Painting Fine-Art Cartoons in Oils - Enchanted Images

as well as praising mine, was
too much to hope for. And as
I was to discover, I was lucky
to get a personal response
at all. Years later, Garé told
me Barks’s address had
somehow ended up on some
kind of newsletter sent out
to autograph hounds: The
text read something to the
effect of “Please write to Carl
Barks, the daddy of Uncle
Scrooge, and ask him for a
sketch. The poor old gent is
retired now and has nothing
better to do than write nice
letters to fans.” The Barkses
were inundated with fan
mail and had taken to using
form-letter replies. For all its
faults, my painting of “The
Good Artist” got me in the
door.
In the following year Another
Rainbow began publishing
lithographs from new Barks
paintings: “Sailing the Spanish
Main” in 1982 and “An
Embarrassment of Riches”
in 1983. Barks had sent me
miniature lithographs of
them, but there was no way
I could afford the full-size
lithographs – in 1982, while
supporting a wife and three
small kids, I quit my job as
a grave digger in a Medford
cemetery and enrolled in college,
no small feat for a kid
who had dropped out of high
school in the ninth grade. In
1983 I somehow managed
to scrape together enough
cash to purchase the first set
of Another Rainbow’s Carl
Barks Library, which reprinted
all of Barks’s Disney
comic stories as well as a fair
amount of information on his
paintings.
In 1983 I began to feel that
the hands of destiny were at
work. I had read enough of
Barks’s biography to realize
we actually shared some of
the same “roots.” I grew up
and lived in Medford, a small
town in Southern Oregon;
74
Left: A photo of Garé
and Carl Barks from the
Barks estate. This is
how the Barkses looked
when I knew them.
Opposite: A map of
Southern Oregon. Barks
was born in Merrill; I grew
up in Medford. When I
was 22, Barks retried to
Grants Pass, which is
where I had purchased
my first old comic, Uncle
Scrooge No. 9.
Barks grew up in Merrill,
which was a little over an
hour away to the east. Years
later I discovered that in the
1930s Barks had also struggled
to raise a young family
in Medford. The coincidences
kept piling up. I learned
Barks was retiring to Grants
Pass, a small town just 20
minutes north of Medford. A
few years before I had purchased
my first collectable
comic book – Uncle Scrooge
No. 9 – at small paperback
store in Grants Pass. In 1983
I worked part time at that
same store. My boss called
me: “Guess who just stopped
by to look at books?” Carl
and Garé Barks! It turned
out Garé read Harlequin Romance
novels by the bushel,
and the Barkses had stopped
by the shop to browse. Barks
mentioned he had a new
painting on the easel and
that when it was further
along, the shop owner could
come by to see it. Barks