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Moments with John Paul Leon – Last

27 June 2021 by Rey Armenteros

The last time I talked to JP, it was probably August of 2020. I had heard him interviewed in a video about the greatness of Alex Toth. I had heard his voice, and it sounded terrible. I immediately thought it was related to the cancer. I sent him a message, telling him I had heard his interview about Toth. We set up to talk that weekend. He was explaining why his voice had changed so much. It had to do with an error in a throat surgery he had a couple of years back. It might stay like that for a long time. I asked him to let me know when he wanted to stop talking, but we talked for two hours and then made it a point to talk the next day. On Sunday, we talked for three more hours. I felt like I spent the whole weekend with JP.

We did talk about Toth, but we also talked about the lack we saw in current movies and TV shows, and the end of Game of Thrones. JP was critical about such things, as I was (because this is what happens when you go to art school). I think he had read some of the novels from A Song of Ice and Fire, and in there, travel across Westeros or other parts sometimes took years. It was a small detail, but he felt that with every new season of Game of Thrones, travel became easier, allowing great distances to be covered in one-day journeys. It cheapened it, somehow. He asked me what I thought, because he was not too convinced about the show anymore. I remember telling him Game of Thrones was not perfect, but now that it was gone, we had nothing.

We would return to the topic of comics, always comics. JP talked about page design and how the most important element of drawing was line. I agreed on some of these points, because they paralleled my own views about drawing. We didn’t agree about everything because we liked different types of comics. He didn’t like some of the work I admired in the alternative scene, and I was no longer into mainstream comics. But we had much in common, especially in thoughts about the old comics masters.

Before we hung up on the second day, I asked him about his dad, and he informed me that his dad had passed away a few years back. I told him I was sorry, and then I made some reference to the passing of my dad. He had remembered. But as we talked about it, I noticed we were not talking about the same thing. I was talking about my father, but he was talking about my step-father.

And that was when it dawned on me. I told him I had no idea my step-dad had died. He said he was sorry, and we both were at a loss for words. I told JP I had always thought I would talk to him again. I should have tried to reach out to him. And now it was all too late. It put a real damper on the last minutes of the conversation. JP felt bad to have brought me the news, and I kept telling him he had nothing to feel bad about.

A month or two later, I was looking at JP’s art online, and I got it in my head I wanted to catch up with the newest work. I read Batman: Creature of the Night, along with some of his shorter work, and then I read Winter Men once again. I was sending him messages, giving him my thoughts on his work, on how toward the end of Creature of the Night, his line got thinner. “Perceptive eye,” he shot back. He said he was getting into drawing what they call a dead line, which was the opposite of the full-bodied line he was known for. He explained that he had been looking closely at Al Williamson. I said I had just been looking at his Empire Strikes Back work.

I was trying to ask him when we would talk again. I really wanted to talk about his work. Not just Creature of the Night, but Winter Men, which I had always felt was JP’s masterpiece.

Back in the days when I first read it, I remember the delays and how those hiccups almost ruined the pacing of the Winter Men story. He and the writer had to make changes because they were getting less and less of a page count by the publisher. In those days, JP expressed his regrets, especially about the ending. When I read the ending the first time, I think I allowed for his feelings about it to color my own experience with it. I agreed that the ending was a bit thin and that the work was a flawed gem.

But my recent reading gave me a very different perspective of the book. Bret Lewis, the writer, was extremely talented. The two worked well together, and I recognized that from the start. But this time around, I found no flaw in that gem. It felt more like a story cycle than one epic story. One big story is what I assumed it was, but a story cycle might have been their intention all along when the series was supposed to be twelve issues. I wanted to ask him about that. I wanted to say a lot in our next conversation. But in those days, JP wasn’t up for talks on the phone. I waited, and in the meantime, I was sending him messages about how the Winter Men read so differently to me now, and about how it was a crime that that masterful work had not been made into a nice hardcover! There was so much I wanted to tell him.

I had also wanted to ask him what happened to my stepdad. I told my side of the family, and my brother and mom were shocked that he had passed away. It affected us, and it came with that finality that all future intentions have been swept away. And that is how it is with JP now that he’s gone.

In our last conversation, I did tell JP about how proud I was of him. He was the one that made it! Every semester, I would tell my art students about my cousin that worked for comics professionally. I always had at least one student interested in doing comics, and I would point them to JP’s direction. As I would tell my student, JP was not exactly famous in the comics industry, but he was a highly-respected creator, often lauded by his peers. I told him I was proud of him because he was doing such a stellar job of keeping the flame of artistic integrity. JP never settled for cheating the backgrounds or allowing a bad day to affect his work. “Once it’s in print,” he would say, “it’s there forever.”

And here we are. It was inevitable that I would get to the point where I cannot locate anymore memories. It is natural. Some of the memories are gone. I believe many of them are not. They are just mixed up with other memories. Memories seem to conflate, so that every time we played a role-playing game, the multiple instances come together. Yes, there was that time we brought the Platoon board game to JP and Alex’s house, and we played it. I can still see the scenario we played and how it was going. I think that game only happened once. Conquest of the Empire was another of those one-time playing sessions, and I have a strong recollection of how JP and Alex had painted the game’s ships with Jolly Rogers to include pirate vessels as an optional rule. Like I said, they were the most creative kids I knew — altering board game pieces and making their own rules. But how many times did we actually play D&D? How many times did the three of us sit down to draw characters or watch a movie on TV?

The moments that come out at you are the ones that stay because of something said or because of something that happened. I wish there were more. I will have to hold the ones that I have and keep them till the end. John Paul was a singular person that had touched my life and the lives of many, many others. My great friend and kindred spirit — you will be sorely missed.

Art by John Paul Leon

Art by John Paul Leon

Art by John Paul Leon

Art by John Paul Leon

Art by John Paul Leon

Art by John Paul Leon

Art by John Paul Leon

Art by John Paul Leon

Art by John Paul Leon

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The Tautology

22 December 2019 by Rey Armenteros

I found a list in a notepad. The first line read “One Day Long (312),” followed by “This is not an allegory (1-9).” It was like trying to figure out code. But I was the one that had made up this puzzle. And yet I couldn’t figure it out. I kept reading.

“Falling Again, Again.” “Orange Cola Blues.” I make laundry lists like this for snippets of ideas I have that I’d like to explore later. But I couldn’t get a handle on any of this.

I couldn’t read the next one because it was illegible, but the one following simply said “Microwave.” Then, it was another illegible word followed by Beyond, and then another illegible word — “Something Beyond Something.” I’d like to say it says people in both places, but I was not too sure.

Even so, it was riveting.

“Dressed in Blue Eye Shadow.” And then I stopped. That one gave it all away! They were the new titles of old poems I had reworked last year.

How could I forget this? It disturbed me. But I was delighted anyway, and I immediately wanted to seek these old poems out and get reacquainted with them.

I usually scratch out these scrawled reminders after they were resolved to avoid confusion later. I was about to put lines through these when I decided not to. I was going to find this again maybe next year, and the same mystery would unfold and lead me back to these poems once again.

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REMINISCING: THE OTHER SIDE

07 June 2017 by Rey Armenteros

Looking at old paintings and old drawings is a bitter-sweet pastime. On the one side, you’re reminiscing. In reliving the past, you enter the warm world of nostalgia. But on the other, those old works that once appeared so successful are successful no longer – or at least, not for the same reasons. This is actually the good news. Far worse is when the painting has something that was better than you remember it, making you feel good for a second (the sweet component to this subjective reality) but simultaneously making you question why you no longer paint in such a dynamic and charming way (the bitter).

There are “mistakes” I would gladly make today, if they could only look as good as the ones you are now beholding from some years back, old mishaps that seem to hit just the one right note today.

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REMINISCING: THE ONE SIDE

26 May 2017 by Rey Armenteros

It is only natural to look back at old art and find it subpar, but what happens when you conclude that it was better than you remember it? What happens when you look back at old artwork and find it in your honest assessments that you had deviated from something that was actually better?

When it happens to me, I wonder if I still have it in me on some one or two levels, if I can no longer draw that hand the way I thought I could, if my eye for color is softening. I wonder if I took the wrong turn back seven years ago, and it is now coming to haunt me. I hate feeling regret, but moments like these, it is unavoidable.

This sound like a warning, but I do feel old art should always be revisited, because it contains reminders of paths you had intended but left behind. When I look at these old images from Shinchon, Korea, I find a freshness and boldness that I have put up on the shelf as my art developed with the years. Reminders of freshness are beneficial later, when that is a trait you don’t even recognize you’re missing.

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REMINISCING: THE DISTANCE

15 May 2017 by Rey Armenteros

It was one of those garage moments wherein I was cracking open old boxes and dodging the welling dust to get at old memories. No matter how you cut it, looking at old artwork is asking for trouble. The excitement that comes with the curiosity, for me, usually mingles with confusion.

Here is one take on that confusion. It is rare when you look at the old drawings that you find exactly what you remembered. You are either going to wonder why you thought that drawing that was so good was good at all, or you’re going to look at certain mediocre pieces that actually had promise if not a certain something that “those old good ones” lacked.

This is good, you tell yourself, because this is the clarity of distance (the distance of time) making you see what should have been obvious. This is the same perspective you exercise when you put aside a painting for a couple of weeks and get enough distance to see it from a more objective position. You tell yourself this, and you uphold this fickle assessment as something inestimable.

 

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Another Living Room Moment

26 April 2016 by Rey Armenteros

Why show this? I don’t know. It was nothing more than me trying paraline perspective in a room in my dad’s home. I added my dad in the corner, but he’s not coming under the paraline rules, almost like an objective bystander. He’s an outsider, floating above the room, delineated by thick lines that no longer hold him together. Paraline, as a diagrammatic handling of reality, succumbs here to the standard rules of perspective, here and there, wherever I forgot the rigid rules. Theoretically, a paraline drawing can run forever, if you have enough drawing surface, like the diagrams in assembly instructions and eye trickery. I’d like to try this again and make it work this time.

SKINS 2_0008

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Pure Memory

08 January 2016 by Rey Armenteros

SKINS 2_0002

This is from pure memory, but what does that mean? To me, it could be something as simple as I got this out of my head. But since this is the way I always work, I know there are facets to it most of us take for granted. For example: This is a general memory from my dad’s living room, and there was no doubt a lamp where you see it, but if that lamp looked exactly like that one you see in the picture is highly doubtful. I had to make it up in most places because I simply do not recall. His face, on the other hand, is from whatever I could bring back from direct memory, which is also spotty. There are also points where this picture has taken embellishments because there comes a point to most paintings and drawings where you try to make it clearer or closer to the goal you set out for it.

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Image on Skin

21 August 2015 by Rey Armenteros

Here’s a recent image I made on an acrylic skin using acrylics. It came from memory, but it might be more accurate to say I made it up. It started with the vague memory of my father taking my brother and I to a claustrophobic apartment where an old couple lived. The layout of the spaces was strange and uncomfortable. I remember the TV set in the middle of the room touching everything with it’s light. The memory is tinged with an all-pervading feeling that I don’t have a word for. And it was a moment that had been absent of conscious recovery for a long time until I started thinking about it once again when working on my father’s commemorative paintings last year. The memory is what I started with. However, this clouded thing is what turned up.

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Dad Making Muscles

31 July 2015 by Rey Armenteros

Here’s a recent drawing done in acrylic, with before and after shots. It’s a memory of my dad clowning around. When I draw from memory like this, it’s like attempting to take a snapshot of something that was never captured before. I don’t use reference of any kind. I’m just trying to tap into something that still resides in memory.

I like the earlier phase, and sometimes it’s difficult to determine if pushing it would ruin the freshness it seems to have. In this case, I’m not sure which I like better. Though there’s something fresh about the earlier phase, I almost always note that my earlier phases do not bring out the forms to the degree I usually desire.

Dad (early)Dad Making Muscles

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Jury Duty Sketches

08 May 2015 by Rey Armenteros

The last time I was in Miami, I found some sketches in my mom’s garage, and they triggered the story behind a court case that happened over twenty years ago.

For two weeks, I was part of a jury on a heroine trafficking case. The police caught the defendants in a reverse-sting operation in New York City outside a Nathan’s. It was tried in Miami because the deal started there, if I remember correctly.

We weren’t supposed to talk about the case to anybody, including our fellow jurors. Fascinated by the tale being unraveled before us, I wanted to express it somehow and could only do it by taking my memories out of the courtroom and drawing them in my sketchpad during my lunch hour, and I suppose I wanted to use it (and notes I may have taken) for some future work that never came into being.

Our case ended in mistrial.

Scan 184 Scan 187 Scan 190

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