Free Prayers the Devil Answers by Sharyn McCrumb

Philadelphia or New York, but to an uneducated kid from the back of beyond, Knoxville seemed a more manageable sort of place. If he did well there, maybe he could aim for bigger things. And if he failed miserably, he wasn’t too far from home: he could always go back, if he had to.
    He worked at laborer’s jobs, saving up for art lessons, and managed to take a few classes at the university. When he told people in the art community that he wanted to paint, they all said the same thing: what a pity you didn’t get here a couple of years earlier. Lloyd Branson, a master of historical paintings, lived in Knoxville, and had taken pupils at his studio on Gay Street. He was widely hailed for his two frontier paintings: Gathering of the Overmountain Men at Sycamore Shoals and The Battle of King’s Mountain . The latter had been lost ten years earlier when the Hotel Imperial, which owned it, had burned to the ground, taking the painting with it. But Mr. Branson had passed away in 1925, and no one else measured up to him.
    Lonnie made do with the teachers he could find and afford, and he earned his keep by preparing gesso and doing other odd jobs for working artists. That in itself had been an education, but it didn’t pay as much as laborer’s jobs. Still, he scraped along for four years, thinking that sooner or later he’d make enough contacts to get some well-paying commissions, or at least enough jobs to allow him to buy meat for supper every now and then.
    Even if the Depression hadn’t happened, he doubted he would ever have been able to support himself with his art. Very few painters ever did. One of his friends joked that the best preparation for being an artist was to be born into a wealthy family. Or perhaps he hadn’t been joking. Failing that, he said, the best alternative was to ingratiate yourself to the rich and tedious, until you found someone willing to keep an artist as a pet. It had worked for Michelangelo. There weren’t any Medicis around these days, and the pope wasn’t hiring, but America was sufficiently endowed with steel barons and railroad tycoons to make the idea seem possible.
    With an indifferent education and no skills aside from his art, Lonnie Varden faced the fact that he hadn’t much chance of finding better employment to support his vocation. The Depression hadn’t made any difference to him at first. He wasn’t particularly fazed by the poverty that the economic disaster had spawned; as far as he could tell, for an artist, being poor was a way of life. There wasn’t much call for artists even at the best of times, and as the country’s hard times dragged on, people no longer had money to spend on portraits of their children, or for acquiring pretty lake and cottage scenes to hang above the parlor mantelpiece. There was another world of art out there, too—people whose work hung in museums and sold for great sums to discerning collectors—but he had none of the qualifications to join that group, least of all the ability to ingratiate himself to rich and influential people.
    Despite his ardor, Lonnie wasn’t a natural talent as an artist, if the opinions of his teachers and fellow painters were anything to go by. At first, he could make a portrait resemble the person who posed for it, albeit without imbuing any life or personality into the image, and his attempts at landscapes, which he intended to appear as real as a photograph, showed no particular talent for composition or theme. He worked hard at it, though, and finally he learned how to put what he felt into the work so that other people could see it too.
    Before times became really hard, people had liked his early efforts well enough to shell out a couple of dollars to own one, usually to be given as a gift, but, as he learned more about the social side of art, he finally resigned himself to the fact that his work would never hang in museums or sell for fabulous sums in