In describing his brother’s work, Scott uses the evocative language of one who
was shaped by many of the same experiences at the water’s edge, on the sand, and
among mossy oaks and thick pines.
“He paints what he’s walked, the roads he’s walked down. His paintings smell
like mud, smell like salt air,” Scott says. This is not just the salt air of their native
Jacksonville, Florida that is infused into Ford’s pieces, but also of Wrightsville
Beach, North Carolina, where the Rileys spent many summers at family members’
homes (Boone and Blowing Rock, North Carolina as well).
Both Rileys share impassioned recollections of their grandmother’s circa 1934
home at No. 4 Channel Avenue on Banks Channel in Wrightsville Beach, which
Scott describes as a classic two-story shingled cottage with a wraparound porch
where 20 to 30 family members would gather. Ford calls it, “the greatest house in
the world.”
“Wrightsville Beach always had a fix on me,” says Ford, recalling late 1950s and
early 60s Wrightsville, catching crabs underneath the stilt houses on the beach as
the tide came up, and longing to be with the older kids at Shooney’s, a popular teen
hangout located across the street from their grandmother’s Channel Avenue cottage.
The Riley brothers’ mother, Maureen O’Crowley Riley, was an artist too, and their
cousin, Wilmington resident Mort Neblett, says that she took lessons in the
mid-1940s with the successful Wilmington artist Claude Howell (1915-1997).
Ford says that as his mother took notice of his growing love of art, she encouraged
50
WBM september 2012
Old Florida