Malibu morning picture of the day - Monday, December 15, 2014

Dear Family, Friends, and Gentle Readers,

Here is today's look...

This exposure gives off a very placid feel to me. It almost looks to me like the start of a hot day. But no, by L.A. standards it was a bit chilly this morning.

Here the second look with some diagonal motion to it and more contrast. Simply being aware of this is one of the fundamentals of basic artistic practice.

Carl Barks was
my hero ...

Speaking of fundamentals of art, I was a very lucky lad who benefited from sloppy school administration. When I was a child, I loved to draw and I loved reading comic books like Archie, Adventure, Adventures of Donald Duck, House of Secrets, Dennis the Menace, MAD, among others. I would ask my mother to buy me writing tablets (pads of blank paper, which when folded would fit into a small correspondence envelope), because they were just the perfect size for me to carry around and on which I would draw my own comic books stories, three panels high, two panels wide.

OK, it wasn't projects quite this elementary at City,
but only a step or two above ...

She thought to encourage me in my art and signed me up for some community service art course at the nearby city college. It was OK, but it was totally not anything along my interests in cartooning. We did things like drop a blob of brown paint on heavy, white paper and then take a straw and blow the fluid paint into patterns that looked like tree branches.Or we would take an issue of Reader's Digest fold the pages into slightly varying patterns, and then glue the covers together to create a rounded sculpture, and then spray paint the whole thing. Thanks for trying Mom, but this was just not the thing for me.

Otis Art Institute, across the street
from MacArthur Park

Untitled - abstract figure, Harold Kramer

Then, one day I was looking at the L.A. Times and noticed an ad for Otis Art Institute offering a class in drawing during the summer at night and told her I wanted to go. She gave me some money (it was probably about $25-$35) and I rode my bike down to the MacArthur Park area on their registration Saturday afternoon. I think they just took my name, address, phone number, and my money. It was mostly what I thought then were old people, but I really didn't care. I knew enough about the world that if I was signing up from something for people my age, that it would be childish, condescending, and insipid.

Untitled - figurative abstraction, Harold Kramer

I went to the first day of class with a
requisite drawing pad and charcoal sticks that we were instructed to get for the first session. The teacher was Harold Kramer (1912-1995) and he was like not any teacher I had ever had before. He was short, white-haired, cussed like a sailor, called out bad efforts without hesitation, and dressed like a construction worker. The first thing we did in class was take a vote on whether smoking was going to be allowed during class--the smokers won. Mr. Kramer not only smoked in class, he smoked cigars. He announced 1-minute warm-ups, and then a black woman who was sitting there in a robe, dropped the robe and struck poses, unclothed. (Now that I think of it, she was the first naked woman I had ever been in the same room with, outside of my child-latency period.)

Untitled - figures relaxing in a landscape, Harold Kramer

Did I mention this was the summer I was 14, turning 15? (They never bothered putting the word "Life" on the drawing class in the ad. What did I do? What any good Chinese boy (who teaches Sunday School at a conservative Presbyterian Church) would do in a class where he's new--just copy what everybody else was doing and proceed as normal. And so, Mr. Kramer became my new normal, "Picasso bless his atheistic spirit." (He said he had no God, but if he had to pick one, it would be Picasso.) I'm sure it was totally illegal for a minor to be enrolled in such a class at a L.A. County-run school.

I went on to study art formally at Cal State Long Beach, and elsewhere, but I have to say that everything I absorbed that summer from Mr. Kramer, who was just doing what he normally did, stuck with me, to the point that I'd say that anything any other art teacher told me afterward, seemed just like a variation on the fundamentals that I got that series of summer nights. This anecdote has gone on too long for blog-time, but every adolescent needs a "Mr. Kramer" to show up in their life and blow the lid off their comfort zone, and deliver advanced teaching to the kid who is ready to accept it. He gets the Award for Changing my Psyche from me for being my first world-teacher. Thanks Mr. Kramer, wherever the hell you are.

Love,
Pops


Source URLs:
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiF4VClOLEcGoG315Gh0N2VNB_PP07CL2kiwBrG72MN61LLpAFG6UitjMsHhY_zf4LYY7PCxN9Tfr4i3o0zsygEuNxv4tdfTyjMS7u443aKxqBcOMMncg4ds5tNXtSnLX7K62Bm2LzXF4iZ/s800/2401ealyartinstmodern.jpg

http://chouinardfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/image_kramer.jpg

https://shard2.1stdibs.us.com/archivesE/upload/a_414/48_14/haroldkramerinthebackyard1/HaroldKramerinthebackyard1_l.jpeg

http://www.askart.com/askart/k/harold_m_kramer/harold_m_kramer.aspx