The Art of Bluegrass

For most visual artists, subject matter comes from the stuff that touches the soul. It comes from themes that tug at the psyche, either because they are familiar or because they offer intrigue. Sometimes, those themes hit close to home.

Artist Robert Yonke's gentle work depicting bluegrass performers resulted from a longtime fascination with the music, which began when he was a child.

“My father worked for a trucking company out of Wheeling, West Virginia,” Yonke explained. He said his parents’ “big entertainment” was attending the Wheeling Jamboree.

“There was a lot of bluegrass,” Yonke explained.

While this music was always around, he said it wasn’t until later that it truly gripped him. He began attending many bluegrass shows in his hometown of Pittsburgh, Penn. For ten years, he played at a weekly bluegrass jam at a VFW hall in the area he’d moved to next, western Maryland. At some point, he said, “the artwork was a natural thing to do.”

“I started painting those things [portraits of musicians] with no objective in mind,” Yonke said. Then, his daughter – who now handles most of his artwork business – started putting his work online. Somehow, somebody at the IBMA saw it.

“We took a ride down to Nashville for the 2007 conference there,” Yonke recalled, “and I did the artwork for 2008. We did that for three or four years. We’d always set up a booth and display artwork.”

As if being the artist for the annual World of Bluegrass conference weren’t enough, he also created promotional materials for events such as DelFest.

“For the first year of DelFest, I did a watercolor of Del [McCoury] himself,” Yonke explained. That painting would eventually be donated to a hospital.

He's painted his fair share of musicians from Bill Monroe to Missy Raines to the Stringdusters. However, Yonke isn’t solely about bluegrass; he also creates artworks depicting golfers, evocative landscapes, riverboats, and more.

While Yonke’s primary passion is watercolors, he said his work has evolved.

“A lot of my stuff has gone to mixed media, with watercolor and then acrylic and all kinda stuff on top of it,” he said.

Original artwork, prints and cards are available at his website, Appalachianstudio.com. While Yonke does not do strict commissions, in the past, he has made arrangements to create artwork around a specific subject matter. To discuss possibilities, he suggested reaching out via the website to his daughter, Becky Sciullo.

Today, Yonke lives in Florida but still occasionally performs with a group of musicians from a previous band he had in West Virginia.

“We do mostly old country, with a few numbers of the old bluegrass stuff. We do a lot of stuff in hospitals and nursing homes,” he said. “One of the things I miss about being down here is I do miss music. I get together with people, but it’s not the same.”

His first and primary musical passion was the mandolin, but after a shoulder injury, playing it eventually became more difficult. He switched to something that seemed easier on his shoulder. He told himself: The Lord's telling me to pick up the guitar.

Yonke said he’s liked bluegrass for as long as he can remember. One of the things he has enjoyed – whether he’s jamming with other musicians or creating paintings of them – is the welcoming nature of the roots music community. He said bluegrass is filled with “small egos.”

“The bluegrass people are just so easy to fit in with,” he said. “You can show up at a bluegrass festival, walk around, and then jump in.”

He noted how much he liked the years he attended IBMA: “The whole fun of it was at night, hanging out at the hotel. The bands would even be on the elevators playing!”

He said the great thing about bluegrass jams is you don’t have to be great to be welcomed in with open arms.

“As long as you can keep time,” he added, with a laugh. “You DO have to be able to keep time.”