Frank Eber’s primary goal in painting child workers from the past and young refugees of today is to make sure you notice them—and remember.
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Frank Eber was already known for his oil landscapes when he became interested in a new subject and a new medium. He’d painted portraits before, but in oil. “There are lots of oil painters who do portraits well, but in watercolor, not so many,” he says, naming contemporary artists Dean Mitchell, Stephen Scott Young and Mary Whyte as examples of portrait artists he admires. The speed of the process and the elusiveness of watercolor attracted Eber to choose this medium. “The element of chance opens up possibilities,” he says—but he knew that merely painting pretty faces wouldn’t keep him interested for long. “There’s little depth to it, you know?” he says. “What’s the point?”
Then Eber discovered old black-and-white photos taken by Lewis Hine, a photographer who’d visited American mills and factories in the early 1900s. He’d wanted to document children laboring in the days before laws were passed to protect them from workplace atrocities and exhaustingly long days. “Hine was concerned with capturing the spirit of the person he photographed, and that’s what jumped out at me when I looked at his photos,” Eber says. The artist found himself asking questions about the children pictured. What was his life like? Was she happy? “It made me emotional, which was partly why I wanted to paint them,” Eber says. “I wanted them to be remembered because they’re forgotten people, but they played such an important role in our society.”
Piecing Together a Portrait
Young Spinner (see “A New Spin”) is the painting that, in 2019, launched Eber’s child laborer series, which has grown to include about a dozen watercolors. The artist based most of these works on Hine’s photos, which have existed long enough to become copyright free. Eber learned through researcher and historian Joe Manning that the girl in the reference photo for Young Spinner was 11-year-old Lalar Blanton. “No child should have to work for 12 hours six days a week,” Eber says, “but that’s exactly what she did.”
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Manning had made it his mission to find out more about Blanton and other workers pictured in Hine’s photos (see “The Lewis Hine Project”). The researcher’s legwork assisted Eber with his artwork. “In the process of finding out where her life led after the photo was taken, Manning posted a picture of Lalar at age 45,” says Eber. The newer photo, taken with a more sophisticated camera than would have been available to Hine, proved a tremendous help to the artist, who had struggled to paint the girl’s face from Hine’s blurry profile shot.
Translating black-and-white scenes into color sent Eber on his own trail of research. “That was really the hardest part for me,” he says. “I tried to find out about historical clothing—what colors they could have been at the time.” Skin tones were also somewhat of a guessing game. Again, the color photos, obtained by Manning, of the children later in their lives helped Eber make decisions. “I’m so grateful for all of his work and efforts,” Eber says.
A New Spin
Young Spinner began Eber’s series of child laborers in America, based on the photos of Lewis Hine. “I painted this at least three times,” Eber says of his portrayal of 11-year-old Lalar Blanton gazing out of a window at Rhodes Manufacturing, in Lincolnton, N.C., in 1908. “Her face is hard to make out in the photo, so I spent a lot of time drawing it, trying to figure out her facial features,” he says. Considering the photography equipment of the time, Eber suspects that Hine staged this shot of a pause in Blanton’s 12-hour workday. “I don’t think he used a flash here,” says the artist, “so, he would’ve set up a huge camera on a tripod and told her to hold the position and not move.”
Courtesy National Child Labor Committee collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Lost and Found
Details matter in Eber’s portraits, but equally essential is hinting at just enough of the subjects’ surroundings to contribute to their stories without stealing too much attention. Eber may change the original background entirely if it threatens to overtake the subject (see Been Through the Mill). Lost-and-found edges, which he’d grown accustomed to using in his landscapes, take on new significance in his paintings of people. “I like the idea of having certain unfinished business in the picture—some areas unresolved and others that are truly there,” Eber says. “When you’re painting someone who’s no longer living, they’re here, but they’re not here. Edges that come and go emphasize that.”
Eber works wet-into-wet for as long as possible—90 percent of the time—spraying with water to keep the paint workable as long as he needs it to be. “Of course, there’s a limit to it,” he says, “but that’s how you get the most beautiful edges.” He typically lays in the whole scene with the first wash, then adds light values and lets this first layer dry before painting the mid-tones, nearly finishing the picture in this second go-round. In his third pass he fine-tunes, tightening edges here and there.
Key to Eber’s technique is the adjustment of the ratio of water to pigment in his brush. “I take this to an extreme,” he says. “By adding more and more pigment, you get edges that more and more stay put, but they’re never hard edges. That’s why the painting looks soft overall.” Further explaining his process, he says, “With watercolor, they say you have to go in and then leave it alone, but I pretty much do the opposite,” he says. “If it takes an hour to dry, I don’t stop working on it during that hour. I stay with it, and I get different edges when I do that.”
The Lewis Hine Project
Photographer Lewis Hine (1874–1940) gained recognition for his photos of American children at work before child labor laws went into effect in the U.S. He quit his job as a New York City schoolteacher to join the National Child Labor Committee, which formed in 1904 to investigate the harsh working conditions children endured at the time in a number of industries. From 1908 to 1924, Hine took more than 5,000 photos documenting abusive practices, which played a large role in the development of new laws passed shortly before his death. His photos are currently viewable and downloadable online through the Library of Congress website (loc.gov).
Unfortunately, little was recorded about the child workers Hine had photographed, and their lives seemed destined to fall into oblivion.
Then, in 2005, historian Joe Manning began a painstaking process of identifying them—combing through death and census records, tracking down and interviewing their descendants, and then writing the stories of the young laborers’ lives after Hine had photographed them. Manning’s work culminated in the Lewis Hine Project, which continues to this day. Learn more about the project at bit.ly/lewis-hine-project.
Making the Unknown Known
Eber has begun a separate series on another largely overlooked group: refugee children (see African Refugee; Temporary Shelter; Girl Study; and Boy in the Backyard). “I was inspired by the African refugees trying to get to Europe and how nobody wants them,” he says. “I connected to them as I did to the child laborers.
I see something about the look on their faces that shouldn’t be there in a child.” Acquiring reference material takes more effort for these paintings since the photos are newer and taken by photographers who retain the rights to them in many cases. Eber found, however, that the photographers were usually willing to allow him to use the images. “They want the same thing,” Eber says, “for the images to be out there.”
Eber’s portraits of child workers and refugees continue to fulfill his desire for technical challenge and his need to connect more deeply to what he paints. “Americans don’t seem to be very connected to their own history, and this can cause people to take for granted the things they have,” Eber says. A longtime California resident, Eber is originally from Germany. “It’s different in Europe. There you’re constantly getting bombarded with your own history,” he says. “You learn to live with it and also to look back and say, ‘We have this now because that happened.’ ”
Painting these portraits has changed Eber, pushing his body of work to the new level he was seeking and “opening up a new avenue” with a deeper purpose. “The emotional aspect is the most important one for me,” says Eber. “These people suffered so we don’t have to. I feel like we’re standing on their shoulders today. There are things still happening today that are wrong, but that doesn’t mean we have to stop trying to change things for the better.”
WATERCOLORS: Daniel Smith
SURFACE: Arches cold-pressed watercolor blocks
BRUSHES: DaVinci Casaneo and Frank Eber by DaVinci, series 224
PALETTE: Holbein metal palette #500
DRAWING SUPPLIES:
- Faber-Castell charcoal pencils
- General’s vine charcoal
- Faber-Castell Pitt Pastel Pencil in 101 white
- PanPastel in black
- Sofft mixed pack of palette knives and covers (for applying PanPastel)
Been Through the Mill
The painting Will the Mill Worker presents 15-year-old South Carolinian Will Morrill in 1908. He had worked in a textile mill for five years. “The striking part for me is that, despite his age, he looks like an old man,” Eber says. “He seems to have a weary expression, and his hands are all knobby from the work.” Eber changed the backdrop, pointing out that he likes to incorporate lost-and-found edges between the subjects and their backgrounds. He says this supports his assertion that everything in life is connected and without true separation. It’s also a visual way of acknowledging that these child laborers are no longer alive. “We’re looking at ‘spirits’ from a different time,” he says.
Courtesy National Child Labor Committee collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Author Bio
Stefanie Laufersweiler is a freelance writer and editor living in Cincinnati, Ohio.
About the Artist
Based in Central California, Frank Eber is an artist who works in both watercolor and oils. Originally from Germany, he grew up outside Nuremberg and moved to the U.S. in 1994. He’s best known for his landscapes and his city and seaside scenes, but is expanding his body of work to include evocative portraits that speak with broader implications to the situations of his subjects. Eber teaches watercolor workshops and offers one-on-one mentoring online. To see more of his paintings and learn more about the artist, visit frankeber.com.
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