Blame it on the Avon Lady and Charles Schultz

When I was a kid in the 1960s, my mom (like many) would buy the fine products offered by the door-to-door Avon saleslady. She’d also buy stuff for my brother and me. Before you get the wrong idea, let me quickly add that Avon sold more than makeup for women. They also sold stuff like bubblebath and toys for kids. She bought me this plastic Snoopy soap dish.

Now I really dug it and used to play make-believe stories with it. Then I started drawing it. Many times. of course, I was glued to the TV whenever CBS would show a new Charlie Brown cartoon. Although, everyone loves A Charlie Brown Christmas, my favorites then were Charlie Brown’s All-Stars and He’s Your Dog, Charlie Brown. At any rate, my favorite character was Snoopy.

My dad took notice of it and bought me paperbacks reprinting the Charlie Brown newspaper dailies. I soon took to copying them. That’s when I knew I wanted to be an artist for the rest of my life. (I also wanted to be a priest and a weatherman. I’ve strayed far from those vocations since then!) Although I don’t think I was thought of as the best artist in the class, my schoolmates did think of me as the Peanuts expert.

My skills at drawing Peanuts characters have greatly dimished, but I still have fond memories of the strip and consider it one of the best and most-influential of all time. I lost my Snoopy soap dish as a kid and, with the help of my wife, I found one in a comic book store. Since then, it has a place of honor in my library at home, as you can see in the photo.

Where was I?

Oh yeah. So even though I wasn’t the best artist in the class, I was determined to become so. I drew a lot and would get in trouble often in grade school for filling my tablets with cartoons and drawings instead of class notes and homework. It got to the point where my mom gave me a tablet soley for drawing in, so I wouldn’t get bad grades for drawing in the tablets for math, English, or whatever.

By high school, my best friend Stephan introduced me to Marvel Comics and I was instantly hooked. Before, I did mostly cartooning with an occasional landscape, I had little interest with the figure. This changed now that I was exposed to Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, John Romita, John Buscema, Gil Kane, Gene Colan, Jim Steranko, and many, many others. I now changed my style to learn the exagerated anatomy and the foreshortening that were the trademarks of superhero art.

I had little formal instruction, because my high school offered art for about 45 minutes on Friday. The art department had very little budget or priority. It was cancelled half the time for choir practice or National Honor Society meetings. I wasn’t in National Honor Society (too much drawing in my notebooks and text book margins?), so all that meant for me was to join Stephan in a trip to the corner comic book store to buy new and old issues of more Marvel comics. I soon became in expert in Marvel Comic trivia. Still, despite all that, my instructor Luba Kytasta was very encouraging to my efforts.

With the comics, I was also introduced to fantasy illustration of the likes of Frank Frazetta, Berni Wrightson, Barry Windsor-Smith, and others. Wow! They really took this stuff seriously. They used very realistic rendering in their approach.

A revelation

By the time I entered college, my style was immersed in the sword and sorcery/fantasy/horror/superhero comic look. My projects in my college art projects all reflected that bent. Until one day, I saw my first (and so far, only) act of violence in person. A hit-and-run drugged-up driver hit an old woman who was crossing the street. This happened right in front of me. I stuck around with other witnesses to give a report to the police. I will never forget the sight of the long trickle of bright red blood that came from her head while she lied on the ground. Her head was cradled in someone’s lap.

I found out in the local paper that she died that night. This incident had a very profound impact on me. I realized that evening how shallow and mindless the violence I depicted in my art was. Since then, I rarely draw violence, unless it’s to make it look ugly.

Someday, my prints will come

I got a 2 year Associates Degree from Macomb Community College, where I got all my beginning drawing and design. I then attended the Center For Creative Studios for 3 semesters, taking life drawing, anatomy and a few commercial art classes. I majored in fine, as opposed to commercial art, because I was already working for a studio and figured I’d learn more on the job than at school. And fine art was a lot more fun!

But CCS got too expensive for me, so I transferred to Wayne State University. I took my first intaglio class with Stanley Rosenthal and fell in love with printmaking immediately. It became my concentration (along with drawing). I took every printmaking class they had, except for seriagraphy, which didn’t interest me. Stanley became a mentor to me and I’ll never forget the strong influence he was on me.

The medium I really liked the most was woodcut. Maybe it was all the black & white comics I drew, but the graphic approach to creating imagery came naturally to me. I loved intaglio, but I tended to spend too much time correcting my etchings and aquatints until I corrected the life out of them. Woodcuts were much more difficult to correct, so a lot of the rawness stayed, leading to a more powerful look that I liked.

I started showing and selling my work in Detroit galleries like the Detroit Artists Market and The Scarab Club. It was a very exciting time and it thrilled me to no end to sell something to someone I never met. One of my prints even won an award from the Alma College Print Show that was juried by David Becker, an artist and art professor at WSU I greatly admired. This made me happy when I found out, but I didn’t realize what an honor that was. When I showed up at the reception, all the awards went to art professors, except for two including me. This inflated my ego so much, I had to soap up my ears so my head could pass through the door openings!

The greatest gallery an artist could wish for

While at Wayne State, a co-worker of mine told me about the figure drawing sessions at the Michigan Gallery. It instantly became my hangout every Tuesday night and Saturday morning. Along with the figure drawing I was doing at Wayne State, I ended up drawing from a live model at least 5 times a week!

After I got my Bachelor’s Degree from Wayne State, I took a workshop at the Michigan Gallery given by Stephen Goodfellow on how to do micropointillism. It reminded me of doing aquatints and I caught on to it very quickly. Stephen soon organized the first group show of micropointillism there, along with Lowell Boileau (who helped Stephen create the technique). There were 3 rooms designated for the show, with two of them for us beginners and the large one for Stephen and Lowell. They displayed my work in a very prominent area in their gallery next to their work, which I felt was a great honor. My work even got mentioned in the papers. Wow!

Back to some roots

I got involved with Ukrainian artists by Dzvinka Hayda and the organization ADUK. This introduced me to a new circle of artists and I finally met a hero of mine. One of my strong influences since childhood were the breathtaking paintings in my church Immaculate Conception in Hamtramck. I doubt I’ve ever paid attention to an entire mass any time I’ve been there, because I was too mesmerized by the art, especially the one of God and Jesus crowning Mary in the large painting on the upper right front panel. The work was done by Michailo Dmytrenko, and he was a board member of ADUK.

The first show we did of art by Ukrainian artists was in 1990 at The Scarab Club. I couldn’t believe my art was in the same room as Mr. Dmytrenko, as well as the Kozak brothers and Roman Baranyk who all did beautiful paintings, sculptures, and icons in churches that I’ve admired for years. And I was speechless when Mr. Dmytrenko told me that my painting of The Risen Christ was a beautiful composition. This from the composition master!

The next year, the ADUK show concentrated on the 5 year anniversary of the Chronobyl Tragedy. It was a powerful show. I wasn’t able to make the reception due to a wedding I was standing up in. Still, Joy Colby, the Detroit News art critic, singled my woodcut out in her review. Egomaniac that I am, I bought quite a few copies of that paper and was even able to get the negative and metal plate for that page.

The last show ADUK did was the one based on Ukrainian folklore. I miss ADUK, but a lack of participation from Ukrainian artists stopped the annual shows. The same three or four people were doing all the work.

Getting lazy

Since then, I got married, bought a house, and became addicted to movies and websites. My art output shrank and I stopped submitting my work at galleries and shows. At this point, my drawing has become rusty. I’ve been making a strong effort to get my skills back to where they were, but I still have a way to go. Keep checking the galleries. You never know when I may actually create a piece I actually like!

In the meantime, check out the interview I gave to CidTalk.com which featured me in her artist’s section.