This 14 x 20 painting of Len's longtime friend and business partner Richard (Mack) McDonald was done on a hard brown board with watercolor paint. Mack and Len met in Boston while Len was going to art school and Mack was working a construction job. As Len told me, Mack was up on scaffolding and Len was walking by with a portfolio under his arm when a curious Mack yelled down to Len "what ya got there?". Len had a female nude drawing from a live model and showed to Mack that led to beer.... Len and Mack continued on a lifelong friendship that had them go into business together harvesting Irish Moss seaweed from the shores of the Scituate area before WWll. Mack ended up a fighter pilot and was shot down in his P-51 Mustang in Germany and was a POW for some 18 months and liberated at the end of the war (there are 5 swastikas on the plane indicating 5 kills). Mack told me how he was a pow and was held on a German farmhouse and worked on the farm while in the first year of captivity. He became friendly with the family but things changed when he was transferred to a concentration camp. Mack would not talk about the camp and just shook his head and grimaced when I asked him. I knew by the look of horror on Mack's face to never bring this part of his life up again. It was a response that is not easy to forget. In the late 1990's Mack returned to Germany where they had found his P-51 Mustang buried in a swamp. Mack went back to the farm and they had a ceremony for him. Mack died in the summer of 2001 just a few months before Len. Len and I had visited Mack at their oceanfront Scituate home almost every year since I had married Mandy. Mack's widow Ellen let me take 3 paintings out of their seaside home in Scituate to be scanned. Ellen has since died, their home torn down and the paintings have gone to heirs unknown. this is one of my favorite Len Gorman paintings due to Len doing this for his friend and the significance of Mack's service to our country.
No comments:
Post a Comment