Interview recorded by Jennifer Deer. Slideshow produced by Paul Reyes, Jody Reho, and Luck Dog Audio Post.

HENRYK FANTAZOS lives in the west end of Hillsborough, North Carolina, near an old textile mill that, until the 1980s, turned out fine corduroy and other fabrics night and day. The railroad still runs occasionally, the streets are in good repair, the sidewalks peter out. The mill buildings have been segmented into small entrepreneurial sweatshops that have just one shift, a long one.

The hills around Henryk’s studio are flecked with mill houses and mobile and manufactured homes. A mile out, a few small homesteads sit, more lost than abandoned, known only to the taxman. Chapel Hill is a few miles to the South; Durham to the east; Mebane to the west, all growing fast. The landscape feels like change is coming, by Act of Congress or a report of a UN committee, to remove all the inhabitants to a part of the world where they will not be noticed and to re-landscape and redecorate a persistent vestigial wrongness. Something that needs to be got beyond like hillbillies, Southern ladies, good ol’ boys, and tackiness.

Henryk moved to Hillsborough just after the last bolt of corduroy rolled out, so we have no art by him of a mill in action or of the end product, both of which he’d have found “delicious” to the eye.

Henryk has always suffered from zeal to paint the constituents of reality, even in art school in Krakow, Poland (as a boy, then as a young man), under teachers who were either post-impressionists or colorists of various tints. They could do nothing with him, and had the inspired good sense to leave him alone.

In the 1970s he drew and painted “real things,” objects both in the world and in his imagination. But always with three dimensions, existing in light and shadow and color—what you learn from looking at Vermeer, Memling, Bosch. On questionnaires that ask him to identify himself in various ways, Henryk often writes “Proto-Renaissance.”

He painted his way out of Poland, to France, to Germany, then to New York City as a Fellow in the Kosciuszko Foundation. Antipathetic to Polish Communism, he sought asylum in America.

From New York he moved to a remote part of West Virginia, where he produced a body of brilliant and whimsical paintings of fantasies of trees and porches and pots and people, the people often appearing as vagabonds or characters in a commedia dell’arte.

Then happily to Hillsborough, North Carolina, continuing to produce scores of paintings and engravings widely exhibited and winning many awards.

Suddenly he announced he would paint the “Face of the South,” a face he saw disappearing:

Stumbling and groping, by some subterranean guidance I arrived at last at the most obvious, natural resolution to paint my own surroundings, the South. Once the revelation unfurled itself I saw an endless realm of sights, situations, rituals, actions and inactions, all being parts of a certain totality. I do not intend to proffer an ideology through my work on the Southern themes but rather provide a panopticon of images showing the South. Loving—rather thought demanding to be agreed with—motivates it. Nothing, I hope will be shown in these works as neutral, the way the metallic reptile of the camera brings us an image. To paint the land one can hardly remain hidden in the studio. I had to learn the skills of painting outdoors. The swiftly changing light and shadow conditions, heat, humidity, glare, wind, cold, gawkers, insects, “no trespassing” signs, dogs, inquisitive property owners, portage: all manner of difficulties to be overcome and enjoyed in overcoming.

There is urgency attendant with the subject: the South is a disappearing country. Yes: the world I am painting now is being removed, rolled away, and rubbed out with an eraser as big as Sherman’s army of bulldozers. The South is removed every working hour and replaced with generic anonymity. Soon there will not be such a place as the South. In its stead we are getting nightmarish happiness of Global Nowhere. I can’t stop those fascists of profit, neither can you. All I should do, as always, is to paint it before it will be gone and yet stay; in my “Face of the South.”

I know vaguely of caricature of the South the comedians use to force laughter by spitting venom. I love the Land I live in, so my paintings are born of loving, not of jeering. Certain irremovable tendencies lead me to places and sights never seen by the tourist busy with camera or by the irremediably practical person who sees the world only as a backdrop for his projects.

I find the South in cotton stubblefield dotted with thorny chinaberries showing their yellow planets, or among the predeluvial cars overgrown with kudzu and on nameless islands in river, so silent about their secrets. Month after month, I painted an abandoned homestead held together by a grapevine, a collapsed floor of an ancient porch with sounds of a rocking chair still in the air and the stuffing of an arm-chair reaching out imploringly for the rheumy absent sitter. Then I would see the touching altar of a rusty fridge (as they say “gone feral”) and some parts of a baby booster seat in the middle of a forest, or a gloomy congregation of mailboxes vomiting Publishers Clearing House million dollar certificates. Sitting and watching, sitting and painting is a meditative occupation where much of what unobtrusively perdures becomes a deepening of the epistemic musings about what this reality consists of. Then the process of painting leaves the aesthetics behind and is increasingly about worshipful observations, one by one inserted into the painting to honor the proud individuation of all objects in view. That task obviously is infinite. The important thing is to force yourself into accepting one day that it is time for signing the painting, before your friends will find you a year later behind some burnt house incoherent and mad, muttering about infinity of individuation.

A thinking and reading painter, Henryk had pursued this Southern initiative into the libraries, finding, on his own, Tate and Cash, Woodward and Caldwell, Simpson and Montgomery, Welty and O’Connor: agrarians, humorists, novelists, poets.

But he does not paint ideas or propaganda. His works are free of defeat and guilt, of the knots and gnawings of poverty and status and family and wealth. Free also of progressive dreams and nightmares, free of any New South programs (which remind him of bureaucratic octopuses in the Poland of 1970).

In the “Face of the South” cycle, Henryk affirms such Southern legends as “fragrant overabundance,” courtesy, and friendliness.

But he eschewed the progressive ideology that, from the 1950s, I witnessed and, mea culpa, took part in; it was an intellectual program for a new Reconstruction that was implicit in jokes at the faculty club, in lectures, novels, movies, and newscasts. What were we pushing? Great educational leaders, sociologists, journalists? Having made a beginning of the end of racial discrimination, what next?

A funny bunch of notions: to remove the restraints on lovemaking, now called “sex,” pregnant with meaning (why all the energy spent for an activity well able to mind its own occasions?); to undermine devotion to concepts of honor or personal integrity (antisocial they are); to do the same to love of country or region or tribe; to correct (with the confident help of a humane intelligentsia) the erratic distribution of wealth; and, less honestly than Mao, to embrace quietly the prejudice that religion is poison, especially if it makes any difference.

Henryk, as I have said, never said hello to all that. The legend of his pictures grows out of his love of objects. Cotton bolls are not symbols of decadence or affluence or manual labor. There are delightful specifics of our region now; they want to be looked at and painted.

Henryk sees much in the form of visual puns impossible to unravel. They are comic mysteries. The cotton fields grow preachers; women in fancy dress roll collards into cabbages; okra smugglers prepare for customs (at the Mason-Dixon Line?). He depicts a yearning for mail, for letters, as experienced by mailboxes, the landscape, man.

The legend is about a triumph of existence, realities that came into being and left at least a footprint. Along with triumph there is wear and tear. He records this, too, lovingly.