When I was a kid if you showed the slightest inclination to draw, your parents (unless they were too looped on diet pills or beer to notice you at all) would buy you a Jon Gnagy Learn to Draw Kit.
The kit was connected to a TV show of the same name. Pictured on the cover of the kit, and hosting the TV show, was a congenial goateed fellow in a lumberjack shirt named Jon Gnagy.
When I grew up, became an artists, and moved to New York city it was amazing how many of my fellow bohos had watched Jon and had been gotten a Learn to Draw set...just like me. It was liberating to have a relatively uncool thing like that in common.
As an aside there was a Lower East Artist/Art Dealer (Nature Morte gallery) named Peter Nagy who was related to Jon Gnagy himself.
Peter Nagy moved to Delhi in the late ninties and re-opened Nature Morte...which, the last time I looked, is thriving. Like his relative (Jon Gnagy) Peter Nagy was prescient...timing his entry in to the Indian art market previous to its boom. Which everyone by now has heard too much about.
Jon Gnagy had the very first syndicated television series in the history of the electronic medium. An artists invented the TV series as we know it today. And this month marks that series' 65th anniversary.
Happy Birthday Learn to Draw & Learn to Draw Graduates and Fans Everywhere!
Click on the Learn to Draw link up above for more......
And thank you Jon Gnagy - January 13, 1907 - March 7, 1981-
