Peaceful but Not Always:
Paintings by Neil Daugherty

In the Main Gallery
July 14, 2010 through December 31, 2010

Opening Reception July 30, 2010
from 7 – 9 pm

As part of the final show in the old Customs House before it undergoes renovation this fall, the Erie Art Museum, in conjunction with Stairways Behavioral Health, presents “Peaceful, but Not Always,” an exhibition of paintings by Erie native Neil Daugherty. This show features the museum’s collection of Daugherty paintings along with others from private collections. The exhibition is also part of the community celebration of 50th anniversary of the founding of Stairways Behavioral Health, where Daugherty’s love for painting was nurtured and encouraged.

Daugherty was born November 6, 1925. He studied mechanical drawing at Strong Vincent High School and intended to pursue a career in drafting. He also took art lessons from Joseph Plavcan. His artistic influences included Norman Rockwell, Vincent Van Gogh, and the ornithologist and bird artist Louis Agassiz Fuertes.

As a young adult, he developed a nervous and emotional disorder and was admitted to Warren State Hospital for treatment. Eventually his condition was controlled by medication and after 1952 he drifted among menial jobs in local industries. By the mid 1960s, he had recovered sufficiently to reconsider a career in drafting. While enrolled in an industrial skills center for drafting, he sold a few paintings to teachers. At age 40, he decided to drop out of classes and turn his attention instead to painting.

In his paintings, Daugherty combined abstract motifs with his vivid imagination to produce paintings of trees, flowers, animals and birds. He gave his works idyllic, indescript titles, such as Peacefull, but not always, Imagination, and Idle Afternoon, often hand writing the titles on the cardboard backing of the frames he chose. During the 1970s, he won numerous prizes at regional shows in Girard, Fairview, Edinboro and Erie, PA for his watercolors. After an intense period of creativity lasting more than a decade, he ceased painting. His work is in private collections in Erie, Buffalo, Cleveland and Florida. The museum currently owns twenty of Daugherty’s paintings.

Despite his disability, Daugherty became regionally well known in his time. His personal philosophy expounded two types of habits--doing and not doing. He regarded himself as the former. He was a frequent contributor to newspaper Letters to the Editor columns and a regular caller to Paul Brown’s longtime noon talk show on WQLN-FM. Daugherty died in 2004, at age 78.

Daugherty’s connection to Stairways came in the 1960s, when Stairways was founded. Stairways’ programming officially began on April 6, 1961. Several women in the Erie community founded the organization. At this time, hundreds of patients were released from Warren State Hospital and returned to Erie as medications for their conditions improved. The original Stairways programs began as just a few nights of recreation, as a social outlet for former State Hospital patients, who had been used to being around the same group of people for their time at the institution. Even at this time, art was encouraged in Stairways’ clients; although the program did not and does not use art therapy, clients were encouraged to produce art as a form of expression, to help them re-find their voices. Although the organization has grown in other directions over the last 50 years, art remains an important component of their programs.

Sponsored in part by Stairways Behavioral Health
Fifty years ago, Stairways founders welcomed Neil to the original social rehabilitation program
where they encouraged him to advance his artistic talent.