Sailor Malan’s Magic Spitfire

Sailor Malan’s Magic Spitfire
Mixed Media - 19 x 25"
One in a series of images on WWII

David's take on the iconic image of Adolph "Sailor" Malan, the South African-born RAF ace.  One can imagine how Malan's life story would seem fascinating to a young boy in the 1940s, when David likely first saw the famous photograph he would re-create decades later.  Malan was a former member of the Merchant Marine (thus the nickname) who joined the RAF in 1935.  In 1939, Malan led his squadron into action just 15 hours after the formal declaration of war between the UK and Germany.  Unfortunately, Malan's fighters mistakenly attacked a returning RAF bomber squadron, and shot down two planes.  Malan survived the subsequent court martial to become one of the most decorated and heroic pilots in RAF history, and his influence on air combat (and life in general) continues to this day.

Journal Drawing - Home (56 Hendricks Avenue)

Home (56 Hendricks Avenue)
Ink on paper, size unknown
June 1958, Wheeling WVA

I did this ball-point pen drawing of my parents' house in Elm Grove (a neighborhood in the city of Wheeling, WV) shortly after I moved back there for the Summer after my second year of graduate school in Cleveland.  Although the house was certainly undistinguished, its shabbiness is exaggerated by the drawing style, which I was experimenting with in imitation of Ben Shan, who's work I much admired at the time.  This produced some interesting results, but it was too easy to create effects that were not entirely honest (as in this case) and I soon abandoned it.  As for the house, it was demolished six or seven years later in the construction of Interstate 70, and the entire neighborhood is now buried under a 20-foot retaining wall for the highway.

(Ed. Note - In the late 1970s, David moved with his wife and children to Syracuse, NY, where he had accepted a faculty position with Syracuse University's Office of Publications.  David's office was only steps from one of Ben Shahn's best known murals,"The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti" [1967].  The 60 x 12' mosaic tile mural adorns the Eastern edge of the otherwise unimpressive H. B. Crouse Hall, where its message and beauty go ignored by thousands of students every year.  For a fascinating and very comprehensive history of the mural - and of Sacco & Vanzetti themselves - click here)

 

German Dive Bomber (Blue) - Mixed Media, 19 x 25"

German Dive Bomber (Blue)

Mixed media, 19 x 25"

One in a series of images on WWII

In the Fall of 1965, when I was teaching art and working as a graphic designer at the University of New Hampshire, I did several drawings portraying major personalities of World War II - the heroes and villains of my childhood.  I intended them as an ironic counterpoint to the war in Vietnam, which was just then becoming a divisive issue on college campuses and throughout the country.

When I started, I thought that the series might extend to five or six drawings.  When I finally stopped, more than five years later, I had completed more than 100 drawings and 20 offset lithographs depicting various aspects of the war and its aftermath - by far the most complex and ambitious artistic project I had ever undertaken.

What was concerning to me then (and intriguing to me now) was the extent to which the project had come to dominate my artistic output, spreading and growing as though it had taken on a life of its own.  I realized that exhibiting my World War II pieces would be difficult.  I thought that, seen out of context in an art gallery, they would be controversial; that my fascination with the brutality of the war, and the evils it revealed, would be misunderstood.  I explored collecting them in a portfolio or book, but that idea proved to be overly ambitious and too expensive, so I gradually abandoned my WWII project, incomplete and unfinished, and moved on.

In 2001, after being stored away for 40 years, they came back forcibly to mind in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.  I'm not sure how to explain the renewal of interest.  Perhaps I have regrets about leaving the project unfinished, or perhaps I feel that the subject of war and evil is too important to be left in the past.  But whatever the reason, I believe these images of World War II deserve an audience to whom they can present themselves and state their case.

To Be Continued

Journal Drawing - Robert Courte, Viola

Journal Drawing - Robert Courte, Viola
Ink on paper, size unknown
April 1960, Ann Arbor MI

I started keeping a journal in January of 1957 as an unintended consequence of taking a life-drawing class at the Cleveland Institute of Art.  By the end of the semester, I had come to rely on it as a combination sketchbook, diary, and pocket calendar, so I bought another book just like it and kept on going.

Over time, my journal changed substantially in format, content, drawing materials, and the quality of the drawings themselves, but two principles remained constant from the outset. First, I never deleted, altered, or edited anything; second, I never let anyone read my journal, or even look inside it, so that I wouldn’t need to worry about offending anyone or embarrassing myself.

As with most of my principles, there were occasional lapses. Two or three times I ripped out a page in frustration, and on a few other occasions I sliced out individual drawings, not to destroy them but to include them in exhibitions. Also, in 1959 I allowed one of my students in Ann Arbor, to read through my journal, but that will be saved for a future post.  

 

I continued on, with a few interruptions, for another 13 years.  By the time I stopped, in May of 1970, I had filled an estimated 3,400 pages with an unexpurgated rough draft, in words and pictures, of my life recorded in "real time" as I was living it, during the years that I changed from a 22-year-old graduate student, uncertain of my talent and unsettled in my personal life, into a 35-year-old husband and father, confident of my artistic skills, and settled into a career as a teacher, designer, and editor.

To be continued...

(Ed. note - the subject in this sketch is Robert Courte, a prominent viola player and distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.)

"Emeritus Honors"

excerpted from

Music At Michigan, Volumes 7-12

pg. 77

Akron Exhibition Poster & Invite

Akron Exhibition Poster

Silk screen, 9.75 x 15"

1964, Edinburgh

While I was studying at the Edinburgh College of Art, I met their requirement to produce at least one silk-screen piece by doing this poster and invitation (below) for a joint exhibition with Norman Schulman (the ceramics instructor at the Toledo Museum) at the Akron Art Institute, which I had arranged before I left Toledo.

The poster is silk-screened on black paper in four colors (red, pink, green, and white).  The invitation, on gray paper, is silk-screened in two colors and the text imprinted by letterpress.

I finished the project in January and sent the copies by surface mail to Norm for mailing and distribution.  It was my first silk-screen piece, and far as I can recall, I never did another.

Akron Exhibition Invitation
Letterpress and silk screen, 8 x 4"
1964, Edinburgh (2 copies)

(Ed. Note - This show got a small mention - see below - in the March 17th, 1964 edition of the Toledo Blade.  Elsewhere in the same article, one of David's previous co-exhibitors - sculptor David Hysell - gets a mention as well.  The paper announces that Hysell has an upcoming solo sculpture show at a gallery in Omaha, NB, and that he has moved on from Toledo to take a teaching position at Drake University in Des Moines, IA)

Dylan Thomas Folio

Dylan Thomas Folio
['In my craft or sullen art']
Letterpress and woodcut, 8.75 x 11.25"
Edinburgh, 1964

I did this one-color woodcut specifically as an illustration of the Dylan Thomas poem and experimented with printing it, along with the text, on various kinds and colors of paper.  This version (the only one that survives) is on purple tissue paper, folded around an orange paper liner and stapled into the cover.  Unable to find the precise color I envisioned for the cover, I used a sheet of white charcoal paper, which I stained brown with artist's oil colors.  This one-of-a-kind work served as the prototype for a later project, the "Nine Author Portraits" booklet (Ed. Note - we will post that work as well as other woodcuts by David May in the future).

'In My Craft or Sullen Art'

Dylan Thomas, 1946 

In my craft or sullen art

Exercised in the still night

When only the moon rages

And the lovers lie abed

With all their griefs in their arms,

I labour by singing light

Not for ambition or bread

Or the strut and trade of charms

On the ivory stages

But for the common wages

Of their most secret heart. 

Not for the proud man apart

From the raging moon I write

On these spindrift pages

Nor for the towering dead

With their nightingales and psalms

But for the lovers, their arms

Round the griefs of the ages,

Who pay no praise or wages

Nor heed my craft or art.

Gallery 8 Invitation

Gallery 8 Invitation
Letterpress and tipped-on offset
lithograph, 6.25 x 4.75"
1963, Toledo OH

"Gallery 8" in the Toledo Museum of Art was often used for exhibitions of work by local or area artists, including this one which I shared with sculptor David Hysell, a sculptor on the teaching staff at the museum.

For this invitation, I "cannibalized" extra copies of several of the offset-lithograph landscapes I had produced during the two previous years.  David Hysell, who was admirably easy-going, did not seem to mind that the invitation featured my work and ignored his.

(Ed. Note - while David's invite "ignores" Hysell's work, a story in the February 5, 1963 edition of the Toledo Blade mentions Hysell at some length, albeit after noting David May's inclusion in the 20th American Drawings Annual.)