About Me

I Discover "Art"

I discovered my passion for art at about the age of fourteen when my mother sent me to the and antique shop of Mr. Demuth, my first real art teacher. For years, I had been painting on my own. Coming home from school, I would get my dime store watercolors and drawing pad and execute piles of paintings about whatever entered my mind. I painted scenes I read from books about the Paleolithic cave men, or things I had seen. Mother showed Mr. Demuth some of these pictures and he agreed to let me attend his studio classes. I was not a very confident student, having made mostly D'S in art in grade school. We were taught by non-artist teachers who handed out sheets of pre printed lifelessly outlined scenes of happy-faced people doing innocuous things. The "art" was to apply color in an even tone and to stay in the lines. You didn't try to mix colors. Neatness was art. I was all over the place in mixing and going out out of the lines wanting to do my own ideas. So ingrained was this cursed mode of teaching that the word "art" for me was that subject I was never good at in school. What I did at home, and even later at Mr. Demuth's studio was not "art." It couldn't be. It was fun. It was life. I had no word for it.

Mr. Demuth was a wonderful teacher, soft spoken. He showed you how to do things. His studio was fabulous! I rode my bike through part of the then segregated Hispanic area where his studio-antique shop was located. Inside were objects of infinite variety and color. It was warmed on cold days by a pot bellied, cast iron stove. When class ended and when the other students had gone, Mr. Demuth helped me to clean up. We sat by the stove and he cast into its flames my excess paint and his. He would talk to me there. He flipped through art magazines showing me paintings by Cezanne and many others. True, he had taught me to carefully "box" objects and measure and draw them "right." Then he told me how these great painters were not afraid to distort, to make one side of a vase different from the other. I learned about modernist art, cubist and abstract, in a simplified way to be sure, but also in a way that took away fear and built confidence. At that tender age, I was spouting names like Cezanne. To many of my friends, it must have sounded like a mispronunciation of Captain Marvel's famous shout, "SHAZAM!"

From my very first lesson there, he put me to drawing ever more difficult objects. I handled them easily with my new learned method of measuring and boxing in. I knew then I would be an artist. What I felt inside was something I have often heard described as a religious experience, a sense of being reborn, or born anew; that sense of one's future path becoming clear as if gates had suddenly opened and a voice said, "walk this path."

Early high school was also most fortunate. Tom Curry, our art teacher, was an excellent painter working mainly in watercolor. He gave me a lot of attention and took me with him to paint landscapes. In one trip, we went to Rockport and Port Aransas, my first glimpse of South Texas. The highlight of these early years was when the diminutive but fierce (seemingly only) librarian, Ms. Van Ells came up to me and asked if I would like to be the art editor of the high school annual. I did almost all the drawings (ink and wash) and I guess, this was my first commissioned work. It was 1951. I was fifteen.