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My father admired artists who drew what they saw, and drew it well. He was particularly interested in this little-known and probably even less appreciated group of American realists called, sometimes derisively, the "Ash Can School."

"THE ASHCAN SCHOOL AND REALISM" is a term paper he wrote at the University of Rochester in 1967. I recall that it got a "B."

Warren E. Saul (1921-1996): An Appreciation

by Andrew W. Saul

Some people read while they wait. My father sketched.

Constantly.

For over 20 years, Warren Saul kept a daily self-illustrated diary he called "Sketchnotes." It ran to some 55 volumes, including many thousands of quick sketches, comments, and watercolors on all conceivable topics. His notebooks at times are reminiscent of an almost Leonardo DaVinci-like rambling, but entirely serious visual inquiry into the world around us. Sometimes, the drawings are just stream-of-consciousness cartoons done while my Dad sat at the kitchen table, at a meeting, or in a waiting room. He sketched from his car in a parking lot, or at a stop light or drive-up window. I like these the best. They are his take on his own life, seen through his own eyes.

My father also produced a considerable number of more formal watercolor, acrylic, or oil paintings. I think his best work may have been his quick watercolor sketches. These never took him longer than about 20 minutes, usually much less. Most of his watercolors are copies of, renditions of, or tributes to the work of his favorite masters. Chief among these would be the French and American impressionists. He was especially keen on the circa 1900 American "Ashcan School" of artists who liked to draw just about anything, and did.

Just like Pa. He would sketch what he saw, sketch what he thought, and sketch what he read. His work constitutes a slice of American life, from the start of the second World War until 1996. Most of the work published here is from the last twenty years of his life, a prolific period indeed.

A Boy of Summer

Like so many other boys, Warren E. Saul wanted to be a big-league baseball pitcher, and he came half-way close to making it. When still a teenager, he played semipro, pitching for a farm team in the NY Yankees organization. He tried out for the Yankees, but his fast ball wasn’t fast enough for the majors. But he did all right in the minors. Dad’s greatest boys-of-summer moment was probably when he struck out Bobby Brown, twice in one game. Bobby Brown went on to become the president of the American League. Dad went on to become an artist.

While baseball's loss may ultimately have been our gain, my father had a pretty humble beginning to his art career: he was a sign painter during the depression years of the late 1930's. He once had a job lettering a set of display windows for a local merchant. After he’d been outside on the job for a while, there was some kind of disagreement about payment, and the store owner said he would not pay. My father finished the job anyway. Now you are going to think this is a holier-then-thou story, but it is not. My father intentionally had used water-soluble paint, and the first time it rained, the lettering washed off in a blurry slurry of color.

After enlisting for service in WW II, he rose to the rank of sergeant. Twice. The first time he was promoted, he was AWOL, on the train to New Jersey to see his first-born child without a pass. When he got back, they cancelled his promotion. He made sergeant again before war’s end. After honorable discharge, he became a draftsman. With variations on this theme, he would continue so until his retirement in 1986. He called this "tight" work, and though he was a fine illustrator, he did not especially enjoy industrial drawing. He preferred to paint, fast and loose, often dispensing with a brush altogether and using only a palette knife. Or, he would make a quick line drawing somewhere, probably on his lunch hour, and later add watercolor to it at home. His Spartan ground-floor studio at our home was also known as "The Kennel," because the family dog slept there at night. You have not lived until you’ve experienced the combined scents of turpentine and wet dog.

Life With Father

Well I remember our usual wretched snowy Rochester winters. At times, Pa took the bus to work, and had a short walk from the bus stop to our house. Half way home from the bus stop, there was a city sidewalk plow, really a tractor with an oversized snowblower in front, that had been clearing the walk of at least two feet of new snow. The operator was trying to clear a stick or ice chunk from the blades with his heavily booted foot. The only problem was that the fellow had left the machinery running, and it was stronger than he thought. It took the end of his foot clean off, boot and all. There was blood gushing everywhere, scarlet spatters all over the white snow. Pa never missed a step. Instantly, he grabbed the man, pushed a big handful of snow onto the wound, and held it there. He carried the fellow to the nearest house, a two-family orange brick apartment. He pounded on the door, an old man opened it, and in they went, blood and all, all over the man's carpet. An ambulance was called. The man lived. I never found out what happened to the man’s toes. Dad was great in a crisis.

He was also frugal. Not as much so as my mother, but he certainly took runner-up honors. When I was a kid, my Dad used barn paint on our house because it was a buck cheaper per gallon and, he believed, longer lasting than regular house paints. We had the only barn-red house in the neighborhood, and maybe even the city. Pop also made a large wood and metal star to display on our white front door at Christmas time. He painted it with the red barn paint, too. Imagine, if you will, the overall patriotic effect of a bright-red house, with a bright red star on the door . . . during the post-McCarthy era. Dad (who was fortunately well-known as a solidly American WWII veteran) finally realized the humor of the whole thing, and painted a one-inch green border around the star.

In addition to when he was 16 feet up on an extension ladder, I watched him paint a lot. It was not because I was a dedicated, precocious observer. It was due to the fact that Pa painted practically all the time. He sketched while in church. He drew after (and during) meals. He painted signs and posters for charities and civic organizations, always free of charge. He lettered trucks for friends and neighbors. He also taught mechanical drawing for a time, briefly at the college level and even more briefly in high school. As a father with a wife and three sons, he went back to school and earned a master’s in art history.

Middle-Aged College Man

When my father was a 41-year old undergrad at the University of Rochester, I went with him on a geology class field trip to Jaycox Run in Geneseo, NY, to dig fossils. I was 7. What a crushing bore that was, until one of his classmates dug up a trilobite. Whoo hoo. I also went to his graduation. The commencement speaker was a down-and-not-even-governor-of California Richard Nixon.

Pa worked hard at the U of R, where he felt somewhat outclassed. He often was. I remember how hard he worked. He illustrated his own classroom notes so he could understand things visually. For his term papers, he worked even harder. His handwriting was exemplary, and yet he typically paid a typist to ensure a proper final version. At the “brain factory,” as he liked to call “The University,” Warren Saul earned a lot of C-plusses and B-minuses. His exam books, all of which he kept, show that he was no scholar. But he did surely become one.

After earning, and I do mean earning, his BA in Geography, he went on to complete a Masters in Art History. My mother never wavered from maintaining her view that he did that to one-up her. Mom had been a teacher, and had a BA in History from Montclair State in NJ. She taught us the Montclair State fight song when we were toddlers. If Montclair is ever playing any other team on the planet, I will root for the other team. Nothing personal, of course.

For one shining moment, my father rose spectacularly above academic mediocrity. He was writing a paper on Rembrandt’s “Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp.” He would later cartoon-ize this famous painting at my request, and make it into the comical cover illustration for my second book, Paperback Clinic. It was a joke that almost no one ever got . . .except Pa and me. But anyway, Pa had a flair for the thorough, if not for the dramatic. He decided to check and see if Rembrandt got it right. So, Pa arranged to attend a human cadaver dissection at U of R’s medical school. He gowned up and watched closely. Rembrandt was right: there are two sets of arm tendons, and the anatomy is accurate. However, he wrote, Rembrandt was not accurate in his portrayal of the appearance of the dead body. The color and, well, “lifelikeness” of the cadaver are artistic license. My Dad was first to verify the one, and comment on the other. He aced his paper.

Then he had nightmares for months.

Maturity and Some Immaturity

For a consummate artist who could discern two dozen different shades of blue, Pa had incredibly bad taste in wardrobe. Oh, he could put on a dark suit and do the Kodak thing OK; it’s what he wore when he was not at work that was enough to give Calvin Klein a coronary. He would wear plaids with checks, bright red pants with bright blue jackets, and brazenly loud bow ties with anything. The most outrageous outfit he ever wore, in my opinion, was his pajamas. My mother liked to sew. She was not particularly good at sewing, but made up for it with sheer inventiveness. Inventions are not always successful, my father the patent draftsman would tell you, but that does not stop inventors. Neither did such constraints as good taste stop my parents. When my mother made my Dad terry cloth pajamas, she must have been low on material. The pajamas turned out Bermuda-shorts length, with wild, patterned green pockets cut from an entirely a different fabric. Perhaps those pockets were not quite big enough to hold volume one of Encyclopedia Britannica, but it would have been a near thing. The worst part of it was that Pa absolutely loved them, and to prove it, wore the pajama pants in public. No, that was not quite the worst part; this was: he took me with him. When I was in 9th grade. To the neighborhood public library. Where my friends were.

I knew what was coming but was powerless to prevent it. The man whose best-known family phrase was, “Don’t talk while I’m interrupting” was not to be dissuaded by the likes of me. Off we went to the Charlotte Branch of the Rochester Public Library, me hunching way, way down into the foam front seat of our sea-green 1960 Chevy.

When we got to the library parking lot, I deliberately dragged behind, as far as humanly possible. It was looking good: I was 30 feet back now as we approached the front double doors. Up the steps he strode; back on the sidewalk I slowly slunk. He opened the door, and in full view of the world, called back to me in his never-soft voice, “C’mon, Andrew!”

Oh good grief. I followed him in and yes, right at the first lobby table were several of my friends. My memory blanks after that. I understand that is what post-traumatic stress can do.

When I was a boy I was infamous for waking up as early as 2:30 AM on Christmas morning, and almost never later than 4 AM. As my Dad would be up past midnight decorating, he was for some reason not fully appreciative of my enthusiasm. As the decades and I had a family of my own, Pa started waking up earlier and earlier on Christmas morning, just as I had in my youth. It got so that he and my mother would open their presents Christmas eve. They simply could not wait. There is something rather charming about that.

Pa loved the music and clowning of Spike Jones. He did a remarkably good impression of Peter Lorre (“My Old Flame”). A natural born master of ceremonies, Pa could tell a good joke, or a bad one, and get good audience response. Once in a while he took center stage at home, although it was crowded under that spotlight with my brothers and me. The best mealtimes were when he told stories about being in the Army.

And yet this is the man who studied portraiture with Stanley Gordon, renowned painter of Popes and presidents.

The Measure of a Man

Most of Warren Saul's professional life was spent behind a drawing board at Eastman Kodak Company. He executed many, many patent drawings during this time. Although patent illustrators are not allowed to sign their work, Pa did so anyway. He used Morse code, and concealed a "W E Saul" into each drawing's broken shading lines. So, if you really want to, you can go to Washington and find just which ones he did.

Before and especially after his retirement in the mid 1980s, Dad did many art lectures, free of charge, for churches and clubs. He usually talked about the architecture of the building the group was gathered in. Pa could tell you the construction date of any private or public building to within five years either way. He was never wrong.

Over time, these lectures turned into live how-to demonstrations. Pa insisted that to know how to paint, you first have to know how to draw. All the while explaining what he was doing and why, Pa would paint a picture in less than half an hour. His favorite subject? The TITANIC leaving on its maiden voyage from Southampton. He was very interested in ocean liners. This is likely not only because he was a boy during their heyday, but also because the burning wreck of the MORROW CASTLE was beached within an easy walk of his New Jersey home when he was only 13.

I always knew my Dad was a great artist, but I did not know why until I took art history at Brockport State. One day the instructor was showing the quick sketches of Rembrandt. I stared up at the lecture-hall screen, and then I saw it. By golly! My Dad had the same economy of line, the same lightning drawing speed as did the great master.

I told Pa this, and he of course dismissed it. But after that, when we visited, he brought me photocopies of all his new sketches. And what’s more, the man who so liked to quip “If I want your opinion, I’ll give it to you” actually did ask for my opinion on them. That is a moment we had for the ages.

For years, I remember Pa saying that when he retired, he was going to play golf every morning, and do paintings every afternoon. His surviving sketchbooks confirm that he kept at least the second part of that pledge to the letter. In later years, his hands and fingers were a never-ending sore spot for him, and after nine operations, he sold his golf clubs.

However, he never got rid of his pencils, brushes or pens. He kept right on drawing.

Of his thousands of surviving paintings and sketches, the online archive at www.doctoryourself.com consists mostly of my favorites that were small enough to scan into a webpage. For every item there, a hundred more are waiting to be seen.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

I would like to express my special appreciation to my cousin Earle Seely for kindly donating a number of my father's watercolors.

Andrew W. Saul

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