An Artist's Angst

When I was going to Lake Michigan College, from 1969 to 1971, I minored in English but majored in art. I was going to be the next Salvadore Dali. Needless to say, that didn't quite work out. Maybe it was because I spent way too much time in the student union cafeteria playing euchre. No, that can't be it.

Of all the media I worked with during various art classes, oil paints were clearly my favorite. I became very familiar with the Sherwin-Williams paint store because it actually had an artist's aisle where I bought all my supplies, including oils, canvases, brushes, and various other odds and ends.

I did manage to produce a number of paintings that were very well liked by classmates and teachers while there, one of which I even sold to one of our class models. During the fall of my second year, another painting, a fairly large quasi-surrealistic still-life with floating cracked eggs and bombs, about three feet by five feet, was put in the display case where it remained the whole school year.

On the last day I went to get that painting only to discover it was gone. My friends and I searched everywhere, all through the various art rooms and storage areas, with no luck. My only conclusion was that someone had stolen it.

During those two years at college I worked at a local bowling alley running the front desk, and had lots of time to chat with customers. One, a girl about my age, asked me to come over one night because she had something to show me. I didn't go because I was just starting to date Carol, who would later become my wife, at the time, but now I began to wonder if what she really wanted to show me was my stolen painting! I'll never know.

It was at that time I decided that if I ever did any more artwork I would make sure I took a photo of it before selling or giving it away.

One of the first projects I photographed after that was a painting I did of Carol later that summer in 1971. It was about two feet by three feet. Even though I had dabbled a little with portrait drawing in high school, this was really my first attempt at portrait painting. I think the reason she looks kind of mean in the picture was because I did a poor job of capturing her smile. That was one of the last oils I attempted.

A year later Carol and I were married. I did do a couple of drawings in india ink after that, but that was about it. My life as an artist was basically behind me.

In 1975, I bought a camera. Carol was pregnant and we were going to need to start taking pictures. I began looking for a camera that would allow me to use existing light without needing a flash. That way I could play with light and shadow. That also meant long shutter speed capabilities.

After a couple of months of research I found just the right one, a Yashica Electro 35 rangefinder with an automatic shutter, and it was affordable to boot. I actually bought it at the military PX at Camp Grayling during summer camp while I was in the National Guard. Of all the cameras they could have been selling, they actually had the one I was looking for.

I figured out how to manipulate the camera to do what it really wasn't designed to do. Instead of averaging the light and dark areas in a shot I tricked the camera into exposing as close as possible for the light areas by adjusting the ASA setting, and letting the dark areas go dark.

I was always experimenting, and so it was fairly common for half of each roll of film I shot to be basically wasted. But the existing light shots that did turn out were really amazing, at least as far as we were concerned. No ordinary snapshots for us, not if I could help it. I quickly became the family cameraman at all functions.

Years later I would experiment, with some success, with bouncing flash off the ceiling, using a zoom lens indoors with a Pentax K1000 SLR and ASA 1600 film. Currently, I am back into existing light shots with a couple of digital cameras and, like everyone else these days, video. But I always try when possible to approach these things with the same artistic eye.

For some reason, in 1979 the drawing bug hit me again. At Whirlpool we used to get these thin cardboard sheets, 8 1/2x11 inches, that were the bottom supports for packages of forms, similar to the kind that used to come packed with dress shirts. I took one one day and started drawing a woman's head on it with a regular pencil. (My job at work afforded me about three hours a day of free time to do as I pleased, but that's another story.)

As I was finishing the drawing a friend remarked, "Hey, that looks just like your wife!" I stepped back and looked closer, and could see he was not far off. Over the next few weeks I did a couple more drawings, one of each of my kids, this time from photos I had taken. I wanted to approach drawing the same way I had photography, and decided I needed better materials to work with.

I went back to Sherwin-Williams, which was still in business at the same location, and bought an artist's sketch pad, 12x18 inches. But what really got my attention was the huge selection of real artists' charcoal pencils! After a little experimentation I found just the right one, a Grumbacher 6B, Not the softest, which was too crumbly, but close, and capable of making very dark areas, almost as dark as india ink.

It also smeared very well. My style was to try to have as few actual lines as possible, using light and shadow to bring the image out of the paper. I wanted the drawing to look like a black and white photograph.

But the real trick was trying to draw people that were recognizable. It didn't really matter how well the drawing actually looked. If it didn't look like the person I was drawing it was no good. I did do an occasional still life, but that wasn't as satisfying as drawing someone people knew.

When done I would trim the paper to fit in 12x16 inch frames, so if the drawing wasn't centered or balanced correctly I could adjust it a little by how I trimmed it.

My first subject with my new tools was Gordon Lightfoot, the Canadian folk singer. His photo on the cover of his Summertime Dream LP was already a stark black and white shot, so that's what I used. It came out pretty well. I did a few others while developing my technique.

I didn't know of anyone else drawing that way. In fact, one person told me it was cheating to use my finger and a flat eraser to smear and manipulate the charcoal shading, which I couldn't understand. But cheating or not, the results were not bad, so I kept working on it.

That summer I did a drawing of my father-in-law from a photo I had taken a year earlier. Now I became inundated with requests from family members, as well as from co-workers. This thing was starting to get to be too much like work.

Every year, right after Labor Day, Whirlpool held a company picnic. One of the activities there was an art contest open to employees and their families. In the summer of 1981 I did a drawing of John Lennon. This was six months after his murder, and the drawing came out pretty well. I had trouble with the mouth, and spent a total of about forty hours overall on the drawing. When the picnic came I entered it in that contest.

To my surprise I took first place. Whirlpool had a weekly paper for employees, called “The Communicator,” and the following week it contained photos taken at the picnic, including those of the first and second place winners of all the various contests with their entries, including the art contest.

The second place winner was a woman who had entered an oil painting, It was a very nice, colorful still life in a nice frame, and she had obviously spent a lot of time on it. It looked worthy to be hanging anywhere. But in the photo she had a disgusted look on her face. She was obviously very displeased at coming in second to a charcoal drawing, and I can't say as I blame her.

The next two years in a row I came in second. But by then I was beginning to get tired of drawing. Too many of my projects were by request, not things I wanted to do. I was only charging $15 a drawing, pretty cheap considering it would take a few days of spare time to do one, but I was increasingly under the gun to get to the next project, another one I didn't really want to do.

I was commissioned by Chickhaven, a local restaurant, to make some advertising posters for their annual “Chickhavenfest”, which I did for $130. When they opened a second restaurant/bar in a nearby town I was asked to do some drawings for their walls. I did three and charged them $120. I suppose I could have gotten more but I've never been a very good salesman.

One guy had a plate for his car that had the words 'Tweety Bird' on it, and he had me paint an image of the bird on that plate. I was more than busy with requests.

For a short while I even did a few tasteful nude studies, and they came out very well, but not without their own complications. One day at a video store our youngest son, Joshua, about five at the time, put his hands on the counter and said to the lady working there, "My Daddy draws nekkid women!" Boy, did she ever shoot me a dirty look!

One year I entered the Lennon drawing in a contest held at the Krasl Art Center. It was up against wall sized paintings, and everyone there seemed to know everyone else. I didn't know anybody. That experience was very discouraging. I eventually gave that drawing to my brother in California.

It all got to be too much, and no fun at all, so I just quit. A few months later we returned to the church, really putting an end to that last phase of my artistic endeavors, at least as far as visual arts were concerned. I no longer had the time, and what little time I did have I focused on biblical studies.

A couple of years later I became involved in a nursing home ministry that included giving sermons and bible lessons on Sunday mornings. My verbal approach became similar to what it had been visually in that I would take an idea and build on it and develop it and then present it, for me almost as a performance piece, whether anyone else got that or not.

Even today I never speak from notes so it won't appear scripted. That lends a certain free flowing spontaneity to my sermons. Although I know where it's going I'm not always sure how I'm going to get there. But my listeners can never tell. If I give the same lesson twice I never get there the same way.

About 1992 Carol and I both worked for the same company, and the subject of drawing a family portrait came up between Carol and a co-worker of hers. She offered my services for $40. I hoped it would be turned down but it wasn't.

I was to work from three different photos, all with different lighting, and put them on the same page as in a group shot. This was my first effort since quitting seven years before, and the $40 really put the pressure on me. The odds for success were not in my favor because I really wanted nothing to do with this project, while the woman who wanted it was willing to pay almost a day's wages on it.

I did the best I could but was dissatisfied with the end result. Fortunately, the woman who wanted it seemed very pleased with it, and even wanted me to do another project for her. I never got around to it. That was the last drawing I ever did.

When Carol began her independent massage therapy business in 1995 I used the paint program on our new computer to draw her “A Healing Time” logo, which was the only one we ever used on business cards and brochures.

In 1997 I put this website online after months of developing it. There's a certain artistic utility to the flowchart as an image map, and all the various text files are attempts to do in written form what I try to do verbally, so in a sense this website is the third medium, written, along with visual and verbal, tackled with a similar approach, which is pretty much my style.

The religious section of this site has had some success in that it has been taught in 79 churches around the world. That means my approach has had some value, at least, from a teaching aspect.

Of course, having it all available online for free hasn't hurt, either.

During the last twenty years I have been asked occasionally to do another charcoal drawing. Now that retirement as afforded me more free time maybe I'll start to dabble in it again. As I look again at my old drawings, other than some of the nudes, not included here, some of which I modestly think are spectacular, they are not as good as I remembered. I wonder if I can do any better now?

The last year has seen me really become re-involved in writing again, of a non-teaching kind, which for me is like painting or drawing pictures with words. Yet again my approach is virtually the same, only now it involves rewriting, rearranging ideas, and editing in order to shape a piece in a way that will impact the reader's mind in a certain way, much like a painting or drawing would visually.

I have had some success in that regard. In August of 2010 Sliver of Stone magazine published my first effort at short story fiction, George's Revenge. I continue to send things out in the hopes of getting published again, if for no other reason than to prove that the first time wasn't a lucky fluke.

Since then I have managed to get epublished four times. The links for those can be found by clicking here and scrolling down some.

As I look back over my life in art, it seems my impression of large chunks of time with no involvement is not entirely accurate. The chunks aren't as big as I thought, and the mediums are more varied than I realized. At least every decade I've found a way to become artistically involved in some way, either visually, verbally, or with the written word. So, one way or another, communication has always been happening. I don't know why I feel the need to do that. Nor am I ever satisfied that I'm doing that effectively enough.

During this current phase of writing I'm constantly worried that the last thing I've written really will be the last thing I will write. How close to the bottom of the well am I? My pattern seems to be periods of furious writing, getting something down as quickly as possible and then polishing it up, followed by periods of no activity at all. During those periods of no activity I can never tell when the next big idea will strike, or even if there will be another one. That and the fear I can't express myself the way I want well enough are two major sources of my angst.

A final source of angst is why did I write this essay, anyway? So many people I know, who've known me for years, whether at work since 1987 or at church, or golf, or anywhere else, have no idea about this history I have with art. There was never a reason for me to bring it up. Why am I bringing it up now?

One reason is because I saw some black and white drawings recently at a local art gallery. If I had done them I would have considered them not finished yet and wouldn't have displayed them. But the artist who did them obviously thinks differently about it. So I'm left wondering if I squandered my talent over the last forty years or so? What would have happened if I had stuck with it and developed it as far as I could have? Or did I go as far as I could have? Why do I feel like I failed? I quit after college and I quit again in the mid 80s. I haven't quit preaching and teaching for 23 years, now. Will I? And will I quit writing?

My angst continues.

These images represent only a small sampling of the artwork I've done so far in my life.

Image #1: Photo of my late wife Carol at age 25, taken in 1978. This photo was also used on her tribute page.
Image #2: Photo of our first son Justin, age 18 months, also taken in 1978.
Image #3: Photo of our second son Joshua, age 2, taken in 1982.
Image #4: Photo of a halloween real pumpkin lit by a candle inside, taken in 1981.
Image #5: Photo taken from my driveway in January, 2007.
Image #6: Photo taken on the Smoky Mountains near the border between North and South Carolina in 1999. Some backyard this guy has, eh?
Image #7: Charcoal pencil drawing of Gordon Lightfoot, done in 1979.
Image #8: Charcoal pencil drawing of John Denver, requested by a friend to give to his niece as a Christmas present, done in 1984.
Image #9: Oil painting of Carol, done in 1971.
Image #10: Charcoal Pencil drawing of Sitting Bull, done in 1981.
Image #11: Charcoal pencil drawing of my father-in-law, done in 1980.
Image #12: Charcoal pencil drawing of Willie Nelson, done in 1982.
Image #13: Charcoal pencil drawing of John Lennon, done in 1981.
Image #14: One of four advertising posters done for Chickhaven in 1981.
Image #15: Tweety Bird added to car plate, done in 1983.
Image #16: A Healing Time logo I drew on the computer in 1995.