Tuesday, September 19, 2006

The Crowd Pleaser

Frank McCarthy, the artist who was called upon to render a realistic picture of the crucial training-camp grudge fight for [author Bill] Cox's story, had only the experience of a few informal boyhood fights in Scarsdale, New York, to give him proper background.

"In my teens I was mostly a sailor," he recalls. "I took part in a lot of races and I sketched and painted everything I saw. After studying at the Art Students Legue and Pratt Institute I worked as a messenger boy and apprentice artist and gradually moved up to illustration.

"Then I made a 14,000 mile trip around the country, taking photos and sketching - all the way from New Orleans to California, Lake Louis to Yellowstone, and Montreal to Florida. The pictures and drawinga are invaluable to me now in my work.

"But I guess I owe my career to my grammar school, a progressive place where they taught me to print, not write. Somehow that got me started drawing. Furthermore, we never were made to study, so I had plenty of time."


From Collier's Credits, May 27, 1955

4 comments:

  1. Anonymous10:27 AM

    Leif,

    Great entry!

    Do you have a larger scan of "The Only Game in Town"?

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  2. I'm very happy that you're enjoying this week's scans, Joe. You can find full size versions of all these images in my Frank McCarthy Flickr set. Just click on the "All Sizes" tab above each image and choose the largest size. ;-)

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  3. I'm really enjoying your blog, Leif!

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  4. Hey, that's great to hear, Mike - thanks for commenting!

    ReplyDelete