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Certain people and certain teachers make big impressions on you. Jack Leynwood was one of my teachers at Art Center that was influential to me as an artist and a young boy. Let met explain.
Long before I attended art school I put together model planes, boats and cars. Most of the kits I used were Revell and on those boxes were painting by Jack Leynwood. It was solely based on those paintings that I decided which kit to buy. The artwork fired up my imagination and my hopes that I could duplicate the look Jack so deftly painted on the cover with the model inside. It is one of my childhood’s warmest memories and Jack was responsible for that.
When I took Jack’s class and realized who he was I was enthralled. The thing I liked the best about Jack was his demonstrations of how to paint with gouache which was his medium of choice. He painted clouds, skies, planes, cars, trees all there right in front of us like a magician with a magic wand, although he was using a paint brush probably a series 7. Because of Jack I still have a love of painting skies, the way colors blend into each other to form clouds is still a fascination for me. Illustrators like Jack go unnoticed to the public during their lifetime because of the low profile and the area of work they choose. I have no doubt that Jack was just as influential in many ways as Peter Maxx was to a generation of 60’s hippies.
I recently came across this article about Jack and I am reposting it today in tribute to a true blue-collar working-class genius of an artist, and a man whose enthusiasm and warm sense of humor still sticks with me today decades after he stood in front of my class weaving his magic.
Jack Leynnwood–Illustrator
My Favorite Jack Leynnwood Stories
Those of you who know who Jack Leynnwood was…or more fortunate yet, those who had Jack as a teacher–know that he was not only a major force in 20th-century illustration, but also a great teacher and a genuine “character.” For the uninitiated, let me just say Jack was responsible for hundreds of illustrations, mostly “hardware” based, for everything from plastic model kits to movie posters. If you ever drooled over those fantastic Revell plane and ship boxtop paintings–that was Jack.
Though Jack left a permanent imprint on my life, I didn’t know him well. I only had one unforgettable class with him. I leave it to another, his student and long time friend, Michael Boss, to give Jack and his career the full treatment they deserve. Don’t miss it.
I was fortunate to take Jack Leynwood’s marker-comp class at Art Center College of Design. Jack had been teaching at Art Center for a long time. The school began as a commercial art college in downtown Los Angeles. By the time I blew into town–the late 1970s–it had moved into spacious new quarters in the Pasadena hills. The new school had plenty of seats to fill. From a small, fiercely competitive illustration school, Art Center expanded to include photography, industrial design, and fine art. During the years I roomed with full-time Art Center students I heard many tales of practical old-timers butting heads with the new “artsy” teachers.
Jack was one of the old-timers. He wore the badge with pride. Short, feisty, and bursting with energy, Jack reacted to critics of his “old-time” methods by giving them more of the same and then some. He knew he was too good and too tough to be “eased out” like other oldsters had been. So he made a point of tweaking artistic noses at every opportunity.
Jack protested loudly that he was only in the field for the money. Some facts bear this out. He never saved originals (“Aaaah, I didn’t need ’em.”). He filled his spare time with his “true” loves (horses, flying, music, collecting Jaguar cars). But Jack’s zeal to do the best possible work and his dedication to teaching his students to do the same… these suggest that his tough-guy routine was at least partly an act. And Jack had acting in him. One of the delights of having a class with Jack is that he always gave great theater.
Jack was short and wiry. He looked like an ex-bantamweight boxer, which someone told me he had been. Whether lecturing or conversing, he spoke with a rat-a-tat cadence that reminded one of classic James Cagney. He liked to tell stories. Friends who know me have heard these stories a thousand times, but I offer them to the rest of you give you a tiny hint of Jack’s style.
Hardly a class went by without Jack reminding us he wasn’t teaching Art. “This is illustration,” he’d say, “this isn’t Art.” One memorable evening a student’s comment set him off. He rattled off his reply in a single breath, talking so fast it sounded like a single word.
“We’re not talking Art here! I do Illustration, I don’t do Art! You wanna do Art, you wanna go to Otis [a rival art school] and sit in the lotus position and throw bananas at the canvas and call it Art, go on! Go right ahead! I’ll be laughin’ all the way ta the bank! Laughin’ all the way ta the bank!”
Jack had been in World War II. After the war he had used the GI Bill to pay for art school. That was the beginning of his illustration career. Once he reminisced about one of his first jobs. “It was for a nudist magazine, you know? I was an airbrush artist. A photo retoucher. Now back in those days there were things you couldn’t show in a magazine, you know. If you sent ’em through the mail you could get thrown in jail. That’s what they hired me for. They’d give me a stack of photos of naked people and I’d airbrush ’em out. That’s how I spent every day, day in and day out–airbrushin’ ’em out, airbrushin’ em out.
“Then one day the boss comes in and he says, ‘Hey, Jack! The postal regulations have changed! We can show that stuff now!’
“‘Oh, God,’ I says, ‘That means I’m out of a job.’
“‘No, you’re not!” the boss says. ‘Make ’em bigger, Jack! Make ’em bigger!'”
Jack’s attitudes of decorum were old-fashioned as well. If a class were all men, he was one of the boys, boisterous and raunchy (though always in an old-school way. Jack was neither a heavy-duty cusser nor a dirty talker). Let a woman join the class and Jack became a perfect gentleman, soft-spoken and deferential. He wouldn’t dream of speaking to a girl as openly as he would to a guy.
One of my classmates was a quiet, attractive Korean girl. Stereotypically demure, she didn’t talk much and giggled self-consciously when she did. One night Jack had brought in a nude male model so we could practice idealizing the figure. Jack wandered around the room critiquing us. He stopped by the Korean girl and nodded.
“That’s pretty good, that’s pretty good,” he said, “but you’ve got the legs too short. The illustration figure is usually divided in half at the–” he made a vague gesture in the direction of the model–“at the, uh, the package.”
The girl looked blankly up at Jack.
“The…package?”
“Yeah, uh, you know, the upper body and the lower body are about the same length in an llustration figure, and the dividing line is, uh, the package.” None of us had ever seen Jack sweat. We were loving this.
“But what do you mean, the package?” the girl asked, still confused.
This time Jack made some very vague motions about his own midsection. “The, the package, you know…the middle of the–”
“Oh!” The girl’s eyes lit up and she exclaimed at the top of her lungs,. “I get it! You mean his COCK!”
Jack turned ten shades of red and for once was speechless. “Uh, yeah, yeah,” he mumbled, “yeah, that’s it.”
Jack was famous not only for the quality of his paintings, but the speed with which he painted them. Once I did a storyboard for a movie-poster agency. A gorgeous little gouache on the wall caught my eye. It depicted an aircraft carrier at sea. I immediately recognized it as Jack’s work. The art director told me Jack had done the painting for a presentation (I think it was for The Philadelphia Experiment, but I no longer remember). The art director liked it so much he asked Jack if he could keep it and Jack of course said yes. The a.d. told me a great story.
Jack had painted the finished poster art for Airport ’77. In the movie a jetliner crashes and sinks to the bottom of the sea. The poster showed the airplane balanced at the lip of an underwater crevasse. The client loved the painting, but suggested that Jack add more rocks and rubble around the nose to emphasize the force with which the plane had hit the ground. Jack agreed and took the painting home to retouch.
First thing next morning Jack was back with the corrected painting. The client went off delighted. But the art director was puzzled, for he’d noticed several other small details had changed too. He took Jack aside. “Jack,” he said, “that isn’t the same painting you brought in yesterday, is it?”
“Naah,” Jack shrugged. “Puttin’ that stuff in was too much trouble. I just painted the thing over.”
That’s Jack Leynnwood in a nutshell.
The take away here for me is sometimes you don’t realize how great or influential your teachers or mentors are until their gone and you have someone else point it out to you. In my case everytime I put brush to board or digital brush to electronic surface Jack Leynwood is looking over my shoulder saying, “loosen up young man, have fun it’s only painting”.
Janet Hamlin said:
Thank you for sharing this. I had Jack too, back in 1986, marker comp class. He was both a character and excellent instructor, as you describe so well here.
Illustrators Journal said:
Thanks for responding Janet. I had his marker class as well. Awesome guy and techniques. I did marker comps for years when I worked in agencies. Thanks to Jack it got me a bunch of work storyboarding commercials.
Come back soon I’ll be profiling other great teachers in the future.
Lon
Ted Mayer said:
I had Jack in the late sixties early seventies. I am still in awe of him. Thanks for sharing.
Illustrators Journal said:
Ted,
Thanks for responding back. Glad you like the post. AC grads should stick together, huh? Come back every now and then, I plan to highlight other great teachers as well.
lon
Wendy All said:
Jack was the first teacher at Art Center, other than George Hanft to help me understand that a good illustrator, like a good electrician, takes the craft seriously but does not take himself (or herself) so seriously. I was at Art Center when it had just moved to the new campus (1979 – 1982) and there were too many teachers that treated commercial art like some precious commodity, and like they were god’s gift to the school. Jack used to sit and have coffee with us and tell us stories about World War II. When he taught markers, he’d say, “You understand perspective – an ellipse never looks like a football, it’s a scientific fact.” I think you could have filmed Jack and taught the world how to do comps, he broke it down, deconstructed it, and it stayed with you. He was one of my best Art Center experiences.
Ben Bensen III said:
The main reason I stayed at Art Center…
Some former students from ACCD and I got into a discussion about teachers on Facebook when I mentioned how Jack helped get me a job at General Dynamics in Pomona one year out of school. There is so much to tell, I don’t think there is enough room here to tell it. I own a Jack Leynnwood and though I never had the guts to ask him to sign it, you’d know immediately that it was his! Once, he conducted another class in between his daytime and evening class to correct one of my original paintings for an assignment. He asked me if I was interested in bringing back to class the model F6F I had built especially for the assignment and asked the ten or so students if they would like to return after his dinner break to see him “fix” my illustration. He said that if Ben doesn’t mind me painting over the original as an added lesson, we can extend the class. Everyone showed up one hour later to see Jack completely change my piece. When it was finished, ( it took all of about two hours maybe less ) we all stood there agape! Jack profusely apologized for making so many adjustments. That is just one of many stories I can share with you about Jack. He was never afraid to expose his artistic flaws to anyone because he knew pulling out the paints and demonstrating was the best way to teach visual learners like us. More than likely, there weren’t too many flaws to begin with. Jack was the best.
Christopher Paris Lacson said:
THANK YOU FOR THIS! I loved Jack’s class MOST. This is wonderful to find.
TexanForever said:
I was an artist and “checker” in Northrop Aircraft’s art department for about five years back in the ’50’s and interacted with Jack on a daily basis. I was fortunate enough to get one of his seascapes that he was discarding before doing a larger one, and still have it.
A rendering he did of an F-89 was so realistic I first thought it was a photograph. He was the best.
Jack was also a colossal prankster often injecting nudes or dirty words into his work when he thought he could get away with it. An example was when he was asked to do an 8,1/2 by 11″ rendering of an F-89 sitting on the tarmac. He did it beautifully and in detail, right down to the tiny almost unreadable lettering on the tires. But instead of saying Goodyear it said “F–k You.” The president of Northrop was so delighted with the illustration he asked the photo department to blow it up to mural size to serve as a backdrop behind the Hawthorne headquarters entrance lobby desk. … Jack was soon called to the president’s office for his periodic firing. But he never stayed fired for long because he was too good to lose.
Another time he was to render an F-89 making a low pass over a choppy sea. It was beautifully done but if you looked carefully you could find in the background the waist and legs of a nude female who had just dived into the water. He got chewed out for that one, too, but easily took it out. I still have the preliminary he made for that one, unfortunately without the nude.
Jack was also a “player.” He had a photo album of close-up shots he had taken of, shall we say “lady parts.” You can guess how he got them. He sometimes discussed with us the finer details (pros and cons) that made some more attractive than others.
Jack always loved hearing or telling a good joke, usually dirty. We also had a bunch of ex-Disney artists in the department who were wildly funny and creative. When Jack would get started with those loons we were all kept in stitches. Somehow we managed to get quality work done and meet our deadlines.
I miss Jack and those zany days.
Illustrators Journal said:
Those are very funny stories. Being a student of his I was in awe, especially since the models I bought as a kid had Jack’s illustrations on them. Awesome guy!
Gary Weiss said:
I had Jack for marker class back in the early 80″s.. He was a fun source of inspiration.
Demo’s and Demo’s along with the those stories . I knew I had an incredible teacher so I stayed focused and learned as much as I could. His class served me well. Between my illustration work and teaching I did a lot of storyboards and comps for advertising agencies. I still own one of his Airport 77 movie posters.
Amazing talent and a giving teacher. You could tell he loved his craft along with teaching .