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    An Artist in Love: ...and Other Disasters
    An Artist in Love: ...and Other Disasters
    An Artist in Love: ...and Other Disasters
    Ebook158 pages1 hour

    An Artist in Love: ...and Other Disasters

    By Jack Marshall

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    About this ebook

    Romantic blunders and problems transform into comedy when recalled decades later. For an artist, the adventures of life and love influence his art.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateSep 20, 2015
    ISBN9780996662710
    An Artist in Love: ...and Other Disasters

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      Book preview

      An Artist in Love - Jack Marshall

      Love

      1. Inspired

      I’m an artist, and like all artists, I need a goddess. Why? Because I need ideas. Constantly, I face a blank, a white space, an empty canvas that I have to fill. But fill it with what? According to the ancient Greeks, the Muse is the goddess of inspiration. And you know, there’s something to that, because throughout the years, many muses have inspired me.

      The first time I saw a goddess, I was fifteen years old. Arriving home from school, I found her sitting on the coffee table by the television set—the goddess Venus. Of course, this wasn’t the goddess herself, just her picture. But the apparition amazed me because Venus was stark naked, and to see a picture of a naked lady on the coffee table in my mother’s living room was maybe not quite a miracle, but almost. In the Houston suburbs back in the 1960s, pictures of naked ladies, whether goddesses or mere mortals, did not sit on the coffee table by the television set—not in our house, not in any house I knew of.

      But there she was, the goddess Venus, decorating the cover of the Readers’ Digest, a magazine found in many middle class American homes. Each month the Readers’ Digest arrived in the mail with wholesome stories about World War II heroes, families who adopted disabled children, and doctors who went overseas to bring modern medicine to backward people. Sometimes humorous, sometimes sentimental, all stories were condensed so nobody had to waste too much time reading.

      Of course, the Reader’s Digest was conservative and non-controversial, in line with American moral standards. So why was a naked goddess on the cover?

      The answer: she was art.

      Left: My copy of Botticelli drawn while a high school student.

      Top Right: dot copy of Botticelli made when first learning scanning in the 1990s.

      Bottom right: College drawing of pinup.

      The Birth of Venus was painted back in 1480 by the Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli. According to the ancient Greek myth, after being born a beautiful, fully mature woman in the middle of the sea, Venus stepped onto a floating shell, and the west wind blew her to shore. There an attendant greeted her and cloaked her in a royal robe. I was already familiar with this story because at the Jesuit high school I attended, we studied Latin and read the classics, along with Edith Hamilton’s Mythology which was full of stories about Greek goddesses like Venus. Not only was Botticelli’s picture art, it was classical.

      Now at age fifteen, the distinction between fine art and erotic pinups was not all that clear to me. The difference seemed to be that paintings of nudes were acceptable, whereas photos of nudes in magazines like Playboy were objectionable. Like most male adolescents, I was more than eager to examine any naked-lady picture I happened upon, painted or photographed. For some reason though, Botticelli’s Venus did not stir strong erotic fantasies—maybe because the picture was so obviously a painting and therefore not real. Also, it decorated the cover of the Readers’ Digest, so it certainly couldn’t be forbidden fruit.

      Now besides being interested in naked ladies, I was also interested in art. I had been drawing and painting as long as I could remember. But other than a few years of art lessons with a nun back in grammar school, I had to develop my drawing and painting skills on my own. During my high school years, I copied Life Magazine cover photos of President John Kennedy and the actor Richard Burton as Hamlet. I also copied a leopard, a seascape, and a flower I had found in the family encyclopedia. I wanted to draw and paint Real Art, but other than reproductions of a Cezanne seascape and Whistler’s mother in our encyclopedia, plus some Andrew Wyeth paintings published in Life, I hadn’t seen much of the real thing. So when Classical Art appeared on the living room coffee table, a painting of a naked goddess no less, I had to draw it. Closing the door to my bedroom, I spread a manila file folder on my desk and penciled a large copy. I started with her head and worked my way down. As I approached her kneecaps, I realized I’d made Venus too big. I’d need another file folder to finish her legs and feet, but I couldn’t find one. So she ended up without legs.

      ---

      No more goddesses came my way till I got to college, where foldouts from Playboy decorated many walls in the men’s dorm. Though all those centerfold beauties were supposed to be girls-next-door, none of them ever lived next door to me or any guy I knew. For all of us in the dorm, they were as remote as the goddesses on Mount Olympus. We couldn’t kiss them, we couldn’t touch them—unless some crazy guy liked to fondle a piece of paper.

      Hoping to improve my knowledge of art as well as my drawing skills, I signed up for a human figure-painting course at the university night school. The class only met one night a week, so to practice the other six days, I needed a model. But back when I was a freshman in college, no girl I knew would have posed for me, with or without her clothes. And since I lived in the men’s dorm, if I started drawing male nudes, if I taped a male nude to the wall by my bed, those guys would have given me a terrible time. No way I could do that. The only thing to do was to borrow a Playboy and copy a centerfold. (I was too cheap to buy my own.)

      One day I was drawing a pinup when Tom Mallory walked into the room.

      That’s a great drawing. Want to sell it?

      Sure.

      How much?

      Three bucks.

      Sold.

      Tom bought a frame at Woolworth’s and hung my drawing on his wall. Then he told the other guys, If you got class, you hang ‘art’ on the wall, not pictures cut from magazines.

      Tom convinced a few other guys to buy drawings, and that gave me a chance to pick up some extra cash. I became the artist-in-residence of the sixteenth floor of the men’s dorm, and all the guys liked my drawings of naked ladies whether they bought one or not. But after I’d drawn five or six pencil nudes, I got bored. I wanted to do something different. So I decided to paint a pinup in oils. I got a three-foot by two-foot canvas at the art supply store and started painting away. When I’d almost finished, Bill Stone saw the canvas.

      Hey, that is terrific. You wanna sell it?

      Sure, I said. How’s thirty bucks sound?

      O.K. But there’s just one thing…

      What’s that?

      I want the boobs bigger…and pointier

      That won’t be very realistic.

      Look, said Bill, I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like. And if I’m going to shell out thirty bucks, I want something I like.

      "All right. I’ll fix

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