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fulness and her perseverance.”
And he is too modest to say, also to his considerable talent.
Growing up
He grew up in Paint Creek, W.Va., and Hansford, near Charleston, in a working class coal mining community. His father toiled in a coal processing plant and his brother — Slack is one of 14 children — worked under the earth.
“I didn’t grow up in a house that was very cultured,” he tells a visitor. “I had an internal world I fed. I knew I had to leave. I later learned I could leave West Virginia but West Virginia didn’t leave me. It’s where my heart is.”
He got on a train for Washington, D.C., and worked at first as a busboy and a “bar boy” on Capitol Hill. He landed a slot in the Foundation Program at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and submerged himself in the world of painting and sculpture. It was his art education.
Later, he studied anatomy and drawing at the Art Students’ League on 57th Street in New York City.
“You stumble along until you find your own voice — that’s the mission,” says Slack, who is shy to the point of avoiding the first person singular while speaking of himself (and of having his photograph taken for this article).
In Rappahannock
He came to Rappahannock in 1976, and to Washington, Virginia, a decade later, and lives in an 1833 house that hides behind tall, thick shrubs, and can barely be seen from the road.
At the age of 53, Slack is a handsome man of medium build with bright, intense dark eyes and pupils that seem to absorb the smallest details in his field of vision. He wears a tired slouch hat of felt. His hands are gnarled and smooth. His enthusiasms flare when he speaks
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