Getting started as an artist isn’t easy. While art education is almost always considered a part of any basic education, it’s usually treated as playtime and not to be confused with the more important “real” subjects like history and math. I always admired how my brother forged ahead with his art despite everything, but when he started to lose his mind, I wondered if it was safe to pursue my creative nature. Art was important to me, but I didn’t really see a clear path forward.
When I was very young, I read that some of the guys I admired, like Rick Baker, Monster Maker, and Ray Harryhausen, started in their mother’s garage. We didn’t have a garage. We had a covered carport instead, but in the back of it was what I thought might be a perfectly serviceable storage room. When I turned thirteen, I asked my mother if I could turn a corner of the storage room into an art studio.
My mother always treated my artistic inclinations as an indulgence. That being said, she indulged me fairly often, just so long as I kept it in perspective. I’d been allowed to visit Katherine Ettl and see her studio at her home. Among other things, she sculpted the massive statue of Andrew Jackson that stood before City Hall. Her first husband had been the mayor of Jackson and developed the Eastover neighborhood. She lived in an antebellum-style home with a large, air-conditioned sunroom that she used as a studio.
I enjoyed sculpture and painting very much, and through my father’s business, I could get plasticine clay and tempera paint at wholesale prices. All I had to do was write out the stock numbers on a piece of paper and leave it on his dressing counter in the bathroom, and most of the time, he’d bring the goods home with him. I’m pretty sure he just gave the list to his secretary, but in my mind, he had a small part in what I was spending my time doing. As my dad’s career took off, time with him became more and more hard to come by, so I began to imagine moments like this as something we did together. I knew this was deluding myself, but it didn’t seem to hurt anything. As long as I kept my artistic endeavors in its proper perspective, I was pretty well supplied with materials.
My mother agreed to the plan as long as I cleaned and organized the rest of the storage room. “It might be kind of hot.” She said. I assured her that Harryhausen and Baker did this in their garage in California, and surely California is every bit as hot as Mississippi.
I used an old bed sheet from the rag pile to form a wall between my part of the space and the rest of the storage room and used tempera paints to make it look like the forest in the book “Where the Wild Things Are.” This was going to be my key to success as an artist. Besides having all the supplies I needed, Mr. Towles, the art teacher from St. Andrews, had given me an armature for sculpting busts, which basically amounted to a board with an upright part forming sort of an upside-down “T” that you could sculpt on.
This was in June. I was pretty proud of myself for taking the initiative to set all this up. I had several 1/8th-scale sculptures and was working on a full-size gorilla bust from which I intended to make an over-the-head mask like Planet of the Apes. I had a folding table set up in the corner to work on and several shelves to store my materials and sculptures in progress.
Plasticine is a type of clay in which solids are suspended in a petroleum jelly-like base. Artists love it because it’s infinitely reusable, unlike water-based clays with limited working time. It comes pretty rigid but loosens up as you work it, and the heat from your hand softens it. Almost any source of heat softens it. If you’re careful, you can microwave plasticine to make it more pliable.
Through the rest of June, I was heartily productive in my little space and very happy. I had a portable radio and a cassette recorder that I used to record at least the audio portion of my favorite episodes of “Horrible Movie.” It was getting pretty hot, though. It didn’t matter; I was pretty tough.
With no ventilation, my little workspace started to suffer from the Mississippi heat. Besides being uncomfortably hot to work there, by the middle of July, the plasticine in my sculptures began to melt off their armatures. The musculature I tried so hard to capture was sagging off the wire and aluminum foil skeleton, and my gorilla mask was starting to look like the Incredible Melting Man.
I tried using an oscillating fan, but that just moved the already hot air around. It wasn’t just that the heat made me uncomfortable, which it did; it was also destroying my work, which made me wonder if nature itself wasn’t working against me. By the time school started, I surrendered my studio, and it became a storage room again. I’d read about other artists who got their start in a garage, but it clearly wasn’t a Mississippi garage.
