Who Had a Jon Gnagy Drawing Set As a Kid?

[Uncle Skid]

I had one... my Grandparents had my picture of the dog hanging in their dining room for years.

You must have been a pretty warped kid, to draw a picture of a hanging dog....

[Dan Gould]

There is a pretty clear age difference on this one. Everyone that I know is at least a few years older than me seems to delight in the memory, while I don't have the slightest clue. My artistic career began and ended with one of these:

(My drawings weren't nearly as intricate as this one.)

[Hot Ptah]

Jon Gnagy was of a certain time. He was a fad for a while. He made a lot of average middle class kids out in America try drawing, when they would never have done so otherwise.

I remember his charts and explanations of perspective, how to draw something so it would look realistic off in the distance in the drawing. I couldn't do it, but it was interesting to read and think about.

His fashion sense was decades ahead of the time. I doubt that the Seattle grunge rockers of the early 1990s were directly influenced by his shirts, but they could have been!

[Brownian Motion]

Never really thought about it before, but this drawing

immediately made me think of crap like this:

Did Kinkade ("Painter of Light") learn his craft from Jon Gnagy?

Don't even mention those two in the same sentence. My introduction to Kinkade is a bad memory. About 15 year ago I was hospitalized with pneumonia and when I was well enough to stay awake for more than a 5 minute stretch I noticed these Kinkade prints on the walls. I had my wife take them down and turn them facing the wall. I had never heard of Kinkade but he made me nauseous.

Gnagy's work doesn't resemble Kinkade's. In the exaple you posted they both use the "S" shaped road, but that's a venerable artistic convention having nothing to do with style.

Gnagy, btw, looks like a pretty hip guy for a 1950s tv personality.

[Jazzmoose]

C'mon, Kinkade isn't that bad. He's no Keane, and he hasn't come up with that one recognizable classic like the guy that did Dogs Playing Poker, but give him time...

[A Lark Ascending]

As all artists in Britain had either been purged by the first Labour government or defected along with Philby, Burgess, McLean (but not Blunt), we imported an Australian to teach us:

Amazingly I noticed a new Rolf Harris learn to draw partwork in a newsagent today!

Edited March 21, 2009 by Bev Stapleton

[Uncle Skid]

Don't even mention those two in the same sentence. My introduction to Kinkade is a bad memory. About 15 year ago I was hospitalized with pneumonia and when I was well enough to stay awake for more than a 5 minute stretch I noticed these Kinkade prints on the walls. I had my wife take them down and turn them facing the wall. I had never heard of Kinkade but he made me nauseous.

Gnagy's work doesn't resemble Kinkade's. In the exaple you posted they both use the "S" shaped road, but that's a venerable artistic convention having nothing to do with style.

I guess I should have posted a couple of ;) (winky dinks?? )... I was (mostly) kidding around. Artistic conventions or not, I do see some (superficial) similarities.

Sorry to bring back a bad memory!

[Chuck Nessa]

Sorry to bring back a bad memory!

Just don't make a habit of it!

[fasstrack]

Wow. The sketch pad. The 'beatnick' beard. The smock. The sniffing blow on air, and then the bust by officer Joe Bolton. (OK, I lied about the last one )

No, I never drew the assignments, but I was a young aspiring visual artist and stayed so until around 14, when already into music. Music won, obviously. But that was a great show.

There was a guy on cable in the 90s with a painting show. Anyone remember him? Beard (must be a law to have one playing artists. Kirk Douglas in 'Lust for Life'....), curly hair, wild-eyed look and a voice like Selma Diamond pissed at her kid. He looked like he needed a serious infusion of Zoloft.

'I knew John Nagy. Senator----you're no John Nagy.... '

Edited March 22, 2009 by fasstrack

[PHILLYQ]

I remember the John Gnagy show- my sister would sleep late on Saturdays, but she never wanted to miss Gnagy, so I would wake her up every Saturday to watch it. When the theme music started she and I would dance around the living room!