its people, whether conscious of it or not, have been shaped by that association, says Minneapolis oil painter Ron Merchant.

For “Born by the River: People of the Mississippi River Towns,” Merchant, a onetime telecommunications salesperson now full-time artist, looked at eight Minnesota towns, including Elk River, and their connections both to the Mississippi and to one another.

The exhibition, scheduled to open April 6, 2006, at Robbin Gallery in Robbinsdale, will include approximately 80 oil paintings and photographs drawn from trips to Lake Itasca, Jacobson, St. Cloud, Elk River, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Winona and Red Wing, carried out May-September 2005.

As part of the show, Merchant also conducted interviews with town residents, “to give the paintings context. To get some history and background so you can bring that experience of the town back to people who weren’t there,” he said.

During his trip to Elk River, Aug. 16-23, he interviewed three individuals, including Rose Ann Ames, an Elk River native currently living in Burns Township.

“I saw him painting outside Cub Foods, and I was curious,” said Ames, who was one of several onlookers attracted to the spectacle of an artist with easel and palette in the grocery store parking lot.

Ames grew up in downtown Elk River in a house formerly employed as a stagecoach stop. A stone’s throw from the Mississippi, she however felt no immediate connection to the river as a child, only recalling the seasons when it overflowed its banks and flooded neighboring property.
Her memory is of a town that “centered on Main Street,” with a grocery store in walking distance and a café on the site now occupied by the Bank of Elk River.

“My uncle owned the café for a while,” said Ames. During World War II, “army buses used to go through Elk River. And the soldiers were fed at the restaurant before heading down to the Cities.”

Excerpts from Ames’ interview will appear alongside photographs and paintings at the exhibit, which the artist plans to tour through Elk River later in 2006.
Merchant selected Kemper Drug, the Cub Foods parking lot and the Babcock Park boat launch for representative Elk River portraits.

“Kemper Drug has been there forever. The employees have been there forever,” he said, explaining his choice of the first location. “And that’s one of the great things about Elk River, that it still has these businesses that are connected to the community and know their customers.”
But unlike the Main Street-centered town of Ames’ youth, Merchant saw a small town still going through the pains of rapid growth.

“The whole city center has moved away from Main Street. Elk River has moved away from its roots. It has moved away from the river to where retailers can build strip malls on 169.”

Merchant’s painting “Carting It Home,” a view outside Cub Foods, reflects the city’s disassociation from its river origins. Instead of the Mississippi’s muddy waters, shoppers flow among parked cars and street lamps. Building facades loom up like bluffs.

The artist doesn’t want his pictorial representations viewed as criticism. Each of the selected locations characterizes a point along a continuum of river-town experience—Red Wing, in Merchant’s estimation, the city best evolved to exploit its Mississippi connection.

Aside from its reputation as a picturesque tourist destination, Merchant said, “Red Wing is a working town. There are big grain trucks driving down the street, and they’re going to the river and to the barges. They’re using the river for commerce.”


The project is more than “making pretty paintings of the river,” the artist observed. “I am really trying to create and flesh out a sense of time and place. What is life like in these towns? What is 2005 like for these people?”


Ames said 2005’s Elk River has more traffic, more buildings and less small-town coziness, “but what you remember as a child will never be again.”


Merchant is currently finishing the 40 canvases to be included in “Born by the River.” He is also eyeing a possible companion book, and contemplating a project that would include painting cities along the entire length of the Mississippi River.

Journalist

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