I created a piece called Evolution using hand-carved rubber stamps, printing with drawing inks. It was all very exciting – this was an art museum after all. When it was printed the museum sent me ten posters, but strangely I would have to buy any extras beyond that at the full museum store price. I bought ten more, all I could afford, so that I could give them away as Christmas presents. My mother suggested that I send one to my grandfather, and it was awkward, because he didn’t know what he was supposed to think about the poster. So he went to a gallery in his town of Boca Raton, Florida to ask one question: Is This Art?

You can understand that I was relieved and pleased that the answer, according to my grandfather, from the gallery owner was an enthusiastic yes, this is Art.  Whew! That was a close one.

After the show ended I got a huge tube in the mail from South Carolina. A teacher had taken her fifth grade class to see my show, and the kids were so inspired, she told me, that they wanted to do a their own interpretation of my original artwork. She had the class draw animals on dishwashing sponges and use scissors to cut out animal shapes. She laid out a piece of brown paper about 4′ by 10′ and had the kids print their animals in the shape of a crocodile with poster paint.

I was so touched that I sent the teacher my framed Evolution. I hope that this piece is still on a wall at the school.

Camp Road No.6 | Stephen Springer Davis | 2000

At this show there were about 40 small watercolor and pastel landscapes, maybe ten of which were from the camp roads series. I’ll mention in passing that the show opened about ten days after 9/11, so as might be expected, attendance was minimal for the opening. But the good side of such a small number was that I had the opportunity to chat with all six of the people who came. I really wanted to know what they liked and what they didn’t like about my artwork. Among other things, the most surprising criticism from some was that they didn’t like the camp roads paintings. When I asked why, they all said because there was no sky or water. Bummer.

One reason that I was curious to know what the guests at the opening thought was that several years earlier I read a funny and fascinating article by Richard B. Woodward in The New York Times called The Perfect Painting from February 1994. Two Russian artists, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, wanted to find out if it were possible to make paintings that reflect the tastes of Americans. They studied other parts of the world too. To find out what Americans liked, they carried out a nationwide survey on people’s attitudes toward the visual arts. Do people like art? Do they think it’s necessary? If so, what do they like and not like?

In the survey they asked respondents what color they liked best. Did they prefer religious paintings? What kind of scene appeals to them most? What season do they like to see? Certain people or animals? And so on. Once they tabulated their results, Komar and Melamid, being artists, set out to paint the Perfect Painting. Here it is:

The Perfect Painting for the USA | Melamid and Komar

Note, along with George Washington, the presence of plenty of water and sky. See? My guests at the 2001 opening were right in sync with what the rest of the USA want to see in a painting. I took their suggestions/criticism to heart. I don’t really see the point of doing paintings that people don’t like. I don’t have an envelope or agenda to push. I just want to do paintings that I like and other people do too. And I hope they’ll want to buy them too. Since that opening I’ve never done a painting that didn’t have a least a piece of sky in it.  Having a studio full of paintings is of little value to me.

This show was way ahead of its time. In today’s world it would be called interactive. Your parents, and by your parents I mean your Mom, would buy you the kit that went with the show. Contained in the kit were a piece of acetate-like clear film and some china marker-ish crayons. You’d stick the plastic to the TV screen, and in the course of the show there’d be a development for Winky Dink where he’d need your help. Something like there’s our hero, Winky Dink, walking along, and he comes to a river. The host would say “Hey kids! Winky needs to get to the other side of river to get home. Why don’t you draw a bridge for him?” I’m foggy on the details, but I seem to remember that there were some visual cues to get you started, so your bridge would be in the right spot.

The show would pause for a while so we could draw the bridge. Then there’d be a time’s up, and Winky would walk across the river via the bridge. Pretty great. Then you’d wipe off the bridge and get ready to do the next drawing. As with all things kid, I know I lost the screen at some point and ended up drawing directly on the TV. Probably not a smooth move, parents-wise, but I’m sure that was universally true. Watching Winky Dink really got me interested in drawing, whether on the magic screen or on paper.

When I was about eight I was an avid comic book reader and I’d always see the Draw Me ads in the back of the comics. In one version the ad wanted the world to draw Abe Lincoln. This challenge struck a chord with me because I was a big fan of Abe Lincoln at the time, for some reason. I should mention here that I even won a prize for a poem I wrote (third grade?). Here’s the part I remember:

In eighteen hundred and sixty-three
Abraham Lincoln gave his life
for you and me

The sharper ones of you will see a problem with the poem, such as the fact that he died in 1865, but that was my artistic license. At least the teacher missed it.
Anyway, if you’ve somehow never seen one of the Draw Me ads, here’s an example:

This ad is from maybe the 1970's - Note $675 scholarship...

The sucker, er, I mean the artist, would copy this drawing and send it in to see if he or she would be talented enough to be accepted into the correspondence school. I drew my Abe and sent it in, and got a letter from the school telling me that I had been accepted! I don’t remember the exact wording of the letter, but I seem to remember that there were some blanks to be filled in, including age, and probably an amount for a check to be sent in. Needless to say, the correspondence school was looking for students older than eight, with money in the bank. Once they found out I was just a kid, they retracted their offer. I’ve never forgiven them. I would no doubt be rich and famous if I had been allowed to start my career as an artist at that age.

In fifth grade I changed my loyalty to Peanuts, and I bought all the compilations. Let me say here that I think Charles Schulz’s comic strip of the 1950′s was actually excellent in content and drawing style, as opposed to the lame twaddle of a burned-out Charles Schulz from the mid-60′s on. I’m not alone in this kind of thinking. Roasted Peanuts is a blog about the strip that noticeably favors the early days. Examples:

From the early 50's: The artistry! The nuance! The verisimilitude!

From the 1970's: The crassness! The commercialism! The conflation!

I practiced drawing all the characters all the time, and it occurred to me that maybe Mr. Schulz would be willing to give me a private lesson. I wrote him a letter telling him that I wanted to be a cartoonist, and asking him to please show me how he drew his characters. Amazingly, he sent me back an original of a strip and a very nice letter that must have said something nice and encouraging. I was especially fascinated by seeing his sketchy pencil marks on the panels that later got precisely inked over.

I kept the original strip thumbtacked to my bedroom wall for years, but my stepmother threw them out, along with my Beatles memorabilia while I was away at college. Oops. Did I just say that out loud? I, uh, mean that somehow I must have lost them somewhere along the way. What a shame. I’d love to have the strip and letter now.

In a parallel universe I was at the same time also obsessed with MAD Magazine, and especially Don Martin. I wore out my copy of this book, and if I wasn’t drawing Linus I’d be drawing Don Martin’s characters. I also wrote him a letter requesting guidance in drawing his characters, but never got a response.

This is the cover of my favorite Don Martin compilation

On to sixth grade. On Saturday mornings there was a show featuring a goateed artist, Jon Gnagy. The show was all about shortcuts to drawing stuff.

(Who can save these things when there was no such thing as a VCR?) Mr. Gnagy would teach you how to use simple shapes, circle, square and triangle to draw whatever. Jumping forward to when I was teaching high school art, a kid asked me to teach him how to draw a horse, and for a second I flashed to What Would Jon Gnagy Do? moment. I considered showing him how to draw an oval for the body and neck, and rectangles for the legs, with circles at the joints and so on. Instead, I acted like a proper teacher, and we took a field trip one day to a farm to observe the animals and draw them. Much better.

That year, and only that year, I had an art class every week, and I really loved it. A typical Gnagy drawing might consist of a meandering stream crossed by a covered bridge, broken down by him into the elements. Before the upcoming class I would have watched Mr. Gnagy’s show, so the night before the class I would do an extra credit drawing to bring in. The teacher would sometimes offer some nice comments, but I have no idea what he really thought about these out-of-the-blue drawings. I have to believe that he was smart enough to know that I didn’t really draw this scene from life, all by myself. I think I only got a B+ in the class.

After my sixth grade art class there were no more offered throughout junior high or high school, and I decided it was time to get serious about the academic side of school. I don’t remember having the urge to do some drawing till I had on opening in my schedule at the beginning of my sophomore year in college. Before that I thought I was heading towards majoring in psychology. The drawing class was called the actually called Drawing 101.

Right around that time my former musical partner, Peter Muller, had a freelance assignment writing an article for Smithsonian Magazine about personal menageries in history. It was a fun and fascinating story about the animals kept by mostly the rich and famous a through the centuries. I decided to use that article as my jumping-off point for a new direction. My wife, Nina, and I have collected a few interior constructions that seem to be a tradition in Eastern Europe. Here’s an example:

This is one of the Eastern European interior thingies

My idea was to use the idea of the Eastern European “room” constructions to illustrate the menageries in Peter’s article. My first piece was an extrapolation from the story of Lady Bath and her pet hippo. I decided to throw in a reference to Hokusai’s Great Wave for some reason too.

Lady Bath Had a Pet Hippo | 1983 | Stephen Springer Davis

Next was a send-up of Josephine, wife of Napoleon, and her orangutan.

The third and final piece of this series was not based on a historical figure, but rather on a fish tank I once had, but gave up because it’s a very expensive hobby, one that on my meager earnings I had to give up. Hence the title I Used to Have a Fish Tank, But It Got Too Expensive. The terra cotta color is our wall, on which this piece hangs. As with the other constructions, all the fish are cut from balsa wood and painted. They are suspended from the background by short lengths of guitar strings. Recycling!

I Used to Have a Fish Tank But It Got Too Expensive | 1983

I was really having a great time with this completely new direction for my artwork. I took them to a gallery in Philadelphia where I’d been hoping for some time to have a show. The owner of the gallery was jumping for joy when I showed him these constructions. He said they were my best work ever! Absolutely perfect! Inspired! He’d love to show them! If only I could make a few teensy changes that would make them even perfect-er. You know, for the him and the people who would come into his gallery. What could it hurt to make the artwork more what the public, in his opinion, would want to see, he asked. I said it would hurt a whole lot. See ya.

After that meeting with that gallery owner I said I was done with art galleries. Not really, as it happily turned out. But for then.

As you may have read in an earlier posting, I didn’t do any artwork for about ten years after that. It’s not just because this gallery owner was such a jerk, it’s just that I had to try to make some money to help support our family. The funny thing is that I believe these balsa wood constructions somehow foretold my later getting involved with designing sets for TV.

I’m hardly the first artist to be influenced by the artifacts of King Tut’s tomb. After the tomb was opened in 1922, the images of the jewelry and carvings (along with discoveries of Mayan and Aztec artifacts as well, it should be said) had an immediate impact on the development of the Art Deco movement, from the Chrysler Building to jewelry.

In 1980 I went to see a show at the O. K. Harris Gallery in New York called the Splendors of the Sohites, which was an amazing and hilarious spoof of the King Tut show. The conceit was that a huge dumpster had been discovered in Soho which contained artifacts of a lost culture, the Sohites. The artists who created this show had wandered around the city and found junk that looked vaguely like a scepter (the remains of an umbrella) or jewelry (pop tops) and they would paint them beautifully and humorously in gold, black, lapis lazuli and coral red. Brilliant. I wish I had thought of it.

The King Tut and Sohites shows were often in the back of my mind for years. I hoped I would come up with some related ideas of my own.

Separately I started a rubber stamp series in which the pieces were meant to look like tile floors with some things sitting on top. But after doing a couple of these I thought that they were boringly regular. I had the revelation [when one writes a blog it apparently gives one the freedom to recount his artistic life as if it has a rightful place in the History of Art, when in reality I figure maybe upwards of three hundred people know my artwork. But that won't stop me from using big words like Revelation] to break up the floors and make them artifacts, just like those of those from the King Tut and Sohites shows.

My first attempt at a fragment was actually not a rubber stamp print. Instead, I went to a place called the Clay Studio in Philadelphia, where ceramic artists could go and take classes or simply use the materials and kilns for a fee. I spent one night a week for months creating scads of 1/2″ square tiles. I mounted them to pieces of plywood in patterns and grouted around the tiles. Then took a hammer and chisel to the assembly and made cracks in the patterns. I sanded some of the color off and used dirt and graphite powder trying to age them. This is the only surviving piece.

I was disappointed in the results because there seemed to be nothing artistic about these real tile fragments, aged up and all. They were just fake tile fragments. It was sort of like the difference between a photograph of something and a painting of the same thing – there was no artistic interpretation represented. So I gave up on those ceramic pieces and started working on my rubber-stamped “tile pieces”.

I wanted the viewer to imagine being an archeologist who stumbled upon the remains of tile floors from some unspecified lost culture, maybe ones that worshiped maple leaves, pigs or butterflies. As I recounted in My Life as an Artist | Part One, ultimately I showed 24 of these tile pieces in a show in San Francisco, in 1983. I estimate that each piece took about 100 hours.

It just occurred to me to take a moment to explain to those readers who aren’t familiar with how the typical gallery/artist business relationship works for shows. Your results might vary, but for me, here’s how my business relationship for this show would have gone.  The gallery and I decided on $1200 for each piece, unframed.

Fragments Study No. 18 | 1981 | Stephen Springer Davis

The gallery and I split the cost of the announcement card, $250 from me and $250 from the gallery. If there were a sale, the gallery would take its normal 50 % sales commission, leaving me $600. Divided by 100 equals $6 an hour, minus a modest amount of materials cost. At least it was above minimum wage at the time. That assumes, though, that the artwork would sell. But none did. Ouch.

I’m not, despite how it might sound above, bitter, though. No one asked me to make this artwork. It was a gamble that I loved taking. Happily, over the next 20 years I sold all but four of the 24 original tile pieces for $600 or so each, which is about what I would have made anyway.

I don’t feel I was cursed by King Tut.