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LAST MINUTE MUSINGS: Rees print honors gem in our midst
If you, like me, look out your window five days a week and see the Putnam County Courthouse, it’s easy to forget the significance of the building.
It’s an old building. Climbing the stairways is a chore. The WiFi signal is awful. Sometimes little pieces of rock fall from the upper reaches.
Yet if you stop and take a moment, it’s not difficult to appreciate.
Built of good, old Hoosier limestone, the architecture of the 115-year-old building is really something to behold.
And let’s be honest, some of the biggest events in the county happen there. Important court cases are decided. Most county offices are housed there. More than 7,000 of us have already voted there in this year’s election. Come Tuesday night, many of us will be back, awaiting election returns.
So it was no wonder that our county commissioners, despite having two previous courthouses that didn’t last, felt the need to invest in the beautiful building we still see today.
That’s the way Indiana State Bar Association Past President Douglas Church sees it.
“I think they (county commissioners) really, truly did understand the significance of being able to have laws and live in a peaceful manner,” Church said.
The veteran Hamilton County attorney was in town recently on Bar Association business, collecting the 71st addition to the association’s goal of collection 92 works of art featuring each of the state’s county courthouses.
“They’re really magnificent buildings,” Church said. “In most cases, they’re the most architecturally significant structure in downtown.”
The Bar Association was hoping to help people see this in commissioning these pieces. Locally, the project was sponsored by the Greencastle Arts Council in conjunction with the Heritage Preservation Society of Putnam County.
“It really was intended to get people to realize the significance of these courthouses, the significance of the court system,” Church said.
The entire collection is housed at the Indiana State Bar Association offices on the fifth floor of the Regions Tower in Indianapolis. He said that anyone with some free time in downtown Indianapolis should stop in for the tour of the eclectic collection.
The Putnam County piece will be the first of its kind in the collection, a woodblock print crafted by Matt Rees. It features not only the historic courthouse, but also the surrounding trees and even a flock of birds that flew over as Rees was taking pictures of his subject.
These additions were important to Rees, who noted that his art often focuses on nature and motion, not static buildings.
He got inspiration, though, while visiting the Putnam County Museum, where the paintings of 19th-century local artist Elisha Cowgill are currently displayed.
While looking at Cowgill’s paintings of the first two Putnam County courthouses, something clicked for Rees.
“He was a little less concerned about the building than about the trees and the animals and the people,” Rees said. “And I said, ‘Oh, it’s just a building and life goes on around it.’”
So we have Rees’s latest work, one print of which will go to the Bar Association, another of which will hang in the courthouse — with a few more Rees’s pieces still for sale.
The birds are there.
The trees are there, and it turns out one is more significant than Rees might have believed.
After a copy of the print ran in a recent Banner Graphic, the artist heard from a local woman who told him the fir tree had been planted in her husband’s memory and how happy she was he’d included it.
These are the kinds of things that make the Heritage Lake native glad he returned to Putnam County after just a few years away.
“It takes a while to appreciate where you’re from, but now I’m proud to be from Putnam County,” Rees said.