Kathy at Everybody Knows asked me to tell the story, “How I Became an Artist”.
I told Kathy that I would explain how I gave up a fantastic multi-million dollar career just to persue the life of an artist…
Wait… that doesn’t sound right…
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When you think of “artist”, what do you think of? Crazy? Moody? Ego maniacal? Paint spattered?
I am not paint spattered.
I am a dry medium person.
The answer to Kathy’s question of how I became an artist is that I was born that way.
Luck of the Draw. (yep, that’s an artist joke)
It is my mother’s side of the family that is responsible for the artistic talent. My grandfather was quite good at drawing. My mother was great at drawing. I got lucky.
My mother would talk on the phone on a regular basis, and she would doodle while she talked. This was back in the ‘olden days’ when phones weighed ten pounds, were black, and had parts called rotary dials, and were attached to the wall by a thing called a wire. You couldn’t walk around with them. You had to sit at a phone table.
Mom always had a “scratch pad” next to the phone on the phone table for the purpose of taking messages. More often she used it to doodle. Mom was a Deluxe Doodler.
Those “scratch pads” were smooth, white and unlined. All of them belonged to me.
Well, in my mind they belonged to me. All of them.
I guess I am a paper fetishist. I think I am also a pencil fetishist. I have a side thing for crayolas, but now that I am older have matured, I have channeled that crayola thing into a full blown ‘enamourment’ with colored pencils.
I also have a thing for scissors, but that is another story.
Oh, alright. It’s not just paper and pencils and crayolas and scissors. I am certifiable when I visit office supply stores. Do not take me into an art supply store either. I will refuse to leave. I drool on the paper, and it gets expensive to pay for the damage I do.
Where was I?
All the scratch pads are mine. All the pencils are mine. All the scissors are mine. The elmers glue, the mucilage, the pink erasers, the stencils, the staplers, the hole punches… mine, mine, mine.
I am finding it so hard to concentrate…
Where was I?
I believe Mom was a frustrated fashion designer, or graphic artist of some type. Mom would doodle when she was on the phone. I watched and absorbed by osmosis those images she would doodle. They are incorporated into my artwork today.
You know those little cottages in my art, with the smoke curling from the chimney? That was Mom. The glam sort of faces and long legs my fairies have?… that’s Mom’s fashion designer style. The graphic Halloween pumpkin, the round whimsical trees, the birds in the sky that look like checkmarks? … Mom.
I copied my mothers doodles. Copied, not “traced”, mind you. Tracing was “cheating”. I only traced when no one was looking. I would put Mom’s Deluxe Doodles right next to my paper and try to draw exactly what she had drawn. I think my mother was aware of what I was doing and made her doodles very easy to copy. Thanks, Mom.
My earliest recollection of drawing on my own was when I was four. I flattened myself on my belly in front of the TV, and drew a horse. Pencil on typewriter paper… typewriter paper being the equivalent of what we know today as copy paper.
I drew a replica of my first ever horse drawing to show you what it looked like.
I received the first “critique” of my work when my rendering of the horse’s face did not match the critics’ expectation.
“That doesn’t look like a horse,” my sister told me.
I have never liked anyone to give me advice about my drawing since then.
Consequently, I am totally self taught.
Oh, there have been those since then that have tried to tell me this or that about my drawing, but in my imagination I put my fingers in my ears and say lalalalalalala until their lips stop moving. Then I draw whatever I want and how I want to.
I had dozens and dozens of coloring books, mostly with horses in them. Having developed my own critical standard of what a horse should look like, I sometimes would leave the 5 and 10 cent store empty handed, disappointed in the art in the coloring books.
“I didn’t like any of them,” I would tell my mother after having spent long periods of time leafing through each and every coloring book Woolworth’s had to offer.
To this day, the smell of pulp paper brings out the critic in me.
I had some “art lessons” at a local art center when I was very young, maybe six or seven. They wanted me to paint with poster paints.
I was a dry medium person.
There were too many kids crowded into the room, all smocked and painting, and I wanted to go home where I could retire to my garret and draw what I wanted. And have snacks.
I had a particularly astute second grade school teacher who singled me out for my artistic brilliance. She had me draw a picture on mimeograph paper, which was then to be distributed to the entire class as our coloring page for the day. I get all light headed remembering the smell of the ether and hearing the rhythmic clacking of the mimeograph machine , as multiple copies of my artistic creation were handcranked out for distribution to the second grade class and, ultimately, all the world. *sigh*
When I was a little older, and had some allowance to spend, I bought a few Walter Foster “How to Draw” workbooks, “How To Draw Horses”, and “How to Draw Dogs”. I would copy from those workbooks, over and over and over. No tracing. There were particular pictures that I favored, and those would be repeated, repeatedly. Always on typing paper, always with pencil.
I’m a dry medium person.
I still have those how to draw books.
It was about this time in my artist’s life that I received a Venus Paradise Color by Number Set. If I have to guess, I bet it was Mom that bought it for me. The set consisted of a few pre-drawn pictures, with faint numbers in areas on the paper that corresponding to the numbers on my very first set of colored pencils. I did not know at the time how momentous receiving that Venus Paradise set would be.
This scan, below, is of a few of the Venus Paradise Pencils that I still have. Yep. Mine all mine.
In my pre-teen years, I used my artistic ability to buy friends by making humorous cards for everyone.
I called my line of cards “Cheapskate” cards. Here is a picture of my logo…
I would go to the newsstand stationers store, Ducoff’s, and read the funny cards in the racks at the back of the store. I would sneak out my note pad, copy the punchline from inside the card, and make a quick sketch of the picture on the front. As I left Ducoff’s, I would make the pretext of not having found any cards that I liked, buy a Chunky for the bike ride home, and spend the rest of the afternoon drawing my clever reproductions of humorous greeting cards with my Cheapskate logo on the back.
I should have been arrested for copyright infringement.
I was perpetually in trouble in school for “doodling” instead of “paying attention”. In my later years of grade school and high school, I always took the option of coloring a map, with my Venus pencils, instead of doing a history report. I was able to avoid attending many valuable classes in the name of making scenery for school plays, posters for the teachers, and organizing prom decorations. I was the school’s ‘resident artist’.
I took Art as a Major in High School.
The guidance counselor called me to his office one portentous day, in my senior year, and asked where I was intending to go to college. I told him I had no idea.
He asked what my best classes were.
I said, “Art”.
He said, “You’re going to Art College.”
I said, “OK”.
It beat the heck out of having to do Math.
I applied to the list of Art Colleges given to me by the Guidance Counselor.
I had a total falling out with my father about wanting to attend Cooper Union in New York City. I had a mental love affair with the idea of living in New York as an artist, and it being so, so cool.
“No daughter of mine is going to live in New York City!” I was told by my father.
“Then I guess I am not going to be your daughter if I am accepted!” I informed him.
We didn’t speak to one another until my rejection letter from Cooper Union arrived.
I was accepted at Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, my parents preference of colleges.
I promptly had my ego crushed by finding myself in a school made up entirely of talented art students from High Schools around the United States.
And to make it worse, the school insisted I use paint.
I was a dry medium person.
To every one’s surprise but my own, I quit art college in the middle of my second year.
That is when I began my hippie journey. You can read about the hippie journey on this blog by clicking here…the ‘hippie’ category in the sidebar. I drew very little during the hippie years.
Toward the end of my time in West Virginia, I had a life altering brush with death. Fortunately for me, I lived. I decided then that it was really fun to draw, and way more fun than being dead.
I re-discovered my love of drawing with pencil on typing paper.
By 1978, I found myself in Midland, Texas.
I began my ‘business of art’ by showing my stuff at the local art fairs. Art buyers in Midland didn’t consider pencil drawing “real art”, and preferred that I would paint west Texas windmills and Hill Country bluebonnet landscapes.
I don’t paint.
I am a dry medium person.
“When are you going to color this in?” was the consistent reaction to all my graphite pencil work.
I fought back the question by using colored pencils. I dug out my ancient Venus Paradise colored pencils, tried them, and used them up. When I discovered that Venus no longer made colored pencils, I began using Prismacolors.
Colored pencil became my official medium of choice in 1979.
“You use map colors?” was a question I started hearing from Midlanders.
“What are map colors?” I would ask.
“You know, pencils to color in survey maps. Green is what you color in with when you find oil”.
In Midland, colored pencils are called map colors. They were not considered a legitimate artists’ tool.
That didn’t stop me.
Despite using ‘map colors’ to draw with, I eventually carved a place for myself in Midland doing colored pencil Pet Portraits. I became the Pet Portrait lady, drawing hundreds of dogs, cats, horses, ferrets, parakeets, mules and prize bulls over the years.
I made lots of decorative art with colored pencils while I lived in Midland…southwestern themes, still lifes, big contemporary pieces, country, Christmas scenes… all with colored pencil.
I did hundreds and hundreds of commission pieces.
I designed record album covers and corporate Christmas cards. I licensed designs for enamel jewelry, imprintable stationery, logos, tattoos, and coloring books. I designed program covers for the theatre and ballet. I even did newspaper advertising art for a number of local clothing stores.
I managed a fine art gallery, and participated in a number of artist cooperative galleries.
I illustrated a Texas history book for children, “Two Glass Buttons” by Marguerite Crain.
I eventually moved to Tucson, and brought my pencils with me.
I designed fantasy art cards and sold my fantasy art at science fiction conventions around the United States. I have been Artist Guest of Honor at a few of the conventions. I have sold lots of fairy and dragon prints.
I wrote and illustrated my fairy book.
I devised a children’s learn to draw program called “Cool Art Tricks”, based on my mothers Deluxe Doodle technique and have taught it in the elementary school here in Tucson on a volunteer basis. There are lots of children recreating Mom’s doodles over and over again because of that program.
I’m getting pleasantly tired thinking about it all.
I started blogging last year, and I do demonstrations of my colored pencil technique on the blog.
I have even toyed with the idea of painting.
I don’t know if I ever will paint, though…
I really am a dry medium person.
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At this point in my long story, I want to say that I have never made a living with my art. My art has always been a supplemental income. Sometimes a very nice supplemental income, but never the sole income.
Will my art ever be worth anything? I don’t know.
I had a lady approach me one time at an art fair, and ask, “Is it true that your work will be more valuable when you’re dead?”
I have to guess she was wanting to make a good investment.
Am I an artist?
Yes. I think so.
Did I intend to be an artist?
No.
Artists are expected to paint.
And by now you know…
I am a dry medium person.
Leslie
voodoolinks: snow sculptures
