Getting Spunky at the Edwardsville Arts Center
Paul Peters | Nov 16, 2009 | Comments 0
by Paul Peters
Somewhere in the back of your head years of advertising have probably embedded images of a turtle, a pirate or a donkey, with the words “Draw Me” above them.
Remember those ads for art correspondence schools?
The general idea was that you’d draw the turtle, donkey or pirate, send it in, and have your artistic talent assessed. If you showed some promise, you were invited to start paying for correspondence courses.
In the late 1960s and early 70s, Edwardsville artist Dave Thomas says he and his friends studying art at SIUE had a running joke about applying to art correspondence schools.
Thomas and his friend’s favorite subject was the donkey, known as Spunky. In 1971 Thomas says one of his friends, Mike Eckhard, took the joke a step further. He pasted Spunky’s image to an illustration board, and passed it around to about 16 other artists in the SIUE art department, who each did their rendition of Spunky.
Detail of EAC postcard, showing original "Spunky" image.
“I’ve just always thought it’d be fun to expand it,” Thomas says. “And then I thought why not do it as a fundraiser for the Edwardsville Arts Center.”
And so a few months ago, Thomas sent out postcards that looked like the original Spunky “Draw This” advertisements that appeared on matchbooks, inviting artists to participate in an exhibit whose only requirement was that the subject be Spunky.
“I’ve always liked the idea of just giving a group of artists an assignment that seems really simple and basic, that has so few limitations that it’s really wide open,” Thomas says. “There are no limits. Any size, any medium, it could be film, a written piece, a performance piece.”
The results have been interesting so far, Thomas says, and include a fashion designer’s Spunky-based dress, and former Edwardsville High School art teacher Dennis DeToye’s Spunky in the style of Andy Warhol and five other contemporary artists.
There’s an art history take with Spunky in the form of an ancient fertility god carving, and the pyramids.
Former SIUE professor Dan Anderson, who participated in the original challenge in 1971, has created a ceramic Spunky.
“It looks a little larger than life-size,” says Thomas, “a head of Spunky that’s three dimensional.”
Thomas himself has done what he calls “a painting of sorts.”
“It’s about 4 feet square – a fairly large painting of Spunky, and it’s intentionally a bad painting.”
Across the painting, he’s stamped the words “rejected” in huge letters.
So far, Thomas says he’s looking at 40 to 50 pieces in the exhibit, perhaps more, mostly done by local and regional artists.
The exhibit opens on November 20, giving the public time to view and bid on the pieces in the show. Bidding closes on December 4, when a reception party will be held at the Edwardsville Arts Center. The auctioned pieces will go to supporting the arts center.
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Filed Under: Art Exhibitions
