The hunt for Haynes still continues

I’ve embarked on a quest, and maybe you can help.
The other day, while looking for something in the garage, a poster caught my eye. It was one that Tim Rivers, curator of the Elwood Haynes Museum in Kokomo, gave me last year. He had carefully scanned a huge advertising poster for Haynes Automobiles, pieced four sections together and had the digitized version output at a more manageable size. Jay County Historical Museum has a copy, along with tons of digitized files on the automotive pioneer and inventor that Tim shared.
That got me thinking about another picture, a portrait of Elwood Haynes that was once exhibited in Jay County and is now unaccounted for.
It was a painting by a woman named Thelma Confer, a talented artist who attended Herron in Indianapolis and later taught there for many years.
Though she was born in Tennessee, she married a Hoosier, Byron Confer, whose family had ties locally. As I understand it, Byron and Thelma were uncle and aunt to the famous choreographer, Twila Tharp, who was born in Portland and lived in the Dunkirk area before her family moved to California.
Still with me? (I know, this is a little bit like going down a rabbit hole.)
Back in the 1980s, Thelma Confer decided to take on an ambitious project, doing a landscape painting of each of Indiana’s state parks. She also did paintings of historic homes, like the Wilbur Wright birthplace.
And for some reason, when Elwood Haynes rolled around on her historic agenda, she decided to do a portrait.
She based it on a well-known photograph that shows Elwood sitting in his first car in profile, wearing a derby hat. She added in the background a scene that included his backyard workshop/laboratory from his early days in Kokomo.
Once the series was completed, it was exhibited — in whole or in part — at a number of venues.
And at one point in the 1980s, several of the Thelma Confer pieces were exhibited in a one-woman show at the Ronald Gallery in what was then known as Jay County Center for the Arts, now Arts Place.
The Elwood Haynes portrait was part of that exhibit, and as you can imagine it caught my attention. At one point, before the exhibit came down, I inquired about purchasing it in hopes of keeping it locally. After all, Elwood Haynes was born in Jay County and pioneered the natural gas industry here.
Mrs. Confer declined my offer, saying she wanted to keep all of the paintings in the collection together.
And that should have been the end of it, until that poster caught my eye in the garage the other day.
Before I knew it, I was on the internet, trying to track down Thelma Confer and the painting.
That wild goose chase is still continuing, but here’s what I’ve learned so far:
•Thelma Confer died in 2013, though her work still shows up at auction now and then.
•In 2006, she donated the entire Hoosier set — 52 paintings — to the Indiana Department of Natural Resources.
A day or two later I was on the phone to Phil Bloom at the DNR. Phil’s editor of Outdoor Indiana. He used to be an outdoor writer for The Journal-Gazette in Fort Wayne, and he’s the author of the best book available on hiking trails in Indiana.
He’d never heard of the collection of paintings, but he had an idea where they might be. It was in about 2006 and 2007 that the Indiana State Museum moved out from the umbrella of the DNR to become its own entity. That was the place to look. DNR isn’t in the art business these days.
The next call was to the state museum, where I found myself confusing the woman who answered the phone. Knowing that the museum has a broad spectrum of artifacts, I asked to speak to someone in charge of collections.
She immediately tried to connect me with someone in the accounting department who dealt with delinquent accounts.
When we finally got that straight, I connected with Mark Rushman, fine arts curator for the museum.
Mark went looking and found, to his surprise, that the museum did in fact have under its control a batch of Thelma Confer paintings that really belong to the DNR. Trouble is, his count didn’t total 52; and there was no record of an Elwood Haynes portrait among them. Instead, they are all landscapes and historic buildings.
But the search goes on.
In the meantime, thanks to Phil Bloom at DNR, the state parks folks are asking about getting the paintings back so they can be properly exhibited at park sites around the state. Maybe if they actually start rummaging through the archives, the Haynes portrait will pop up.
Keep your fingers crossed.