I grew up poor in a very small farming community in south-central
Minnesota near the
Iowa border, having
absolutely no inspirational contact with the world of art in my so-called
formative years. The women of the
village did not “come and go talking of Michelangelo.” If they did, I never heard them. But I did hear their shrill voices reverberating
off the walls of the Catholic Church in our neighborhood at suppertime,
caterwauling for their kids to come home or directing insults at the hopeless,
irresponsible sots they married, who should have been farmers so they could
have made some decent money to provide for the family.
The school taught the 3R’s and Art wasn’t one of them. I think my parents displayed a print of a bird
dog and a pheasant on one wall in our tiny rental home, a converted grain shed,
and maybe a Rocky Mountain
landscape print executed in a technique ala Bob Ross. I was the youngest of four boys, the oldest
being 16 years my senior. One of my older
brothers drew a pretty good-looking WWII fighter plane on one of my school
papers. And of course I was compelled to
copy images of Mickey Mouse and other fantastic animated characters created by
Walt Disney that were so dear to our childhoods.
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| Not Expecting Much |
My old parents didn’t expect much from me and I didn’t
expect much from them. And we didn’t
disappoint. I was too timid to ask for
anything and what I got was painfully inappropriate. Once I needed a new pair of shoes for grade
school and my dad came home with bowling shoes he bought on sale at the J.C.
Penney’s store in Fairmont, the big
town of 10,000 half an hour’s drive away.
I was mortified. When I needed a
suit for confirmation at St. John’s
(Missouri Synod) Lutheran Church,
my dad bought me a cheap, scratchy brown tweed sport coat to wear while the
five other boys were all decked out smartly in navy blue suits. Despite suffering this abject humiliation at
a tender age, I came to like the look of a cheap, scratchy brown tweed sport
coat. But I digress.
I sketched often in the margins of my school books and drew a
Pilgrim on a blackboard in colored chalk during Thanksgiving week in the 5th
grade class of Katherine Philagios, who painted watercolors herself, something
I didn’t know until a few years later. She
was sweet and very encouraging. But from
the sixth grade on it was mostly downhill for me, as sports and party time for
the other boys and girls left me abandoned in their wake. Not everything was bleak. I had an artistic breakthrough in high school
when I figured out how to draw a cube. I
was fascinated. Even then, though, I didn’t know when to quit
on a sketch before ruining it, as a farm kid named Jasper Johnson once pointed
out during a recess period.
I drew a couple of thumbnail sketches for the mimeographed high
school paper and was rated a top talent by the Minneapolis
art school that advertised the “Draw Me” contests in magazines. My sketch of Bob Hope’s profile was
considered so superior, in fact, that the school would let me enroll for just
the price of tuition, according to the very large man who came to our house to plead
the school’s case.
I decided to enroll instead at the University of Minnesota
in Minneapolis, where I did some figure
drawing and took some abstract art courses from a couple of old WPA artists
from New York, Peter Busa and Walter
Quirt. But when one of Quirt’s favorite
students, a very pretty girl from a rich suburb of Minneapolis,
won accolades for a rather odd painting on a big canvas of the back half of a
horse in profile, I decided to take my degree in journalism. I pretended to be a news reporter for about
14 years for various employers in the Midwest, and
finally New York City, before
walking off the job one morning at the invitation of the editor who said, “If
you don’t like it, why don’t you leave.”
So there I was at 35, without a job and no career prospects.
What else do you do in those
circumstances but take the hard-won, adjudicated severance pay and the GI Bill
from a brief, forced tour of Vietnam
as an Army Reservist and enroll at The Art Students League of New York to study
painting.
Now back to the subject of this piece – books about painters
and painting. I’ll get right to it
later.
