The people have spoken: more retro nudie pinups

The Model, by Fritz Willis, published by Walter T. Foster. (Annoyingly undated, like all of them.)

In honor of my just realizing that May 4 marked the second anniversary of this blog, all this month, or hell, maybe just this week, I'm going to attempt to please you, my random readers, by revisiting some all-time favorite posts and/or by simply giving you more of what you seem—based on Blogger statistics—to want more than anything: pictures of nekkid ladies.

See, back in the dawn of time  (i.e., 2004), when I started my first blog, Blogger (neé Blogspot) didn't helpfully crunch the numbers the way they do now. I was blissfully unaware of which of my posts attracted the most traffic, whence the traffic came, and by what combination of search terms said post was discovered and enjoyed.



Well, let's just say that this new feature has been quite enlightening. I did not realize how many people were googling "nude girls draw" or "drawing naked girls" or, my special favorite, "naked girl with guitar" and ending up at my humble blog. So pleased I could provide you all with an appropriate destination! (The naked guitar player can be found here if you missed her the first time around.) I also really enjoy the search key words that bring weary travelers to Thingummery, like "nude finnish men sauna," "70s wigs for women and dolls" and "Carol Burnett naked." Only one Thingummery post actually meets that search criteria—can you guess which?





One of the things I've learned over the two years I've been blogging about my stuff is just how popular Walter T. Foster art books—particularly those about nude girls and clowns—really are. They seriously deserve their own blog, or better still, tumblr, and if I can figure out how to pull off one devoted to Sad Nude Girl Clowns, I will.

Actually, that probably already exists. I'm not going to google it, though. Are you?

Ultra Violet Parkhurst

As you already know, I've got a pretty vast collection of Walter T. Foster art-instruction books. The first was one of those pernicious nostalgia purchases: I learned how to draw horses when I was a kid with the aid of a Walter T. Foster book so naturally when I saw the same book at an estate sale, I pounced. That was a few years ago, before I knew that the generation of middle-class suburbanites whose estates are currently up for grabs here in San Antonio were a bunch of devoted amateur artists who looked to Walter T. Foster's big floppy instruction manuals for direction. Now when I see them, which is frequently, I can't resist buying them. Luckily, they're very skinny, so they don't take up too much room.

I'd say about half of the books in my collection have bylines apart from Foster's signature/brand and almost all of them seem to be men (e.g., Fritz Willis, pin-up girl artist extraordinaire, and Leon Franks, master portraitist of sad clowns) or else their names are gender-neutral initials. So my curiosity was piqued when I saw the marquee byline one Violet Parkhurst merited for manual #101, Painting Sunsets.

Sunset paintings are not especially my thing, but I have to share some nuggets from Violet's CV: Born in Vermont in 1921 and educated in Boston and Waco, she indulged a passion for travel, tooling around Canada and Mexico before landing in Natal, Brazil, where she was a foreign correspondent for movie magazines (here you can see photos of her with Clark Gable, Maureen O'Hara and more). A total dame! She gave up writing for her first love, painting, because, according to the Walter T. Foster bio, "From her French mother, she inherited a temperament which could best be expressed by oils and brushes." Hmmm... insert Bob Hope tomcat yowl here?

Parkhurst ultimately put down roots in Cali; first Malibu and then San Pedro, where she cruised on her 35-foot boat The Hustler (sunset cruises, mostly, I'm guessing). She died in 2008, but in L.A., Violet Parkhurst day is celebrated on November 3.

The Walter T. Foster bio presents her as some crazy feminist trailblazer—and hell, maybe she was:

This internationally known and acclaimed woman artist is no mild illustrator, nor does she dabble in prosaic landscapes. Instead, she specializes in three areas where most women painters have rarely ventured, certainly not with the force, action and vibrancy that she brings to her work. She paints seascapes, life-like studies of the bubbling, foam-flinging seas of the world which thunder on the shores in their wild rush for the beach... She paints both the male and the female nude, displaying unashamedly their God-given charms and attributes. Horses, cats and all animals are an invitation to capture their innocent charms on canvas... For her successful invasion of these customarily male domains...Violet Parkhurst has won scholarships, trophies over thirty blue ribbons, accolades, critical acclaims and an international reputation.

Methinks someone deserves at least 30 blue ribbons for that purple prose.

Anyway, stumbling across this little-known feminist heroine reminds me of an assignment I did for an 18th-century literature class in college, in which the professor had us dig deep in the stacks at Butler Library to locate and write about an obscure work by an obscure female poet of the time. Superfun stuff—shining a light, however small, on these forgotten, overlooked rule-breakers. So if Violet indeed broke down barriers for future chick painters, then my beret's off to her! I will raise a glass in her honor at the next technicolor sunset.

Good eggs

It's been too many weeks since I last shared a Walter T. Foster art-instruction manual. This has always been one of my favorites, though I'm not sure why. Maybe I didn't know felt tip pens were an actual medium. How do they differ from Magic Markers? Maybe I just like the Rona Jaffe Best of Everything vibe I'm getting from the illustrations. Maybe I just really like that portrait of breakfast—when I eventually come across another copy of A.V. Almazar's How to Paint with Felt-Tip Pens, and I've no doubt that I will, I'm going to tear out and frame that plate of sunny-side eggs and hang it in my kitchen.

They're not bad...they're just drawn that way

Time to play my favorite estate-sale guessing game: What, exactly, were our late neighbors up to? What was going on behind those modest brick walls, beneath those popcorn ceilings, atop those shaggy shag carpets?

I got an armload of Walter T. Fosters at the home of yet another San Antonio Sunday painter. This person had all the great, and more rare, manuals devoted to pin-up girls (I already wrote about one here). But as I leafed through Drawing the Figure by Russell Tredell, what should fall into my lap?



A clipping from a mysterious periodical, an exposé about a "Free Love Cult in the Caves of Crete." Frustratingly, the text of the article was not saved; just this picture of a very limber free love cultist busting some kind of gymnastical yoga move on the beach of what I assume must be Crete.

This toothsome lass is on the flip side of the clipping. Free love cult member? We can only hope.



I wish I could report that after conducting a thorough investigation into the matter, I found out all kinds of interesting things about free love cults inspired by Eileithyia, the Cretan goddess of fertility who was born in one of the womb-like caves of Crete, but all I found out is that Crete has womb-like caves, many of which are believed to be the birthplace of mythological gods, including Zeus. Which makes the caves of Crete a pretty good place to start a free love cult considering Zeus was one of the earliest and most accomplished practitioners of the sport.

Portrait of the artist as a young Cindy Brady

In honor of the estate sale I went to this morning where I bought a dozen Walter T. Fosters for a mere two bucks, I bring you the already scanned How to Put Life into Your Portraits by S.M. Shinn. May your weekend be lively with smiley cherubs like these.

Send in the clown paintings...

What do we talk about when we talk about clowns? Where to begin. Clowns are scary/sad/dark. Clowns are sinister/creepy/wrong. Shakes the Clown. Krusty the Clown. John Wayne Gacy. Clown paintings are trite; good-for-a-laff thrift shop art collected by kitsch-loving young hipsters before they move on to better things, like Howard Finster or Henry Darger. Unless you're Diane Keaton, who is a serious collector of clown paintings and even produced an odd coffee table book devoted to them back in 2002. (I know because I own it—it was sent to me by an eternally optimistic publicist back when I was editing the book page of a teen fashion magazine.)

I don't have a whole lot to add to the clown discourse; I did have a love-loathe relationship with a clown doll when I was a small child but I haven't let that poison my feelings toward clowns in general. I picked up this Walter T. Foster volume devoted to Clowns and Characters because, as previously noted, I'm a total sucker for these art-instruction manuals. And what I find especially compelling about this book are the "characters" who get lumped in with the clowns. Basically, a character is a person who isn't white. You'll have to take my word for it because I didn't scan the pictures that best illustrate this point—the colors weren't as vivid—but there's a portrait of a handsome young black guy with an intense gaze, a young black woman called "Cuban Girl" and another called "Woman of Morocco." Below, you have this ginger-haired gentleman tricked out five different ways—a pirate, a clown, a Mexican, an extra from Lawrence of Arabia, a Sikh...such crazy characters!

When dealing with a run-of-the-mill white person, like the middle-aged woman below, it is advisable that the artist accessorize:

Dress up the model in costume, using accessories from the attic trunk. The costume will take the model out of the ordinary class of portraits. Express a few important folds or creases with conviction. This will get you by. (More artists have committed suicide over drapery than anything else.) Paint the drapery in one shot, or keep it tentative until sure. Play it cool. Save all your emotions and passions for the wind-up.

Yikes, in addition to being racist, folks were pretty flippant about suicide back in the 50s/60s, or whenever this was published (it's not dated but it's obviously midcentury). Alas, the Walter T. Foster company no longer publishes the time capsule that is Clowns and Characters; it's been replaced by more timely subject matter like Manja and NASCAR.

Gracing the back cover of the book is the lovely young woman below. I thought for sure she was going to be called "Gypsy Girl" but it turns out she is "Italian girl" (the lack of big gold hoop earrings and a do-rag should've indicated that she wasn't part of a caravan). On the preceding page is a black-and-white portrait of a pensive blonde, her hands folded demurely on her lap. That portrait is called "Beverly"—and she's the only "character" with a name.

How to draw the well-accessorized nude

One of the things I've learned about San Antonio since I started rifling through the things its dead have left behind (morbid but accurate) is that this town is (or was) chock full of Sunday painters. Seriously. Maybe it's not the town so much as the midcentury era when folks would take up art as a hobby. Or do people still do that? I mean, apart from Adam Gopnik, of course. (I enjoyed his New Yorker piece but it only confirmed what I already knew—drawing is motherfreaking hard.) So it's no surprise that I come across a lot of Walter T. Foster's big floppy art-instruction manuals and that I tend to snap them up because I find the colors, the type, the (false) promise of being able to render a sad clown or adorable kitten portrait as adroitly as the one on the cover just so...irresistible.

I also had a small collection as a kid—all on the subject of horses, perhaps not coincidentally the only thing I can draw with any confidence now—which makes this another one of my nostalagia-fueled pursuits, for the most part. I mean, they're also total eye candy, right? Walter died back in 1981, but the company continues to publish new manuals in his name as well as reprint some of the old ones in a Walter T. Foster Collectible Series. I was bummed to find that the company is not immune to merchandising tie-ins; most of the offerings for kids instruct them on the finer points of drawing characters from Disney, Pixar, Nickelodeon et al. Bleh. They may no longer publish a book devoted to painting clown portraits but they do have a manual devoted to drawing zombies. Never thought of looking to old Walt for the zeitgeist but there ya go.

One of the volumes in the Collectibles series is How to Draw Pin-ups and Glamour Girls; back in the day, there were several devoted to sad-eyed babes striking awkward poses in their boudoirs, including this one, The Nude by Fritz Willis. I love the models' supercomplicated hairdos, and the props. Half-drunk Chianti bottles are a recurring theme...

And there's nothing quite like an artfully placed Spanish guitar to preserve a girl's modesty, but you knew that already.

The best thing is finding old sketches stuck between the pages of these manuals. A total estate-sale bonus that sets one's mind a-wandering... Who was this amateur Vargas living in a ’60s tract house in a drab, colorless San Antonio subdivision? We'll never know.