Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Art-R-Not-US





When I was young, I had it in my mind that I would be an artist. More specifically, a commercial artist, like, say Norman Rockwell.

I'd have done it, too, except for two little things:

1) No talent, and 2) No chance of getting any ...

I dabbled. Conned my folks into buying me the Famous Artists correspondence course when I was sixteen. I did two lessons, didn't like what they had to say, and quit. Spent three years paying for it at twenty bucks a month.

I once did an oil painting for a friend. He wanted a still life, a bowl of fruit. He was happy with it. Of course, he went on a couple years later to become a smack freak, so mayhaps his judgment was less than sound.

I did a storefront window banner at a meat market once, using tempera paint. My mother got me the job. It was terrible. Two of the words I lettered onto the glass summed it up: Fresh Tripe.

Later, I came across an engraving instrument used to identify tools, and realized that the process could be used to etch glass. I did a handful of pictures this way, and sold a couple at a flea market. As a gimmick, if you put them into a shadowbox and used a tensor light along one edge, they would glow an eerie green.

There were a few cartoons along the way. As a hippie, I was the staff cartoonist for an underground paper called The Word. Cost a quarter, if you had it. If not, Hey, no charge, man, peace. Did a panel about a bunch of -- what else? -- dope-smokin' hippies: Odd George, with JJ, the Kid, and Sweet Maryjane, whose head was always shrouded in smoke ...

Did some toons for a couple of house magazines for the forestry industry a buddy of mine edited.

Found a method of itty-bitty-dot drawing that appealed, and did a book cover for a doctor's self-published poetry book, based on his daughter.

Eventually, I transferred this technique to scrimshaw.

But, all in all, I didn't have the chops and knew I never would. I think the moment I realized it was the first day of college, when I stood in line next to a guy who had been a portrait artist at Jackson Square, in New Orleans, and who was putting himself through school that way.
He took a pencil out of his pocket and on the back of a notebook, and in about forty-five seconds, sketched a portrait of me that could have been a fuzzy photograph. I couldn't begin to do that, and knew I never would be able to learn it.

Writing is so much easier ...

4 comments:

  1. And if anybody notices in the comic, yeah, I know -- "balloon" is not spelled that way ...

    Back then, my consciousness was altered more often than not. Happy days.

    ... go to parties, sometimes until four/it's hard to leave when you can't find the door ...

    Eventually, the paper bought a light table and the artwork started to get better I mighta had a future as a cartoonist, you don't need to be that great an artist to get by; alas, one afternoon I went to the house we'd rented for The Word's offices -- by then I had become a columnist, as well as the cartoonist, with the title of Resident Cynic, but yon paper was no more. The editor, so the story went, had collected all the ad money for the next couple issues and skipped town. I heard he went to Hawaii where he bought a catamaran; but given our revenues, I doubt he managed a ticket for that far. Maybe made it to Biloxi and bought a rowboat ...

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  2. >"... go to parties, sometimes until four/it's hard to leave when you can't find the door ..."<

    Steve, is it tough to handle, this fortune and fame?

    That chick etched on the glass reminds me of this girl I once dated. Hot. Totally hot. Transparent. Noexistent, actually.

    Wow, you were calling people "Kid" even back then? What am I, a throwback to your hippie days?!?

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  3. Yeah, everybody's so different, but I haven't changed.

    "Kid" was based on a real guy, Bill "Kid" Ford. "JJ" was "Uncle Jay," my wife's cousin. He was never the same after he came into our pad lit up on Orange Sunshine one day and my four-year-old son, holding a flyswatter said, "You're a fly, Uncle Jay, I'm gonna swat you!" and did just that.

    "Odd George" was the paper's editor. "Sweet Maryjane" was, well, based on how the Spanish say the second part of that name.

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  4. Oh, the nude? Put into a deep frame with space between the glass and a plain white background, hung under direct light, what you saw was not the etching, but the gray-scale shadow it made on the b.g. It was a neat effect.

    You have to get the angle just right to see it on the glass in a lot of lighting -- scratches are so fine it almost disappears.

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