You won't make it through all ten minutes of today's clip but see how far you get. This is a ten minute art lesson from Jon Gnagy, a man who alternately motivated and disheartened countless aspiring artists of the fifties. Mr. Gnagy was a pioneer of early television, doing his first broadcasts in 1946. (A Gnagy art lesson was reportedly the first thing transmitted when the big antenna atop the Empire State Building in New York was installed.) Throughout the fifties, he had a series of syndicated TV shows called, variously, You Are An Artist or Jon Gnagy's Learn to Draw.
By any name, what he offered was a fifteen minute program in which he'd do a drawing in about ten minutes and you at home would be expected to draw right along with him and wind up with the same thing. This was not humanly possible. An accomplished professional trying to keep up with Gnagy and replicate his actions would have failed…so you can imagine how well I did when I was nine. He'd be adding the finishing touches, like the smoke curling out of the chimney…and I'd still be sketching in the foundation line of the log cabin. So there were two possible reactions at home: You could think, "If I practice enough, someday I'll be able to do what he can do." Or you could think, "Boy, I really don't have a talent for this" and you could forget all about becoming an artist.
My response was closer to the second than the first, though I kept at it for a time. I even got my parents to buy me one of the Jon Gnagy art kits that were sold during the commercials. It turned out to be a box containing a pad of cheap drawing paper and an array of charcoal sticks that broke the first time they came into contact with the cheap drawing paper. More frustration. More feelings that maybe I should forget all about drawing. A lot of acclaimed artists (including Andy Warhol) would later cite Gnagy's TV instruction as important and inspirational, and I'm sure it was to some. I'm just wondering how many people gave it up because of the guy.
I used to have an ongoing, friendly debate with a gentleman named Burne Hogarth. Burne was an acclaimed illustrator, comic strip artist and art teacher. I'd see him at conventions or since he lived near me, run into often him at the drugstore, and we always somehow got back into it. I was (and still am) of the opinion that even hopeless amateurs should be encouraged to draw…or at least, not discouraged. What they produce might not be worthy of hanging in a gallery but it can be fun and perhaps theraputic. You don't have to be Dennis Rodman to go out and shoot some baskets and you don't have to be Picasso (or even Burne Hogarth) to sit down and paint a painting. Burne's side of the argument was that someone who doesn't know how to fly a plane shouldn't be allowed a seat in the cockpit, and that we shouldn't dignify what an amateur draws by calling it drawing. Or something like that. I'm probably making his position sound less reasonable than it was but that's easy to do when you have a weblog and the other guy is dead.
Anyway, we spoke of Gnagy. Hogarth knew him and respected the man's attempts to educate the masses. When I said I thought Mr. Gnagy had soured a lot of souls on The Joys of Drawing, Burne's attitude was, "Good." If Burne were around today, I think I'd take this video over to his house and see if he could draw what Gnagy could draw in ten minutes with the bad charcoal.
Here then is Jon Gnagy on his show teaching us how to draw a grist mill. I not only don't know how he did this, I don't even know what a grist mill is. I also was never able to keep up with The Galloping Gourmet and make a beef bourguignon as fast as he could…