A naked baby trods along an indiscriminate path through a dim, daunting forest.
The baby’s steps are awkward, as if newly upright.
The acrylic painting hangs on a wall at the Green Dog Gallery in the Englewood Shopping District.
“Life is a path,” says Phil Hood, the creator. “The baby is lost but not afraid. There’s something about it that’s encouraging to me.”
Not far from it is another painting that is less hopeful.
It’s a Hatalii, or Navajo medicine man.
He’s engulfed in an aura of mad streaks and whirls.
Balled in his fist is a fury only known in nature.
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Hood and his wife, Kathy, moved from Tucson, Ariz., to Levasy in early 1993, where they bought their first house. A decent drive from the city, they figured it to be their dream home.
“We were tired of Tucson,” Phil Hood says. “We’d been married 18 years, were childless and not going anywhere.”
Phil Hood had a brother who had lived in Kansas City since 1969.
“He had always spoken positively about the area, so we thought we’d give it a try,” Phil Hood says.
Six months into their stay, Kathy Hood made an announcement. She was pregnant. It was a girl – Rose.
“We named her that because she was the beautiful thing that got us through,” Phil Hood says.
Shortly thereafter, the rain started to fall.
It didn’t stop.
The Hoods evacuated before a surge of water five feet high sank their home. When the flood receded a month later, the home lay wrecked.
But Phil Hood isn’t one to let a dream slip away. He decided he’d rebuild the home with the help of $12,000 from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He, along with members of his church, raised part of the footing, installed new drywall and replaced the floor.
The Hoods returned to the house for a few months, saw the birth of Rose and – as the wet season approached – decided they couldn’t remain.
“We had to get out of there,” Phil Hood says. “And it was important to Kathy that we move to a house on a hill.”
So they did, moving within earshot of the home that once claimed Missouri’s most famous painter, George Caleb Bingham.
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The night is black as pitch when the Hoods stir up a tune inside the Green Dog Gallery.
“Let’s try this song and see if it’s any better,” Kathy Hood says.
To usher in the new year, the Hoods are holding a jam session for friends and family.
Kathy Hood and her husband, who’s picking a mandolin, start in on a rendition of “The Darkest Hour is Just Before Dawn” by the Stanley Brothers. They’re joined by Phil Hood’s brother Dan on vocals and bass guitar along with Rose on violin.
The harmony has an almost earthly complexion, the voices pooling like tributaries before a waterfall. Rose’s violin – self-taught, she’s been playing since she was 5 – produces a sound capable of a trickle or a torrent.
For now, Rose prefers to keep it a trickle.
“I haven’t really gotten into fiddling yet,” she says, smiling.
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Phil Hood learned to paint formally at Mesa Community College, where he earned an associate’s degree. He began painting when he was 12, dabbling with acrylic, watercolor and pastel.
“Oils were too messy and slow for me,” Phil Hood says.
As for his subjects, he’s always had an admiration for the Navajo people, whom he and his wife visited for one-week stints twice a year while living in Tucson.
“I’ve gotten to know the Navajo people real well,” Phil Hood says. “Such a spirited people with a dignity not found in other cultures.”
He’s also fond of landscapes, particularly ones smacking of color.
And there is the painting titled “Marilyn.” Draped in a bright cloth revealing nothing more than her outline and navel, the Blonde Bombshell rests at the doorway, a sumptuous invitation into Phil Hood’s studio.
“My wife ordered me to do that one,” Phil Hood says.
Then there’s the music.
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Phil Hood’s brother Dan, who is five years his senior, turned professional with a band he co-founded in 1968 at the University of Arizona called Doc Ollswang’s Traveling Snake Oil Remedy and Tractor Repair Company. It was a jug band, meaning it featured a jug player and an assortment of traditional and homemade instruments.
“We had a strictly American sound,” Dan Hood says.
At about that same time Kathy and Phil Hood were acquainted in high school. They came to know one another more as extroverts involved in theater than as fellow musicians. Later they discovered, along with other traits, that his incorporeal guitar and her Cass Elliot-inspired voice made for a fine match – and so they were married.
In the late-1970s, the three came together as a group that morphed into the High Noon Band, a Southern rock outfit. While capable of playing any number of stringed instruments, Dan Hood was never fancied for his playing.
“If it weren’t for that haunting voice of his, we would have offed him years ago,” Phil Hood says.
From 1978 to 1980, the High Noon Band toured as far north as Anchorage, Alaska, and as far east as Hastings, Neb., with Tucson their home base. Later, they adopted a psychedelic undercurrent and renamed themselves Carrie Nation. Half of the songs they performed were original, and half were tributes.
In the late 1980s, the partnership ended with Dan Hood’s departure to Kansas City. It would be renewed in 1993, the year of the great flood.
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They now refer to themselves as The Hoods, a group of a gospel and bluegrass basis.
“God wanted my wife and I to move here, and He wanted us to persevere,” Phil Hood says. “I also think He wanted us to reunite.”
In a recent album called “On Bended Knee,” which Phil Hood illustrated, the Hood ensemble plumbs the depths of what it is to be spiritual, Christian. There’s tales of ever-flowing wells, cumbersome mountains – and storms that evoke images of Noah and his Ark. With the exception of one tune, they’re all written and composed by Dan, Kathy and Phil Hood.
The album whisks the listener on a journey of highs and lows, peaks and valleys.
In the Green Dog Gallery, as his fingertips skim the strings of a mandolin, Phil Hood’s gaze becomes fixed.
It’s as if he’s looking through a wall at a painting in his studio that renders him mute when asked about it.
A Navajo man named Alfonso labored all day, sprinkling streams of colored sand from different bowls until an oval painting emerged, one expressing the pride of his people.
As according to custom, the sand painting was destroyed upon completion.
The circle of life.
The Hoods are available for concerts, benefits, church socials, funerals and more. For more information, please call 816-836-3977.
