Bob Boze Bell Art Blog

March 31, 2009
On Saturday morning, bandmate Wayne Rutschman and I decided to walk from the King’s Inn to the final rehearsal at the Fairgrounds. Crossing Old Route 66 we walked straight into Ricca Drive (the very first subdivision in Kingman) and, of course, as we walked, we began pointing out the houses where many of the coolest girls in Kingman lived when we were in high school. Among the houses we pointed out, were the houses of Michele Gilpin, Gail Nash, Debbie Dunton, Karen Cooper, Linda Whiting, Barbara Finn, Cathy Swift, Judy Gillespie and Doris and Di Wells. Those are just a few if the honeys two old ex-horndogs could remember:

These girls, I mean women, who are pictured here were poached straight out of my high school annuals and even though I didn’t try extra hard to portray any one individual, I think more than a few will recognize themselves. And, for the record, not all of them lived on Ricca Drive (like Ms. Torres).

Speaking of high school annuals, I know I am in the minority but I have never been fond of tattoos. When my kids were about ten I did a very devious thing: I showed them all the beehive hairdos in my high school annual and asked them if they thought the dos were hip. “It’s ridiculous and hideous!” they both said, at the same time trying to run from the room. I went and got them and said, “We thought this fashion was the coolest and would never change.” Then, I added this: “Imagine if all of us were stuck with this same hairdo today? Would that be a curse?” Oh, YES! they said without reservation.

“Well, if you get a tattoo, this is what you’re going to look like in about twenty years.”

So far, neither kid has a tattoo (that I know of).

“All is fair in love and child rearing.”
—Old Parent Rationalization

March 26, 2009
Went home for lunch and whipped out a cool little piece on Mickey Free’s contentious relationship with his jack mule:

This, by the way, was a daily occurrence for the Mickster. Whenever he set out on the trail, his combative mule always gave him a chance at a blue sky experience. The name of the painting is: “Damn You Tu!” (Free called his mule Tu, which is Spanish for “you”.)

Been studying a book “Masters of American Comics” which was published in conjunction with the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Taken by the power of blocks of black:

Yes, that’s Chester Gould (Dick Tracy), Jack Kirby, Milton Caniff (Steve Canyon), Chris Ware (Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid On Earth)

And these are sketches are 8,416 thru 8,423. Ah, you say you want a revolution?

“If you want to start a revolution, start a magazine.”
—V.I. Lennin

March 24, 2009
We get so far out front of ourselves that I often lose track of where we are. Case in point: May is at the printer and we are working on parts of June and July and September issues. Someone at Festival of the West asked me about the Alamo and I had to stop and think if that is already out, or if it’s something we are working on, or something we did two years ago (the Alamo piece is at the printer).

I finished Tom Lea’s “The Wonderful Country” on Sunday. Hated for it to end (always a sign of a good read). Really enjoyed the Mexico sojourn passages, like this:

“Martin Brady had breakfast by a farmhouse door at dawn, three leagues from Chihuahua. The taste of the greasy gordas the woman gave him and the stale coffee, stuck sour in his throat. His bones ached unrested, he felt dizzy from the long motion of his ride, and his eyes stung. When he had given the woman a real, he went to the well in the farmyard and from a leaky bucket dashed water on his face. Then he mounted Lagrimas and rode tired, on a tired horse, toward the city.”

Lea gets the grind of a long ride really good and he has the feed and care of horses down to poetry. And by the way, Brady’s horse is named Lagrimas, which means “tears”, as in crying, in Spanish. Of course there’s lots of Mexico in Frederic Remington and his drawings for Mickey Free:

And, by the way, the woman with Bruce Dern at Festival of the West looked quite a bit like NASCAR driver Jeff Gordon’s main squeeze:

Just got off the phone with Joey Dillon and he is Josh Brolin’s gun and tomahawk coach on the new Jonah Hex, which goes before the cameras on April 1. Joey tells me this one is going to be “bad ass.” Joey is also in line to coach another graphic novel-headed-for-the-big-screen, Caliber.

I’ve been told the difference between heaven and hell can be quite minor. Case in point:

Heaven is Where:
The Police are British,
The Chefs are Italian,
The Mechanics are German,
The Lovers are French
and
It’s all organized by the Swiss.

Hell is Where:
The Police are German,
The Chefs are British,
The Mechanics are French,
The Lovers are Swiss
and
It’s all organized by the Italians.

That pretty much says it all, eh?

“My treasures do not chink or glitter, they gleam in the sun and neigh in the night.”
—Old Vaquero Saying

March 23, 2009
Got the word yesterday that the Top Secret Writer was in the hospital for the past two days. He’s had pneumonia for eight weeks (he wasn’t feeling well last weekend when we hiked to Cottonwood Springs but he was hoping this was the end of it). He didn’t get better and Tracy Lee was driving Hutton to the emergency room when he passed out. They had him on a drip. He told me from his room, “I can be this miserable at home.” Got a Blackberry message this afternoon that he’s going home tonight.

I told him he couldn’t die now because we are so close to finishing the Mickey Free project (see below). He agreed, but he’s so damned stubborn and besides, he rarely listens to me anyway.

Had lunch today with cowboy Bill Dunn of Alberta, Canada. He and his lovely wife drove down for Festival of the West and he came out to Cave Creek to get the tour. Took him to El Encanto and we both had the chicken mole enchiladas.

After lunch with Bill I went home and finished a portrait of Major Bullis:

This is for the end section of the Mickey Free book where we talk about what happened to everyone. All of Bullis’s improvements to San Carlos were wiped out when San Carlos Dam flooded the post. Notice his portrait is faded because of a huge watermark. Too heavy handed? Perhaps, but this is the nuance I love in Old West stories, excuse me, Old West graphic novels.

“There are some things can only achieve by a deliberate leap in the opposite direction.”
—Franz Kafka

March 20, 2009
Going to my Wallace speech in about ten minutes, then over to Westworld for an appearance at Festival of The West.

Worked last night on a clean scratchboard style for the Mickey Free book:

More later.

“The function of the press in society is to inform, but its role in society is to make money.”
—A. J. Liebling

March 18, 2009
In meetings most of the day, developing a new category for True West. We flew in an experienced editor from Minneapolis who is an expert on the category and we discussed ways to make it pay (i.e. mo’ ads).

Trish and Michelle are on their way to Festival of the West to set up our booth down at Westworld. It runs thru Sunday. I’ll be out there all day Saturday.

Yesterday, I got a phone message: “Bob, this is Wallace. Call me.” I thought to myself, hmmmmm, there is only one person I know with the first name Wallace and he did a legendary kid show with Ladmo for thirty years. He left a number. I called it, and asked to speak to Wallace. It was him. He wants me to come speak to his group of friends down at the old Bud Brown’s Barn on Friday. I’m going.

The May issue goes out the door in about an hour. Kind of quiet in the office. Robert Ray brought in a homemade trifle and I had some of that.

Got this from our movie editor, Henry Beck, yesterday:

By the way, Lee Marvin’s estate in Tucson—7000 sq ft house, 12 acres, Joseas Jessler design, is up for sale. She was asking 6mil but has dropped that a bit. Wanna split the difference?

Lee Marvin’s estate, check it out.

When I lived in the Old Pueblo, I ran into Lee on South Fourth Avenue in the mid-seventies. He was just an old guy in a white t-shirt, cordial, but kind of shy, or, standoff-ish.

Just the other night I saw him on The Westerns Channel in “Pocket Money” which was filmed in Tucson around that time. I remember not liking the movie at the time. Paul Newman plays an airhead cowboy trying to buy Mexcian cattle for a crooked cattle dealer (Struther Martin). Lee Marvin plays a shifty, blow hard gringo in Mexico and he is just brilliant. It must be age dependant (written for people of a certain age) because I thought it was great this time around.

Ex-employee and current friend, Rob Bandhauer dropped by the office and gave me a present:

Thanks Rob.

“History is not life. But since only life makes history, the union of the two is obvious.”
—Louis D. Brandels

March 17, 2009
I have been in a funk all day. I went to yoga this morning and just couldn’t stop kicking myself for blowing that Alamo cover painting. We did a half-a-happy-baby pose, but I wasn’t a very happy baby. That scene was so sweet in my mind’s eye and I just cartooned it.

Damn it all! I just hate being so incompetent.

Meanwhile, our water heater sprang a leak last night so I had to go home after yoga and wait for the plumber. I took the opportunity to paint on a larger version of the cover, hoping to save it. Couldn’t finish it, so, paid the plumber ($576 house account) and came back into the office.

Deep inside the beast, Dan Harshberger was tweaking my painting in his computer and, unbeknownst to me, adding another sky color and punching up the Burger King sign glow:

Amazing. Now THAT is a decent cover! It certainly pays to have talented friends. Congrats Dan. You are the Man. Now I’m a happy baby.

“An oldtimer is someone who can remember every detail of his life story, but can’t remember how many times he’s told it to the same person.”
—Old Vaquero Saying

March 16, 2009
Back from a busy Southern Arizona jaunt. Got in at eight last night. Spoke at the very first Tucson Festival of The Book on Saturday. They were expecting 50,000 (and I think they came close); the organizers worked on it for 18 months. Went to dinner with the director of the Arizona Historical Society, Bruce D., and Paul Andrew Hutton at Maynard’s, a new restaurant in the old train station (where Wyatt and Doc got Frank Stilwell). Long day Sunday out in the Whetstone Mountains hiking up to Cottonwood Springs with guide Bill Evans, Dave Daiss, Dave’s doctor—Charlie, and the Top Secret Writer. Got good pics and I’ll post them later.

Got up this morning at six and finished the cover for The Battle of Alamo Plaza:

I am disappointed. Had such high hopes for this painting and it ended up in Cartoonland. After I scanned it, Robert Ray stuck his head in my office and said, “Do you want me to send that Low Blows artwork down to Dan?” Ha. Bastard. He as gigging me, as Low Blows was the title of my New Times editorial cartoon book.

The subhead is going to be: History vs. Progress. Guess Who’s Winning?

“There is not shortcut to painting; no man can tell you how to do it.”
—N.C. Wyeth

March 13, 2009
Went home around ten and bailed right into a series of Alamo covers. In typical fashion, I ruined two immediately. Here’s they are:

Looks more like Rosy The Riveter than Davy Crockett. Didn’t like the building development either. The other one ended up looking more like Che:

This one could be called “The Wrath of Crockett,” as Davy cleans out the money changers on Alamo Plaza. Ha. Too biblical for my tastes.

Kept coming back to the original study, which is smaller than the others (it was intended just as a study):

Hmmmm, I really like the compactness of the buildings in this one, with the Alamo squeezed in, and overshadowed by all the signs (which, of course, is the entire point). I have at least another four hours to go, lettering all the signs and bringing out the detail in the skyscrapers. This is problematic because I’m leaving at six in the morning for a book festival in Tucson and then on to Cottonwood Springs to see the probable site of the Curly Bill vs. Wyatt Earp confrontation. Won’t get back until Sunday night and issue goes to press on Wednesday.

Here is another set of sketches that shows the basic components I’m trying to squeeze in:

All my paintings are failures until they are successes unless they stay failures, which happens more than I’d like to admit. I also realized this afternoon this is really a glorified editorial cartoon with aspirations of N.C. Wyeth. Speaking of Wyeth, his studio mate when they both studied under Howard Pyle, has something he wants to add to all this:

“I would work my heart out over a series, and then it all seemed small and fleeting when transferred to the magazine page which people turned over and forgot in an instant.”
—Allen True on his disappointment with magazine illustration, 1905

March 13, 2009
I started on the Alamo cover assignment about a week ago. Before that we considered using part of the big painting done for John Wayne’s The Alamo, but it had two problems: it was too busy for effective cover copy placement, and, although it’s a great painting, it really doesn’t look like John Wayne (which is always a plus for commercial covers).

We were going to zone in on a vertical (magazine cover scale) portion of the painting with the three main characters and the Alamo behind them. I even considered doing a new sky (with a neutral cloud bank) and marrying it to the painting in Photoshop, but we ultimately decided we needed something original and unique to our coverage.

Here are my first sketches:

Pretty straight ahead with the typical iconic imagery of Crockett on the ramparts swinging Old Betsy at the attacking Santa Ana hordes. I first envisioned a couple of jarring reminders of the present, like a Burger King patch on a Soldado, and maybe a Ripley’s Believe It Or Not sign on a wagon.

That was my angle when I did these sketches last week (at least in the bottom, right hand sketch, which I did first):

I developed a stronger swinging Crockett on Wednesday:

And I have three other versions of this on different sized paper.

Spent yesterday finding and printing out reference pics of the surrounding buildings in San Antonio. Someone, maybe Mark Boardman, said that Ernie’s is a popular eatery near the Alamo, so Robert Googled it and printed a jpeg of that as well. Went home at about 5:30 and worked until 7:30 last night on Alamo Plaza architecture and signage:

Now to put all of these elements together in a claustrophobic, multiple vanishing point perspective.

That is my goal today. Gee, I wonder if the legendary painter Mr. Pyle has advice to offer me?

“If, in making a picture, you introduce two ideas, you weaken it by half—if three, it weakens by a compound ratio—if four, the picture will be really too weak to consider at all and the human interest would be entirely lost.”
—Howard Pyle