The History of My Life So Far Part 4: Fields of Corn, X-Men, and Michelangelo..

My parents parted ways when I was seven and we left New Jersey for Newburgh, Indiana, a suburb of Evansville deep in the corn belt. My mom was raised there and found a job at a pharmaceutical manufacturing plant. During the transitional period the summer of the 1984 Olympics my sisters and I stayed with my grandparents in a creaky little house in Yankeetown that always smelled like bacon.

Painting in progress of the Yankeetown house.  My grandparents are gone now, but I'm combining a few photos for the composition.

Photo of my Grandfather, 1940's.  A handsome bloke in his day.

Bacon.

 My grandfather, a long-legged veteran World War II bomber pilot from Kentucky, sat in the chair between the window and the dusty old organ, spitting tobacco into a coffee can, and thinking hard.  He had stern features like an eagle and scarcely said anything.  Now and then he'd turn to the organ and play funny old songs for us singing in a deep bass, sounding incidentally much like Johnny Cash.  His pastimes included walking on stilts he made, riding a pogo stick, and fixing various motor vehicles that sat rusting on the property.  Sometimes he'd disappear for hours, and we would find him sitting in a chair in the top of a tree. He had tied a chair to one of the branches where he would sit with his shotgun watching his garden, and waiting for groundhogs.  There is a story of him as a young man hanging his pants over the back of a chair and trying to jump into them with a running start.  I believe this gene if none other was passed down to me.
My grandmother was an orphaned child of Irish immigrants, and still had a little Irish in her Kentucky accent.

I still wore my old Phillies hat, a fond remnant of the days my dad would take me to baseball games and give me sips of his beer.  I was informed by locals that my hat was offensive and I was not allowed to wear it here, which concluded any interest I'd ever have in sports.  I HATED school, all of it and everything about it (making an exception for you Mrs. B!) but will spare you this unpleasant bit.

My aunt Marilyn, an excellent painter and sculptor had a huge north lit studio facing the woods.  She would have me over on the weekends and spent long days teaching and demonstrating to me everything she could think of about color, oil paints, and clay.  Marilyn took me took me to the Evansville Museum, which had a fairly good old masters collection, but was well-known for its exhibitions and permanent collection of works by contemporary realists.  My first piece was a full-length portrait of Michael Jackson from memory.  I was deeply disturbed that I had  made the head three times too large, and for the rest of my life I have made heads to small to compensate.  I painted animals from National Geographic magazines, two of which I recently found.  Most of what I learned about color I learned there.  My mom frequented yard sales and ads in the paper for art supplies, scoring a huge book on color, a few others on drawing and painting the figure, and a super 8 camera on which I produced stop-motion claymations. It was also the eighties and I had an airbrush, so there was much chrome and sunsets.  We painted my bedroom walls glossy white and my mom let me fill my bedroom walls with murals I drew with paint markers.

In middle school I began collecting comics, and fell in love with Jim Lee's X-Men comics and Todd McFarlane's Spider-Man series.

Spider-Man's left arm has a right hand on it!   How could McFarlane and Marvel be so careless?!

My friend Greg Sallee and I started our own comic book, a blatant X-Men ripoff, and sold xerox copies for a dollar a piece.  We checked out books from the library on Michelangelo and other Ninja Turtles, which we used as anatomical guides, especially borrowing from figures the Sistene Chapel ceiling.  This was my real education.

One of the drawings from our comic.   This is a silhouette I drew of an interrogation scene.  I still like the composition.