Category Archives: homely art

December 5, 2023 · 1:37 am

Homely Art – Part Two – Paul Detlefsen

Back in about 1968 my Grandma Beyer was seriously scandalized by an artist named Paul Detlefsen. Detlefsen did a lot of covers for the “Ideals Magazine” that Grandma always had on her coffee tables. He scandalized her by putting a painting on the cover that showed a young boy taking his pants off, the rear view only, so he could go skinny dipping with a group of naked boys. Truthfully the picture shown above is by Detelfsen, but it is not the one that offended her. I have discovered that this painter of old-timey things like blacksmith shops and one-room school houses has painted at least four different versions of “the Old Swimmin’ Hole”. And Grandma was easily scandalized when we were kids. She was a very conservative woman who loved Ronald Reagan and his politics most severely and thought that Richard Nixon was a leftist radical. She didn’t like for people to be naked, except for bath time, and maybe not even then. She is one of the main reasons, along with this painter whom she adored, that I came to learn later in life that “naked is funny”. http://www.freeplaypost.com/PaulDetlefsen_VintageArtPrint_A.htm

Grandma Beyer also seriously loved puzzles, and besides “Ideals” covers, Paul Detlefsen did a beaucoup of jigsaw puzzles. (Beaucoup means a lot in Texican, I tend to think in Iowegian and talk in Texican and completely forget about the need to translate for those people who don’t know those two foreign tongues) One of the puzzles we spent hours working on was “Horse and Buggy Days” that I pictured here. They were the kind of puzzle paintings where every boy was Tom Sawyer and every girl was Becky Thatcher. And there were a lot of them. Here is another;

http://www.bigredtoybox.com/cgi-bin/toynfo.pl?detlefsenindex

Grandma had this in puzzle form also. We put the puzzle together, glued it to tag board, and framed it. It has hung on the wall in a Grandparent’s house, first Grandma Beyer’s and then Grandma Aldrich’s, since the early 1970’s. My own parents now live in Grandma Aldrich’s house, and that puzzle-painting may be hanging in an upstairs bedroom to this very day. Detlefsen is not known as a great artist. He was a humble painter who painted backdrops for films for over 20 years. In the 1950’s he switched gears and started doing lithographs that were turned into calendars, jigsaw puzzles, laminated table mats, playing cards, and reproductions you could buy in the Ben Franklin Dime Store in Belmond, Iowa and hang on your back porch at home. I believe I saw his paintings in all these forms in one place or another. According to Wikipedia (I know, research, right?) “In 1969, UPI estimated that his artwork had been seen by 80 per cent of all Americans.” That is pretty dang good for a humble painter, better numbers than Pablo Picasso ever saw. Let me share a few more of his works, and see if you recognize any of these;

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Filed under art criticism, art my Grandpa loved, artwork, homely art, oil painting

Tagged as art criticism, artist, artwork, homely art, Oil Painting, painters I love and admire, Paul Detlafsen

October 30, 2023 · 12:03 am

Homely Art – Amos Sewell

Still being under the weather and filled with sinus head-pain, I decided to go back to a subject I love so much that the post will simply write itself. You know I love Norman Rockwell and his art, and I fervently believe that kind of mass media oil-painting does not put him in a lesser category than Rembrandt or Michelangelo or Raphael or any other painter with a ninja turtle namesake. He is a genius, and though he is not a realist in so many ways, his work is more truthful than practically any other kind of painting. If you are taken by surprise and didn’t know I had this passionate obsession, maybe you should go back and look at this post; Norman Rockwell

Now that I got that out of my system, here is another Saturday Evening Post artist that is often confused with Rockwell. His name is Amos Sewell.

Sewell was an amateur tennis player who was talented enough to win tournaments. He was an employee of Wells Fargo who was headed towards anything but an art career until he decided to make a leap of faith in 1930. He started as an illustrator for Street and Smith pulp fiction, and soon caught the notice of the big-time magazine markets for his art. He published art for Saturday Evening Post, Country Gentlemen Magazine, and Women’s Day.

Like Rockwell, he was able to find the funny in everyday scenes, like the dance party to the right. That young man at center stage is trying so hard not to step on the feet of the red-headed girl, that you want to laugh, but can’t because it’s obvious how embarrassed he would be, and the charm of the picture leads you to shun the thought of interrupting. The scene is so real the boy would hear you laughing as you looked at the Post cover.

More expert on this kind of art than I am is the Facebook site that I first got turned on to Sewell by. Children in Art History

They can also be found on WordPress. Children in Art History (WordPress)

There is no doubt that Amos Sewell belongs in the same pantheon of artists as Norman Rockwell, Thomas Kinkade, or Paul Detlafsen. They are all artists who achieve in their work exactly what I have always striven for. I want to be able to hold the mirror up to our world the way they did. I want to capture both the fantasy and the reality in the subject of everyday family life. I also want to share this work with you because I cannot stand the idea that such artistic ambrosia could one day be forgotten in archives where no one ever looks at it and feels the message in their heart.

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Filed under art criticism, homely art, humor

Tagged as Amos Sewell, art criticism, artwork, homely art, humor, Norman Rockwell style, philosophy, Saturday Evening Post

June 8, 2023 · 12:35 am

The Secret Gallery in Grandma’s Closet

After years of being stored away, I discovered that my mother had hidden a hoard of my old artworks in the upstairs closet in Grandma Aldrich’s house (now my parents’ house).

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This oil painting was done on an old saw blade at the request of my Grandpa Aldrich. He wanted a farm painting on it, like the one he’d seen in a restaurant during a fishing trip in Minnesota. I chose as the subject Sally the pig. Sally was a hairlip piglet that had to be bottle fed and raised in a box by the stove until later in life she became a favorite pet. Believe it or not, pigs are smarter than the family dog. She became a pig you could ride. And Grandma had taken a precious old photo of my mother and Uncle Larry riding the pig. I used that photo to make this painting. It was also the painting I wanted to find on this trip to Iowa. Searching for it led to finding all the others.

These two are among the earliest paintings I did. They were both done on canvases that I stretched over the frame myself in high school art class. The purple one is a scene from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. The blue one doesn’t have a title, but you can see what it is. It is an ancient shibboleth water monster lurking under a dock, fishing for young boys to eat.

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This drawing was done on the front porch in the house in Rowan. It would be years before mom framed it. It is another example of what I could do as a high school kid. In fact, I composed it from art-class sketches I did my senior year in school.

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The Boy in the Barn was painted on the remains of an old chalkboard that my sisters, brother, and I had used in grade school.

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Grandma Aldrich asked for this picture to hang over the sofa in the farmhouse living room. It stayed there for many years.

Great Grandma Hinckley passed away in 1980. I created this portrait from a combination of photos and memory. It was too good. It was never hung anywhere because it always made her daughter, my Grandma Aldrich, tear up.

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This pencil drawing won a blue ribbon at the Wright County Fair in the late 70’s.

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This picture is called First Years are Hard Years. It was painted in 1982 after my first year of teaching at the junior high school in Cotulla, Texas. I painted mostly the good kids. The girl on the lower right would later go on to become a teacher for our school district. I can’t claim to be the one who inspired her, but she did make straight A’s in my class.

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This is called Beauty. It is done in oil crayon on canvas. I did it for my mother to hang in the hallway in the house in Taylor, Texas.

So, it turns out, I unearthed art treasures by searching for the one painting.

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Filed under artwork, colored pencil, homely art, humor, oil painting, old art, Paffooney

February 16, 2023 · 4:26 am

Talking to Nobody

I entered the classroom silently. Death doesn’t have to make any sound when it enters a room, but I remember many times when I entered a classroom in a fully enraged-lion roar. Probably too many times.

This time it was a small lesson to a small class. Little Mickey, ten years old, was sitting there in a front-row desk. He was wearing that stupid purple derby hat that he always wore in his imagination. And he was wearing nothing else besides.

I gave him that old death-eye stare of disapproval. He grinned and shrugged. “Hey, I like to write about nudists, okay? They tell the truth more than most people.”

I simply nodded.

Sitting the next row over, in the front seat also, middle-aged Mickey was slumped in his seat like the cynical, world-weary teacher-thing he actually was. I nodded disapprovingly at him too. “I know, I know,” he said. “My time is running out. I have to get started on my writing plan for real this time. My stories will never get written if I don’t.”

The third seat in the third row contained Old Coot Mickey with his wrinkled clothes, his long Gandalf-hair, and his frizzy author’s beard. He grinned his goofy grin at me and nodded at me cheekily. “I’ve got fourteen novels written and published now. Taint my fault that nobody ever reads ’em. They are mostly good stories, too.”

I rolled my eyes at the dark ceiling.

On the chalkboard I wrote out. Today’s Lesson Is…

“I know! I know!” shouted little Mickey, naked except for his purple hat. “The next novel is A Field Guide to Fauns. It is all about nudists in a nudist camp. I am definitely down with that!”

“Is that really a good idea, though?” asked middle-aged Mickey. “I think I was meant to be a writer of Young Adult novels, like the ones I taught so often in class. I know how those books are structured. I know their themes and development inside and out. I know how to write that stuff.”

“But the little naked guy has it right. You have ta be truthful in novels, even as you tell your danged lies.” Old Coot Mickey made his point by punctuating it with a wrinkled hand thumping on the top of his desk. “You have written novels with characters forcing other characters to make porn films in The Baby Werewolf, and sexual assault of a child in Fools and Their Toys, and lots of naked folks, and betrayal and death… All of that is the kinda stuff kids really want ta read. And them stories don’t glorify that stuff neither. Stories can help fight agin that stuff.”

“Remember, that stuff is hard to write about because I actually went through some of that stuff in my own life. It’s possible for even a fiction book to be just too real for a YA novel.” Middle-aged Mickey had entered fighting mode with his fists on his hips.

“But the underlying truth is why you had to write those stories to begin with. You have truth to tell… But in fiction form,” argued little Mickey.

“And horrible experiences turn into beautiful survival stories and heroes’ journeys with time and thoughtfulness and art,” said Old Coot Mickey.

I agreed with all three of me. I nodded and smiled.

“But you are Death, aren’t you?” asked middle-aged Mickey.

“And you’ve come to take away at least Old Coot Mickey!” declared little Mickey.

“You’ve got me all wrong,” I answered all three of me. “I am not Death. I am Nobody.“

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Filed under autobiography, homely art, horror writing, humor, irony, kids, novel plans, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life

December 18, 2022 · 4:36 am

The Gingerbread Train

I had been promising my daughter for a while that we would build the gingerbread train. I was looking forward to it as an art project. She was impatient to eat it. So, on December 27th, I was finally feeling well enough to do the deed.

So, we prepared the work space on the kitchen table. We laid out the items that we could use for assembly. I made my daughter promise to stop eating elements of the train before we could actually put it together.

I started decorating the Christmas trees that go into the baggage car. My daughter ate several of the sugar-ball decorations.

The baggage car was assembled first. I call it the baggage car because even though it is in the tender position for a steam train if we called it that, that would mean that the engine burned Christmas trees instead of coal. My daughter snuck a few more decorations as we argued about that.

It was encouraging that the first part came together without looking too incredibly terrible.

My daughter decorated a majority of the engine and only ate a few more of the decorations while doing it. This was no small thing given how much she loves to eat gumdrops.

It ended up looking vaguely like the picture on the box. We had a great deal of fun making it. And the last time I checked, portions of it still were uneaten… something I am confident won’t be the case for much longer.

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Filed under artwork, family, homely art, Paffooney, photo paffoonies

June 28, 2022 · 2:29 pm

Homely Art – Part Two – Paul Detlefsen

http://www.bigredtoybox.com/cgi-bin/toynfo.pl?detlefsenindex

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Filed under art criticism, art my Grandpa loved, artwork, homely art, oil painting

Tagged as art criticism, artist, artwork, homely art, Oil Painting, painters I love and admire, Paul Detlafsen

June 7, 2022 · 1:59 pm

The Secret Gallery in Grandma’s Closet

After years of being stored away, I discovered that my mother had hidden a hoard of my old artworks in the upstairs closet in Grandma Aldrich’s house (now my parents’ house).

C360_2017-06-22-15-50-19-9622

20170622_215004

20170622_215257

The Boy in the Barn was painted on the remains of an old chalkboard that my sisters, brother, and I had used in grade school.

20170622_215408

Grandma Aldrich asked for this picture to hang over the sofa in the farmhouse living room. It stayed there for many years.

20170622_215535

This pencil drawing won a blue ribbon at the Wright County Fair in the late 70’s.

20170622_215115

20170622_215653

This is called Beauty. It is done in oil crayon on canvas. I did it for my mother to hang in the hallway in the house in Taylor, Texas.

So, it turns out, I unearthed art treasures by searching for the one painting.

2 Comments

Filed under artwork, colored pencil, homely art, humor, oil painting, old art, Paffooney

December 17, 2021 · 2:26 pm

The Gingerbread Train

I started decorating the Christmas trees that go into the baggage car. My daughter ate several of the sugar-ball decorations.

It was encouraging that the first part came together without looking too incredibly terrible.

My daughter decorated a majority of the engine and only ate a few more of the decorations while doing it. This was no small thing given how much she loves to eat gumdrops.