Calling all teachers

My oldest Leopard cub has recently started attending a good art college on the west coast. He’s handling a full class schedule while working a part time job and leading his band while playing guitar for another, and so far is maintaining pretty good grades. But because he drives 40 minutes to and from school, gas kills a lot of his pay, he’s always low on funds.
Students in his school maintain a small studio they share with other students that are inspected by the professors time to time. An instructor came in to look at his work and was impressed, but noticed he had done painting on cardboard in lieu of proper traditional materials. He asked him if he meant to use the cheap cardboard specifically.
My boy told him, ‘No,” but it was all he could afford at the moment. The instructor said he would have him sent a check for 100 bucks towards supplies. – It’s something the faculty is allowed to do occasionally if so moved. When my son told me this, I reacted a little like my own father might: “Just make sure you use that to paint, and not splurge at Taco Bell”.
It’s so important that educators display a personal interest in their students, and that the institutions allow that.

Leroy Neiman

Back the days when The Leopard worked at a certain well-known non profit jazz institution in New York, I had limited authority to hire illustrators and designers I always dreamed of working with. One was the great caricaturist Al Hirshfeld, whom I’ve written about before. The other was Leroy Neiman. Neiman is a polarizing character, straddling the line between illustrator and fine artist.

In the museum world, he was barely taken seriously because of his illustration background and his association with the iconic pub Playboy Magazine (he created the little nymphet on the Party Jokes pages) and his desire to live the Playboy lifestyle.

Also his hyper-colored painting struck some as garish and unsophisticated although his draftsmanship and the immediacy of his brushwork was loved by many - his paintings sold routinely for $100,000 and up.

I once visited him in the early 2000s to discuss the possible commission of a large jazz mural in his pristine studio on upper west side. He was incredibly gracious and friendly, happily displaying his latest work. I’ll never forget a wonderful piece of advice he gave me: I timidly showed him some of my work on some postcards I brought and asked him what he thought or if he had any suggestions. After a few seconds, he said, “No, you know what you’re doing.” Then he flipped the card over. “But don’t call yourself and illustrator. Call yourself an artist”. The extravagantly mustachioed Mr. Neiman passed away a virile 91. 

The Great Frazetta (1928 - 2010)

The Leopard has many artistic heroes: John Singer Sargent, Picasso, Hopper, Wyeth, Basquiat and many, many others, but I'd be lying if I didn't admit that chief among them is the brilliant painter Frank Frazetta. Frank began his career as a comic book artist, then as assistant to the great cartoonist Al Capp on Li'l Abner and as an illustrator of science fiction and fantasy paperback book covers for characters like Tarzan and most famously, Robert E. Howard's Conan The Barbarian. Frank's beautiful covers were so successful in the marketplace that he eventually would come to create the covers first, and then writers were assigned to come up with the novels!

From a very young age - around fifteen, I appreciated his wonderful color palette,  the amazing power and movement of his images and the sexiness of his figures, especially the thick, fleshy allure of his women.

Frank was not exactly politically correct. His depiction of blacks and Asians were mostly derogatory and his women were there for the sexual pleasure of the muscular heroes and the fanboys like myself who bought every magazine, calendar and book where his images were reproduced.   But Frank was a product of his time, having grown up in Brooklyn in the late twenties a child prodigy who was also a scrappy neighborhood kid who played backlot baseball and was good enough to be once considered by the majors.

Frazetta's work to me was so remarkably advanced that I knew even as a child I would never come close to matching his talent.  But he became the measurement with which I compared all others. and despite an army of imitators over the years, I have yet to see his match in fantasy art.