THE FOLLOWING IS ARTIST Lee Brown Coye’s explanation for the use of colorful circles in many of his paintings:
“Those are McGurty discs,” Lee replied…”Yes, McGurty discs. Philip McGurty made them years ago. You still run across them once in a while out in the country where I come from…McGurty was a farmer who lived a few miles from here. He had a hill farm. Hill farms are hard to work, but he was a good farmer and a hard worker, and he made it pay. But besides being a good farmer and hard worker, McGurty had a soul, he loved color, too, and would speak about the sunlight on a field of ripe wheat and the color of the wet ground when it’s first turned in the spring…
“On warm summer evenings he would sit on his stoop and watch the setting sun as it hit the top of a hill across the valley, and he would feel badly when it got dark and the bright colors had faded into night.
“He wished there was more color yet in the fields and hills and trees, and he thought, ‘There is a way to get it there.’
“McGurty’s first move was to get some old boards which he cut into various size circles. These he painted in bright colors. Reds and yellows mostly, because they would stand out better against the background of a green trunk or a dark hill. He took the wooden discs and nailed them around on trees and fence posts. When he sat on the stoop in the setting sun, they glowed and he was happy with the work he had done.”
On different occasions Lee would vary the story. In another version a windstorm toppled an old straight oak tree on McGurty’s farmyard. The straight trunk gave McGurty an idea and he began sawing the tree into slices. Before long, there were many new yellow, red, blue and orange discs scattered around the farm. Strangely enough, one of the tree slices took root and over the years grew into a full tree bearing hundreds of discs like seedpods.
(From Arts Unknown: The Life and Art of Lee Brown Coye.)
(Art by Lee Brown Coye for THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER.)