John Updike's Early Years by De Bellis Jack;

Author:De Bellis, Jack;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lehigh University Press
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Formal Training

While Updike was still in kindergarten, his mother persuaded artist Clint Shilling, grandson of the town’s founder, Samuel Shilling, to provide painting lessons. A painter and sculptor, Shilling specialized in mural painting. He had done drawings based on his experiences in the Mexican border campaign of 1916–1917 against Pancho Villa, and during World War I. Shilling had earned an international reputation as an art restorer, and he worked on the renewal of the Reading Museum (SC 21). Since Clint Shilling lived across Philadelphia Avenue from the Updikes, they must have met informally many times. Updike honored him by describing one of his lessons to his “Kindergarten eyes” in his memoir and by noting his importance to his development in his philosophical poem “Midpoint” (SCn21; CP 66). Barbara Hartz felt that Shilling took Updike “under his wing” during his high school years and showed him his own “great big oils.”

Updike’s talent became refined under the tutelage of Carlton F. Boyer in Shillington High art class. Carlton Boyer had students work in different media, from charcoal to oils, but when he taught cartooning Joan Venne could see that Updike preferred to draw. Benny Palm explained that the teacher would bring Updike’s cartoons into class and “they’d do critiques and then he’d redo it.” Barbara Hartz thought that Carlton Boyer treated Updike “pretty special. I always thought, and Mr. Boyer too, that John was a very good artist.”

Notice of his talent spread beyond Berks County. According to Joan Venne, Updike had art shows “quite frequently” wherever Carlton Boyer had influence, such as Wanamaker’s Department Store, one of the first in the country to sponsor student art exhibits. Art students from the eleventh and twelfth grades took the train from Reading to see the shows, Joan Venne sometimes sitting next to Updike. Though Nancy March Le Van won the senior art award instead of Updike, she admitted that his cartoons were more deserving, and so did Barbara Palm, who insisted Updike’s “WAS the best.” He received “An Achievement Key” in Philadelphia on January 21, 1948. On February 15, 1950, he won an award for the best cartoon in the Scholastic Regional Exhibition of Art at Gimbel Brothers in Philadelphia. During this program he gave a talk about five distinctive types of art students.[12] Perhaps unsurprisingly, Updike was not just drawing, but painting in oils, putting into practice what he learned from Clint Shilling and Carlton Boyer.

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