My brothers and I called my father’s parents, “Nanni and Poppy”. Poppy’s brother, my Uncle Shirley (that’s right, I also had an Uncle Leslie, which is probably why we were given the more normal names of “Billy, Bobby and Ricky”) told me that Poppy started out wanting to be a singer but that he got sick once and couldn’t perform so, being a very pragmatic man, he decided to become an artist instead figuring that he could continue to work even with a sore throat and that he wanted a creative career. He spent his working life as an illustrator for a medium sized publishing house in Nashville, mostly creating illustrations for medical textbooks. He also painted and near the end of his life he wrote and illustrated the first ever collection of Biblical cartoons, pen and ink drawings with accompanying text, that he called “Pointed Pen Parables”.
I have a copy somewhere and I would love to post some here. Maybe Corndoggie can find his and do so.
Here are a couple of his paintings, copies of copies. He loved to paint images of the waterfront and boats because he found such places beautiful, peaceful and calming. He gave me my love of boats and water, my name and perhaps some artistic genes. He was a very kind and loving man and had a pretty good sense of humor for an Adventist. He endured a lot of sorrow in his life, burying two of his three children,(one my father) dealing with the mental illness of his only surviving son and spending his life with Nanni, who could be rather difficult.
Sail on Poppy
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March 10, 2010 at 7:20 PM
Nice stuff, Roto. I always knew you had something in your genes. Why not paint us some pictures using your inherited talent?
March 10, 2010 at 9:08 PM
I draw, I use charcoal, crayons,watercolors etc. but there is something about picking up a brush of of oil paint that is frightening to me. I don’t like to draw specific subjects and I let the media lead me in a random way from itself or from my imagination like seeing images in the clouds or a stain on the ceiling. I never draw objects, only people, or caricatures of people and animals. I do not have the patience or discipline to work on a piece over time or revisit it. When I start I soon finish in a single burst of energy. If I try to alter the original I always find it overworked
and thus ruined. Perhaps this is why I work in portrait photography capturing the spirit and beauty of people in a single instant. One day I will be free of vanity commissions and create art of my own choosing. I long for that day and when I can return to Richmond to live in a loft and be an old bohemian quirky artist.
March 11, 2010 at 12:05 AM
My dad (TBS Jr) painted (landscapes, etc) & TBS Sr painted Pacific NW seascapes, etc.
My paternal grandfather’s FIL was an artist and the first lithographer in Washington Territory. He designed both the Teritorial & State seals & the original Carnation milk logo. His lithography firm (Maring & Blake of Seattle) once had Tom Thompson (one of Canada’s Group of Seven.. seminal Canuck landscape artists of the early 20th c.) as an employee.
I will break out some of their works and make some photos of them eventually.
March 11, 2010 at 9:32 AM
What Boatdog said.
March 11, 2010 at 12:28 PM
He wasn’t only an illustrator, he was an executive: Art Director of Southern Publishing, Inc.
March 11, 2010 at 6:19 PM
I hate to critisize my dear departed Poppy’s work but I think that his paintings had a rather pedantic, pedestrian, “paint by number” feel. He was a good draftsman who had good technique and knew more about working in oil paint than I ever will. He rarely placed people in his work and perhaps the addition of the human element may have lent some drama to the story line of his paintings. However, his pen and ink cartoons, (despite illustrating a certain dogmatic viewpoint) were full of fire, life, even humor and were technically superb. He had a very low opinion of modern art. I went to visit him once when I was in college studying drama and art history and he showed me a copy of Picasso’s
painting called “Guernica” declaring it “rubbish” and a joke played on the art critics. I held my tongue, knowing that the painting depicting Franco’s destruction of this Spanish town of no military importance as a training exercise for Hitler’s Stuka dive bombers was a powerful political commentary that to Picasso was far from a joke. What I saw as the embodiment of the horror and the senselessness of war waged on innocent villagers he saw as the childish, untalented scrawl of a pretending lunatic madman.
Oh well, to each his own. Opinions are like, well you know…
We all have some.
March 24, 2010 at 5:35 PM
Your grandfather was a fantastic cartoonist and I am using his cartoons in a little Adventist newsletter we publish for the Adventist Homeless Action Team which is building a congregation without walls in Oakland, California – homeless plus donors. We worship in the streets. There is nothing like your father’s cartoons – fantastic, witty, sensitive, caring. The book is out of print. I have a good photocopy of it. My understanding is he made the cartoons over a period of about thirty years, beginning in the early thirties. Just fantastic.