Luck of the draw

Over the course of my life, I have met many people of great accomplishment. I've learned from all of them, for better or worse, and one concept I have heard many times from skilled people is that "anyone can do what I do; it just takes practice and dedication."

To be exact, I was interviewing multi-instrumentalist and Hee-Haw star Roy Clark, who told me that anyone willing to practice playing a guitar long enough could learn to play one as well as he. I dunno. I hear lots of people who have been playing (and, I presume practicing) on the guitar for years and years, and they don't pick as well as old Roy.

Sure, we're all bound to get better at things through repetition, but it's not guaranteed, and as evidence, I cite Harvey Korman's efforts to amuse me over the years, and John Grisham's attempts at writing fiction. Swing and a miss, every time.

But a name came to mind the other day that will bring a smile to my fellow Boomers.


Jon Gnagy.

Gnagy (1907 - 1981) was an artist, self-taught, who appeared on TV in the 1950s with shows such as "You Are An Artist" and "Learn To Draw."  We kids watched him and got his home art kits as gifts and did our best, even those of us who are better at drawing crowds of people than drawing anything.

He had that artist-beatnik-beard and mustache-thing going on way back then, which clearly meant to all that he was either an artist or a poet reading beat poetry in a coffeehouse. He was no hipster, though. Jon Gnagy was born in a Mennonite community in Kansas and exhibited his work at the Kansas State Fair, which led to a job as an artist for the oil community in Oklahoma. Having had a taste of success, he went to New York in the 1930s seeking more, not realizing that a Depression was going on. His lack of further success led to what he described as a nervous breakdown in 1935.

The Second World War saw Gnagy working at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, teaching camouflage technique, and at the end of the war he was with NBC for the very first TV broadcasts, at first local, and then across the burgeoning NBC Network.  Early TV needed shows to put on that were easily produced in a studio, and what's easier than putting a camera on a man drawing at an easel.  And in much the same easygoing manner as Bob Ross in years to come, Gnagy, always in his plaid shirts, taught everyone to draw as he had taught himself.

He said that all you had to do was learn to draw four basic shapes: a cube, a circle, a cone, and a cylinder, and then embellish them to form all the images of everything!

''By using these four shapes, I can draw any picture I want. And so can you!'' And so it was that we sat and drew pictures of books stacked outside of tepees, right next to buckets of apples.

Art is so hard to define.