ViRTUALLY - Part 2

After telling my granddaughter about my way of playing games with the TV screen, I dredged up a bunch of “Firsts” that I experienced in TV land when I was a boy and television was new…

After my weekly Saturday morning adventure with Winky Dink I had my Official Drawing Kit that I got for Christmas  at the ready and I exchanged a waxy crayon for a pencil. It was time for my “art lesson”.  I quickly changed channels to watch You Are An Artist with Jon Gnagy and wondered what we would learn to draw this week.  I loved this show more than Howdy Doody or Cartoon Corner!

(Note:  Jon Gnagy is most remembered for being America's original television art instructor, hosting You Are an Artist, which began in 1947 on the NBC network.  It was the longest running show of all “How To’s” in TV history.  As of 1986, over fifteen million of Gnagy's drawing kits had been sold.)

My art kit had some neat stuff - a charcoal pencil, several lead pencils, a big tablet of genuine artist “sketch” paper, a kneaded eraser (which I thought was a “needed” eraser until my first year as a college art major)  and a small gizmo that Mr. Gnagy, called a sketching stomp was used to blend and shade our lines and shapes and “give them form”.  This simple tool made a big difference in the results of my drawings.  I was always excited to see what subject we would draw this week.  The show started. “Hi there artists...let’s draw a sailboat and a lighthouse…it’s called a seascape”  Wow, I thought this was going to be much more fun than last week when we drew a pumpkin and three gourds which I learned was called a still life.  Our teacher had a goatee and looked exactly like all the images I had seen of a real artist.  (I couldn’t wait to grow one of these tailor-made facial decorations -  but I would have to wait ten years - another story I haven’t written yet).  

Mr. Gnagy started every show with a review of his basic technique - “Everything is made up of shapes - a cube, a sphere, a triangle or a cylinder. And begin your drawing with the most important shape.”  This week it was the sailboat’s sail which was a triangle! I followed along step by simple step and at the end of the show I had a rough duplicate of his well praticed drawing - I thought it was very creative rather than a copy.  He closed his lesson with some shots of famous paintings with boats by the great masters and pointed out the shapes they used to achieve their lasting masterpieces. As another episode came to an end he urged us to “keep drawing because you are an artist and art takes practice for us all”.

And as my memory faded I ended it story thinking of a comment from a renowned  American landscape artist that I produced my own TV show with - Pat Whit, The Marsh Painter.  “Dare to be lousy,” she has urged her students of all ages for 70 years.  Indeed, great advice for us all.