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Story By Hazel Jump, Photos By Jodi Hutchison

Elvis Coble is a rare individual who possesses talent in two worlds, music and art. He blends them so well that it’s just about impossible to think about one without bringing the other to mind.

Coble grew up in Jonesboro, graduated from Arkansas Training School, then, as he puts it, “walked across the street to Arkansas State University,“ graduating with a degree in music education. A steady climb toward a highly successful career in that field followed.

His first job was as choral director at Blytheville High School. At the same time, Coble pursued a master’s degree in music at Indiana University in Bloomington. From Bloomington, Coble went to Denver, Colo., to accept a position with Jefferson County Public Schools, and completed his master’s degree at the University of Colorado School of Music.

Next came a teaching position at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, a post he held for five years. During that time he studied for a doctorate at the University of Illinois.

Coble was then offered the position of music and art supervisor for the 12-school Valley View School District in a Chicago suburb. After four years, he interviewed for a coveted position in the Cook County Homewood-Flossmoor High School, a school that he describes as “an outstanding choral school with large auditioned choirs that toured regularly.” His students performed on television, and appeared in the 20th Century Fox movie “Lucas” in 1986. Coble said the Homewood-Flossmoor position is the best high school level choral job in the U.S.

“It was a choral director’s dream to end my career there,” Coble says of his 12 years at the prestigious school.

It was while in Illinois that Coble expanded an interest in art.

“Joliet Junior College had a really good art department,“ he says, “but all the classes (in painting) were filled up, so I took their drawing classes and auditioned for the American Academy of Art in Chicago.“ Coble was accepted into the academy. He also joined the Joliet Art League and participated in a number of workshops, and art, like his music, has been a necessary part of his life since.

During his long career as choral director, Coble’s students performed on tours in numerous concerts both here and abroad, and those extensive travels in such places as Austria, Germany, Italy, England and Wales offered an opportunity not only to collect art, but to create subjects for his own paintings. Two of his watercolors depict St. David’s Head in Wales, located on the Irish Sea.

In 1993, after 25 years in the Chicago area, Coble and his wife, Mary, an elementary schoolteacher, retired and moved back to Jonesboro, where they built a beautiful home on land at Pleasant Grove, which had been in her family for many years. Coble is now the director of music for Pleasant Grove United Methodist Church across the way. It is the church in which they were married 54 years ago.

Coble briefly came out of retirement in 1996 to teach choral music at Arkansas State University for a year while the department searched nationwide for a permanent professor. He also studied art under Evan Lindquist at ASU.

ON PAINTING
When he began painting, Coble worked in oil, but he prefers watercolor. For one thing, he says, “it’s a lazy man’s job. With watercolor you can get in and get out, and go back later.” He adds that the creation of art involves a lot of problem solving, and believes that art courses should be a part of every student’s school curriculum because it teaches them how to approach and solve problems.

In one room of the couple’s house hangs a landscape done by the mother of an old army buddy. She’d been an artist for Walt Disney Studios in California. Coble admired the painting, and his buddy gave it to him. It now hangs in Coble’s home next to his first oil painting.

Although he prefers watercolor, Coble still works in oils, as well as acrylics, pastels, colored pencil, pen and ink and charcoal. In addition, he recently completed a pointillism piece, a style of painting in which small distinct points of primary colors create the impression of a wide selection of secondary andintermediate colors, using watercolors. Coble frequently paints on watercolor canvas. One of many floral pieces was done in colored pencil, and a second was done using pastels. He recently completed a three dimensional study of vibrant red poppies on watercolor paper overlaid with rice paper, which he says is one of the hardest things he’s ever done. Another watercolor called “Voluptuous Hills” was done in Colorado; another, which he titled ”God is a rock in a weary land,” was painted in Arizona.

After Coble completes a painting he mats and frames it himself in his studio on the second floor. At the head of the stairway leading to the studio hangs his first oil, a landscape of trees and shadows. The studio’s walls are lined with additional paintings.

There are times, he says, when he doesn’t have a complete idea about how a painting is going to turn out, or what to do to see that it does.

“I don’t always know,“ he says. “It’s still in my mind somewhere.” As an example he points to an abstract he calls “Medieval Village,” a multi-colored design of different shapes.

“I didn’t start out to make a village,” he says, “but I began to put doors on it and that’s what it became.”

Coble’s paintings are in numerous private collections across the country. A former member of the Memphis Art League, he has shown his work in Little Rock and locally at the Sara Howell Gallery downtown and Gotay Gallery on Nettleton Avenue, where his work is currently on view. He also had several paintings in the November juried art exhibit held in the gallery of the Jonesboro Sun, which featured paintings by members of the Northeast Arkansas Visual Arts League.