PEGGY MAGOVERN
	November 2003

by Peggy Magovern

I watched in unbelieving horror as my beautiful work of art came crashing to the floor. The sequence of steps in the unfolding disaster marched one after another in nightmarish slow motion. The heavy wooden framework that had been supporting my picture came crashing down, catching the corner of my drawing board, falling to the floor, and pinning me beneath it.

That drawing was the most important commission I ever worked on, and one of the largest. It was a 5’ X 7’ portrait of William Randolph Hearst’s mom, Phoebe Apperson Hearst. I had worked on this project for a month. All the laborious detail work on the hat, jewelry, etc. had been completed. But the entire piece was now full of deep gouges except for the face.

When you can’t do what you want
I struggled desperately to repair the wreckage. I thought that I could possibly fill in the gouges or erase them, but the scars in the paper were deep and permanent. Nothing I tried was in the slightest bit effective in repairing the damage caused by the fall.

Finally, in frustration, I sat down with a glass of wine and tried to achieve some altered state of consciousness through which any solution might come to me besides the obvious one of throwing the thing out and starting again at the beginning.

A conviction suddenly dawned upon me that maybe this was meant to be. I got some chopsticks from the kitchen and savagely gouged the paper even further. I then began to work some light pastels over and around the gashes, which created a cracked marble effect. The results turned out great! The gouges provided a refined texture that added a rich sense of elegance to the finished work.

My experience with the fallen picture illustrates a principle that I’ve incorporated into my own philosophy: When you can’t do what you want, you have to do what you can. And sometimes that turns out better than what you wanted. I tell my students:

“Don’t be afraid of anything that happens. Like life itself, art is a journey. Don’t be concerned. Enjoy the process. Be prepared to be ultimately surprised and delighted by where unplanned detours might take you.”

My portrait of Phoebe Apperson Hearst has been, and continues to be, the source of gratifying compliments. When people read the story in this article, it will be the first time that anyone will know how apparently random the process was that led to the painting’s marbled texture. I feel like I’m in a Paul Harvey article, “Now you know the rest of the story.”

Penciling from the beginning
My mother gave me my first pencil when my PJs still had an opening in the back. Both parents gave me full reign and encouragement to draw as many hours a day as I wished.

My initial experiences as a budding artist predate my earliest memories. A picture of me as a three-year old shows me earnestly doodling on a piece of paper. From the beginning my rest state seems to have been sitting with a pencil in my hand in front of a piece of paper, and using the one to put marks on the other.

As I grew older it didn’t matter where I was, whether riding in the back seat of the family car, in class before the teacher came, or in my room, I usually had a pencil in my hand and was busy creating art.

Perhaps a hearing problem that I’ve had from birth has contributed to the fact that during all of my life I have always enjoyed amusing myself in seclusion. But I never felt driven to solitude by feelings of inadequacy or by some sense that I didn’t fit in. Rather, I used these personal times to hone the skills that professional art requires.

Opening windows onto the world
Pencils have always been my art tools of choice. The fact that I only work in pencil places me in a different category from most artists since pencils often lack the reputation of being a serious medium for finished work.

The pencil’s status as an underrated medium is probably due to the high value our culture traditionally places on oil paintings. Watercolors have recently gathered momentum in California, but the colored pencil remains a poor relative, usually relegated to under-drawings, sketches, and studies in preparation for a final creation in oils or some other medium.

I work in pencils for a number of reasons: For one thing, the medium is very portable. Also, a pencil is the cleanest art tool to work with. Most importantly, perhaps, I originally got into pencil art because it is a dirt-cheap medium. When I was in school, equipment for oil paintings was so expensive that even the paint brushes were outrageously priced.

more than a thousand words
The greatest feature of being an artist is that it provides a way to visually communicate about things that I value in life. I have no great abilities as a writer or speaker, but I believe that my work sometimes speaks visually to people.

For example, I try to communicate through my art the beauty that I find in imperfection. Things do fall apart but from an artistic point of view they are often better for it because they become more interesting. For example, I saw buildings in Venice that had aged to the point of losing their original rigid architectural structures. Hard lines and straight angles had textured and weathered to a softened almost-organic beauty.

The aged, weathered face of an Inuit fisherman, for example, tells worlds about the sunshine, storms, gains, losses, hopes, and fears that fashioned the fabric of his difficult life.

Drawing my way into life
Almost everything I learned about art I learned through the point of a pencil. My passion and proclivity often propelled me to uncharted waters. When I was in High School, the art teacher told me, “I don’t have anything more that I can teach you.” And then she followed the admission with an astonishing proposal, “Would you like your own class?” So while I was still in high school I became an art teacher to my fellow students.

I entered college in the General Education program because I never had acquired any vision of art as a serious profession. In my final two years I changed my major to Studio Art, but nothing in any of those classes prepared me to make a living. I never learned anything about how to market my skills or how to present myself.

The challenge of penetrating the world of commercial art became even more serious when, at graduation, someone stole my portfolio, which contained all of my original art, right off the Dean’s desk.

In order to stay alive I became a dental assistant and was “down in the mouth” for several years. I actually enjoyed my professional life during this time, though my art was relegated to the status of compulsive pastime. I didn’t know what I was doing or where my life was going.

Everything changed one day when I was looking through a newspaper and saw a hand-drawn fashion illustration for an Oakland store. The thought, “I could do that,” suddenly entered my head. Through a series of remarkable circumstances, I actually obtained a position with that store and learned on the job how to design advertising and do Commercial Illustration.

Commercial Illustration was a more satisfying profession than Dental Assistant, but I still wanted to create fine art. I still had no clue about how to market my skills. I went to Carmel with one of my pieces one day intending to try to display it in a Monterey gallery, but ended up selling it to a guy on the street before I ever got to the first gallery.

Commercial success
I finally became Senior Illustrator for the Banana Republic catalog. I got the job because they wanted colored pencils, so it turned into a great fit and I won a lot of awards during my time with them. However, nobody knew who I was. I later learned that people would call Banana Republic and ask who I was but the people answering the phone were not permitted to give out my name.

I finally took the plunge into freelance and landed some great jobs. I created illustrations for Reader’s Digest, Sports Illustrated, Newsweek, Smithsonian, Wallstreet Journal, HBO, etc. People began to find out about my work, but I was still a nobody as far as name recognition was concerned.

Painting Phoebe
I’m finally realizing my dream of getting into fine arts and people are at last hanging my work on their walls. This is brand new to me and I’m excited about moving into my third career.

My greatest opportunity so far was a commission to do the portrait of William Randolph Hearst’s mother that I described at the beginning of the article. Phoebe Apperson Hearst was the grande dame who exercised the actual control over the Hearst family fortune until her death. She passed away in 1918 and left her magnificent estate to the county. A country club in Sunol was built on the property that she had owned. The marvelous estate house tragically burnt to the ground in 1969. In the rebuilding they wanted to show the history of the property and so in 1999 I was commissioned to do a portrait.

The unveiling was a wonderful black-tie event. When the drapery was removed from the portrait a murmur passed through the crowd. That was a defining moment for me.

Now I have begun to gain some recognition. For example, I did a portrait of Steve Young, which he said was the best picture ever done of him. The portrait was done for the Sports and Scholastics School Charity Program and auctioned off for a handsome price. I was glad when $6,000 of the money went to this worthy charity. I have done portraits for a number of people since, such as Mark McGuire, Bubba Paris, and Orlando Cepeda.

A fully detailed portrait takes me a month of uninterrupted work. Landscapes can take longer, but the joy is in the journey.

Trying to pass it on
I teach drawing to a number of people and love to hear them make comments about what they have learned. Sometimes they are amazed by what they are able to produce, because they never imagined the creative power they had in them. Some of my students are very talented and I look forward to seeing their work in the future.

It is gratifying to be able to impart knowledge to others and have their eyes light up when they see what they have done. I’ve heard them exclaim, “I can’t believe I did that!”

One of my students was at the unveiling of Phoebe Hearst’s portrait. She has been attending my class ever since I began teaching. Either I haven’t been teaching her very well or she loves the experience of learning with me.

Doing it my way
My many years of constant practice has been a developing love-affair with my pencils. They are capable instruments for producing expressions of profound thoughts and emotions — things far beyond the simple doodling that they are usually relegated to.

I’m really obsessed with the practice of my art. I had no professional instruction and so my only method of improving my abilities was to practice, practice, practice. Without a mentor I had no idea about techniques such as editing and twisting. I figured out what the rules were as I went along.

Now I’ve gotten old enough to relax about certain things. I find that as I start to get wrinkles I begin to do things like shopping and snow skiing at a more leisurely and satisfying pace. I am beginning to become more relaxed with my pencils, as well. Now that I’m old enough to know how to obey all the rules with confidence, I am discovering a new freedom to be more creative; I’m learning how to “color outside the lines” once in a while. My experiences as an artist just keep getting better and better.

My husband, Terry, is providing me the same enthusiastic support that my parents did when I was young. The best professional life for any person, I think, is when people gladly pay you to do the very thing that you would gladly do for free. I’m blessed!

Peggy Magovern is a pencil artist who specializes in drawing pictures and portraits.