The Rigley Sisters

Growing Up with Artists

~by Boris Ladwig

Above photo of Ellen Rigley Carter and Joan Rigley by Boris Ladwig

Ellen Rigley Carter remembers accompanying her father, Frederick W. Rigley, to the home of Brown County Art Colony founder Adolph Shulz, where they and other artists listened to a violinist.

It was the 1950s, and her father frequently would take the family to get-togethers with other artists to share meals and talk about their craft and the beauty of Brown County.

“They were part of our family. They were our social life,” Ellen said. “We had dinner with them. Our whole lives were completely around art.”

Her sister, Joan (pronounced Jo-Anne) Rigley, recalls meeting many of the artists as they came to her parents’ arts supply store.

Her parents also frequently took the younger sister on rides throughout the county to look for subjects Frederick Rigley could paint, as he did most of his work onsite, outdoors. He would return to the spots to paint by himself, or sometimes with another painter or even a group of students. Often in the sunshine, but sometimes even in rain or snow.

“He liked early morning light,” Joan said. “Shadows are important.”

She joked that her parents took her along on the reconnaissance excursions because her sister, who is nine years older, probably did not want to serve as babysitter.

For the younger sister, the road trips down unknown Brown County roads have had a lasting impact.

“To this day, I still like doing that. I mean it is, like, ingrained in me,” Joan said. “I can’t hardly stand to drive by a road that I haven’t been down.”

While the sisters never pursued professional careers as painters—in part on the advice of their father—their childhood experiences have instilled in them a life-long love for art and other creative pursuits.

Fred Rigley painting a field in Belmont in 2001.

The sisters recently reminisced about growing up in Brown County as they sat in Ellen’s home just north of Nashville. The rustic dwelling features exposed wooden beams, paintings, and antique furniture, such as a hutch filled with pewter dishes.

Ellen was born in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and moved to Brown County in 1951, at age four, after her father had met Shulz, who convinced him to join the artists colony.

But selling paintings didn’t pay all the bills, and the family patriarch supplemented the family’s income through teaching, by hosting tourists, and with sales from the art supply store, which was on Van Buren Street, where the Brown County Playhouse is today.

“He sold paintings out of our living room, and we rented rooms upstairs,” Joan said.

Ellen said that lots of kids lived downtown at the time, and they all knew one another. Her mother, Jeanette, would occasionally send her to the downtown grocery store to pick up local bread. She was only five or six years old, but no one worried about such things at the time. Her black dog, named Rascal, would follow her and wait outside the grocery store.

Ellen said she got to know many of the artists, including L.O. Griffith and V.J. Cariani, by accompanying her father to the artists’ homes.

Her father held the other artists in high regard, and as a young member always felt privileged to be included.

While he shared his love for his craft with his daughters—he painted watercolors with his younger daughter on vacations in Gloucester—he steered them from following in his footsteps.

“He didn’t want us kids to be artists,” Ellen said. “Because it was a hard life.”

He sold his paintings generally for a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, the sisters said. Some sold for less than $100.

And all the things he had to do to supplement his income kept him away from painting, Ellen said.

He did not really like novice painters, the sisters recalled with a chuckle.

“Beginning artists usually just wanted him to paint their painting,” Ellen said.

“He would complain about that,” her sister agreed.

Ellen with her mom Jeanette in Massachusetts.

Ellen went to college in Missouri for two years and worked as a probation officer in Johnson and Brown counties for years before she and her husband, Jay, created and ran The Artists Colony Inn in downtown Nashville in the early 1990s. Ellen said she was working in a restaurant at the time but does not recall exactly how she got “roped into” running the inn.

The couple loved antiques and decorated all the rooms with furniture from around the 1840s, including Shaker beds and handwoven, hand-dyed rugs.

They named each of the rooms after an artist.

The restaurant served home cooking, with dishes named after the artists, such as an Ada Shulz salad.

The inn and restaurant had as many as 60 employees. The couple sold the restaurant a little over a decade ago, in part because they were getting older.

“I was tired of working day and night,” said Ellen, 75. “The restaurant business is hard.”

Ellen still keeps busy, though, collecting antiques and paintings.

Both sisters stay involved in the Brown County art community. Ellen serves as president of the Brown Art Guild and is on the board of the Brown County Historical Society. Joan has served on the Indiana Heritage Arts board.

Joan lived in Brown County for 18 years before moving to Arkansas with her then-husband.

When she was younger, her mother, who worked in the store seven days a week, would send her off with her father, often to deliver paintings.

She remembers going to the homes/studios of Amanda Kirby and Anthony Buchta.

“Marie Goth, I remember taking her to the Hoosier Salon with daddy,” Joan said.

In Arkansas, she worked as a dental assistant and moved back to Brown County in 2001, in part to help take care of her father, who died in Nashville in 2009 at age 94.

Joan said that she sometimes wishes that the family had kept the arts supply store.

“We loved the artists and being part of that community,” she said.

The family got out of the business in part because of competition from big box stores.

The sisters have kept—and even reacquired at auctions—some of their father’s paintings. And while they don’t paint much themselves, they have found other creative outlets to make use of the knowledge and skills they absorbed by interacting with the Brown County masters.

“This whole place is nothing but flowers,” Ellen said, pointing through the windows of her home into her yard. “My creativity is in my gardens.”