 A Series About Childhood Memories |
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Portrait of the Artist As A Young Showman |
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Where does artistic vision begin?
Maybe right in your own backyard
By
JIM HUMMEL
of TheColumnists.com
PEOPLE OFTEN ask me when I first started to draw illustrations and cartoons. I guess they expect me to tell them I got started in my high school art class--or maybe drawing graffiti on the lavatory wall in junior high.
Anyway, they usually are a little disappointed because I always say I really can't remember the exact place it started because I was so little at the time. I just always seemed to be drawing pictures.
But now that I've given it a lot of thought, I think maybe it all started while I was sitting in my mother's lap, watching her draw pictures of her favorite characters from the comic strips, like "Tillie the Toiler." I think she might have been a very good artist herself, but it wasn't easy for a woman to have that kind of career in those days. I don't even know if she ever day-dreamed of being an artist because blue collar women like my mother weren't supposed to have dreams like that.
I grew up in Jeannette, Pa., a small town about 30 miles from Pittsburg. My father was an electrical contractor and he didn't think much of me always drawing pictures. He wanted me to learn a trade, preferably his trade--and I did learn a lot about it, working on his various projects. When he caught me "wasting time" with my drawing, he broke my pencils.
So, when I was a real little guy of about five or six, I began to create my own world to play in through my drawing. I now think it was the beginning of what some call the creative process. It's a hard thing to explain, that process. But much of it comes out of loneliness and the need to express yourself in some way.
I really don't know where this came from, except possibly from my mother, but I also became a very spiritual little boy at that time. My mother was religious, but she didn't take my sister and I to church or anything like that. Still, I began to draw religious pictures on my own and actually covered the walls of my room with religious murals.
I think I finally knew I was going to turn out to be a creative person when I started putting on puppet shows in our backyard. We charged kids a nickel to get in--and, believe it or not, lots of them paid it. My sister, Louisemae, and her two neighbor friends, June and Dale, helped me put on the shows. I used storebought puppets, but made up the stories for them to act out. The stars were the puppets, but I was the puppetmaster.
While Dale helped me with
the puppets, my sister and June waited for their part in the
show: The intermission tap dance performance. They tapped their
little toes off because the shows usually ran pretty long.
Our backyard became the center of my creative life. I was constantly
turnng inanimate objects into animated ones. I built my own six-foot-tall
Frankenstein Monster and Wolf Man out of cardboard boxes that
I drew on and colored. We used those and things like them in
our games. As always, I was the puppetmaster. Those activities
kept us all busy--and very happy.
Awhile back, I went to my 45th annual school reunion and ran into my sister's friend, June, who's all grown up with her own family now. The first thing she said when she saw me was, "Do you remember those shows we used to put on in your backyard?"
It's true that I had a high school teacher who really encouraged me to go into art as a profession and, with her encouragement, I was soon drawing everything I could for school activities. One thing led to another and one day I was being paid to be an artist.
But I think the creative impulse really sprang from my childhood days and those backyard shows. As I think of those simple days again, I feel a tear forming. I know now that I had such a wonderful childhood. In fact, do you want to know something else? I'm still living it--and all my poor friends from those days had to go on to real jobs.
Words and picture © 2001 by Jim Hummel.
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