Painters and Painting Ex Libris

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.

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 5^th 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.

Dick and Artie, Two Old Illustrators

I enjoyed a passing acquaintance with two old New York illustrators, Richard “Dick” Lillis and Ardis “Artie” Hughes, good friends who both lived well into their nineties, through our mutual affiliation with The Art Students League, where I’ve been hanging out for more than 30 years.

 In the 1980s and early 90s, Dick Lillis was usually sitting on a bench in the League lobby, porkpie hat on his head and cigar in his mouth, when I would show up for the late afternoon life drawing class, which is offered free for members Monday through Friday and is a godsend for “starving artists” like me. Dick had lost most of his sight by then and had stopped making art. But he obviously enjoyed talking to younger artists at the League, where he had first studied painting as a young man and where he regularly sketched from the live model over the years.

Richard "Dick" Lillis, www.pulpartists.com

Dick's Painting on Cover of "Pulp Art" Book by Robert Lesser

I remember him telling me once, in his crusty, terse manner of speaking, “You know, if I had it to do all over again, I wouldn’t go into the art business.” Perhaps his failing eyesight prompted that comment, but who knows. He never spoke of his illustration career, so I was delighted beyond words to see, a few years after his death, that a wonderful painting he created in 1945 was the cover of “Pulp Art,” a book on pulp fiction magazine covers of the 1930s-50s authored by Robert Lesser. And it was included in an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 2003 titled, “Pulp Art: Vamps, Villains, and Victors from the Robert Lesser Collection.” The painting is now in the collection of the New Britain (CT) Museum of American Art.

Dick, a good-looking, square-jawed bachelor with a trim mustache, lived in my neighborhood on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and on my return home from drawing at the League I would frequently see him perched on a fireplug next to his favorite diner before entering to partake of his customary evening meal. We usually spoke for a couple of minutes before I headed home. I hadn’t seen him for awhile, so when I next saw Artie Hughes at the League, I asked him about Dick. Artie said that Dick had died one evening at the diner, sitting in his chair at a table. It took two weeks to identify the body at the city morgue because somebody had lifted his wallet somewhere between the restaurant and the morgue. Dick Lillis, who was born Oct. 24, 1899 in Oxford, NY, died on August 15, 1994, just short of his 95th birthday.

Unlike his more taciturn buddy, Artie Hughes was a gregarious, genial leprechaun with impeccable old world manners and way of speaking, peppering his speech with “indeeds,” and such. When he returned from his travels to various painting locales, he liked to sit at a table in the League cafeteria, cotton hat on his head, and wait for artists and student artists to approach so he could show them his sketchbook full of his latest precise architectural renderings of buildings and street views, as well as the sketches he did of people while he was in restaurants and transportation waiting rooms.

He was deservedly proud of his ability to observe people in a way that they would never be conscious of his drawing them. As soon as I try to draw people in a public place they notice right away and I become too self-conscious to continue. Artie also had an incredible ability to start drawing the most intricate street scene or historic building directly in pen and ink, with no preliminary pencil marks, and end up with a precisely rendered ink drawing or watercolor in near-perfect perspective. Boy was I impressed, having not even the remotest chance of doing such a thing.

Ardis "Artie" Hughes,  photo by Philip Greenspun

Ardis Hughes WWII War Bond Poster

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Ardis Hughes, Main Street, Annapolis, MD

There are quite a few images of Artie’s work on the Web, as well as a video produced by one of his old friends in St. Augustine, FL, where Artie spent a lot of time in his last years. The video is a wonderful portrayal of the Artie I knew, but it’s kind of funny in one aspect because it shows how hard it is for some of us to elaborate on our own work. Artie keeps saying he just “suggests” the detail when the interviewer displays example after example of ornately filigreed buildings Artie had rendered to perfection. “If you keep saying that, I’m going to ask you how you do it,” the interviewer humorously says at one point.

Artie graduated from Pratt Institute in 1934 and had a long career in the field of illustration. He worked as an assistant to Saul Tepper, one of the top American illustrators of the mid 20th Century, but also produced his own high-quality illustrations, while continuing to paint oils and watercolors for his own pleasure, never trying to make much money off those paintings. During the Second World War he spent a lot of time in Paris with the Army and did war bond posters for the U.S. Treasury Department.

He had a good friend named Phyllis Cook, a retired school teacher, I believe, who seemed to have places to stay all over the world. And when he retired from illustration, he spent the rest of his long life traveling with her and painting street scenes and buildings wherever she had an apartment or house – Spain, Paris, Saratoga Springs, NY, St. Augustine, FL and New York City, living for many years in the Hotel Des Artistes, well-known for its long list of famous artist tenants and its Howard Chandler Christy nudely idyllic murals.

Artie wasn’t much interested in the business side of art, he just loved making it. He said Phyllis figured he should do a little better job of promoting his work. If he didn’t sell an architectural rendering outright on commission from a building owner, for example, she acted as his business manager and got his “sidewalk sketches” made into postcards and prints, which are still for sale in various galleries.

Artie was blessed with the gift to make art from the time he was a little boy growing up in Rhinebeck, NY until near the end of his life in St. Augustine, FL on Jan. 4, 2009, a day after his 97th birthday. What artist could ask for anything more.

Dick and Artie -- two old-school gentlemen illustrators. I’m glad we talked a bit.