The Clay, the Potter, and the Pencil

Dan Doriani: Hi, everyone, Dan here. This episode of Working is an especially visual one. I’ll be talking with a very accomplished artist who brought a lot of his work to our conversation. While I believe the audio-only version is still insightful, this episode is a great opportunity to find and subscribe to our YouTube channel at youtube.com/@centerforfaithworkstlouis. There you can watch the video of this episode and actually see the wonderful art we’re talking about. We’ll also link to the video in the podcast show notes. Enjoy the show.

Dan Doriani: Hello, and welcome to Working with Dan Doriani, a podcast where we explore faith, work, culture, and the way believers can make a difference in their corner of the world.

I’m delighted to have as my guest today Ron Adair, whom I’ve known for about a year now. Ron is an artist and illustrator. He’s also a lay theologian and a believer, and he has worked since he was ten years old, when he got his first commission. He has been a professional artist since the day he finished college. For many years he worked with his identical twin brother, Don, who is with the Lord now. They worked together in Dallas, in the same shop, in the same office, for 22 years—

Ron Adair: Yep.

Dan Doriani: —and gave each other encouragement and good-hearted critique. Artists aren’t always the most publicly known people, but Ron’s work has been seen by millions on stamps, presidential portraits, book covers, and baseball cards. We’ll get to some of those, and you’ll get to see some of them. Ron, is that a reasonably accurate introduction? What would you like to add about the life of an artist?

Ron Adair: Well, you hit it. My twin brother, Don, and I were very blessed to have each other. He was always a good source to go to, because sometimes I’m not a good enough sheriff to police my own work. You need that extra set of eyes to look at something and point out where you have a blind spot. So we returned fire in a fraternally acceptable, nonviolent way—most of the time. It was a great benefit having Don there.

Dan Doriani: There’s nothing like having a good partner in the enterprise.

Going Independent [02:45]

Dan Doriani: We’re going to get to your artwork really fast. But your career required some faith. When you start off as an artist, most people start by illustrating soup cans, or working for grocery stores or insurance agencies—commercial art.

Ron Adair: Right.

Dan Doriani: You’ve done some of that. But you launched into independence, and that takes confidence and faith. Tell us how you got started. There are probably some people who would like to get started, whether in art or something else.

Ron Adair: As I’ve looked back at a number of illustrators who did magnificent work for years before I got into this, it’s very common for a guy fresh out of school to work for someone as an employee for a while. You come out of school with some skills, and they’re not bad at all, but you need to work some of the bugs out of what you’re doing. School is one environment; getting out into the world is a different standard. Things that might have looked good in a classroom at Washington University wouldn’t necessarily be viewed the same way. So you have to spend some time on that, and that’s what happened to me.

In my last semester at Wash U, I was offered a job with Warner Bros.–Seven Arts in California because of some of my work they had seen. Thankfully I didn’t go that route. That would have been a completely different life, although something in me was drawn to it. But the Lord helped direct me away from that. I grew up in West Texas, 20 miles from where the Bushes lived, interestingly enough. After school I went to Dallas and hooked up with a large publishing company, where I worked for a little less than two years. They had a number of nationally distributed publications, so right out of school I was able to work out some of the bugs and deficits in my approach, and my artwork got widely disseminated.

I knew long-term that I didn’t want to stay at that publishing company. Not long after some of my work had gotten exposure, I started to get phone calls—

Dan Doriani: And that led to independence.

Ron Adair: Those phone calls picked up steam: Coca-Cola in Atlanta, a couple of airlines, and other things. I knew I wanted to do that work, and a time came when I really felt I needed to launch out on my own. So that’s what I did. And it does provide fuel for your prayer life to do something like that.

The Artwork [05:40]

Dan Doriani: That’s good—launching independently into the world. Why don’t we get right into some of your artwork? I know most of our listeners aren’t viewers, but if you have access to our YouTube channel, you might want to watch this part instead of just listening. We’re going to hold up some artwork, and Ron, you gave me the privilege of holding up something first. I’ll start with something a little smaller. This is a book cover for an author I know and respect, Gene Veith, who wrote The Soul of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. There’s a wardrobe with a lion peeking out of it. Guess who drew that? You did.

Ron Adair: Yep.

Dan Doriani: I’ll run through a few, and you comment as you wish. We’ll insert a picture of Charles Spurgeon. Everybody’s seen the same photo of Charles Spurgeon, as if there was only one ever taken. But there was a biography of Spurgeon, and somebody decided a pencil drawing would be more interesting.

Ron Adair: Yes. The publisher, Banner of Truth, wanted to do a second printing and upgrade the cover. I hope my drawing of Spurgeon was an upgrade; I think they viewed it that way. They thought artwork would be better than the photograph they’d used, and I was pleased to be able to do it.

Dan Doriani: Speaking of pencil work, that’s what drew me most powerfully to your work. I met your work in a very different way—through an illustration I used in a sermon about Albert Pujols, whom you’ve drawn several times. In case anybody doesn’t know, Albert Pujols is one of the great hitters of all time in Major League Baseball, quite a firm believer himself, and a very distinctive player. We’ll show a picture of his stance, in which he didn’t take a step into the ball, which is very unusual.

But this is pencil work: this is Ronald Reagan, and you were commissioned by the Republican National Committee to do it. I hope you can see the incredible detail—how a pencil can bring things to life. Can you hold up John Wayne? If you go to Ron’s website, you can almost hear the leather creak. Even the bullets at his waist all have a slightly different coloration. It’s just remarkable. Can we stop right there? Tell us a little about some of these works, whichever one you want—pencil drawing, the skill required.

Learn to Do One Thing Exceedingly Well [07:40]

Ron Adair: Something I’d like to address, and I’ll touch on it here, is really important if you’re going out into the marketplace: learn to do one thing exceedingly well. When people think, “We need some book illustrations, and we want them in pen and ink, or pencil, or gouache, or even oil paint,” one or two names come to mind. “If we’re going to do this, and this is the subject matter, that’s the person we want.” So you’ve got to be really, really good at one thing if you want to find a niche, and pretty good at one or two other things.

Pencil is something I’d always done at home. I didn’t have a studio; I had pencils and paper, and I did a lot of drawing. So I felt at home with it. And during college, all artwork ultimately starts with laying things out in pencil and establishing values. So I felt comfortable with a pencil as a tool.

Let me mention this man right here. For anyone who aspires to learn how to use a pencil: Paul Calle is no longer living, but I learned about him, got his book, and studied it—really, really studied it. I wanted to see how he sculpted on a two-dimensional surface, which is a matter of wrapping the pencil around the form. I studied him like crazy.

Dan Doriani: We can see that the cover’s been beaten half to death.

Ron Adair: Yes—I didn’t chew on it, I don’t think, and thankfully we don’t have rodents that did either. But he really got me thinking a certain way. My pencil work didn’t copy him, but it echoed him. In late 1978 or early 1979, I was in the post office, saw the stamp artwork, and thought, “I can do this.” So I put some drawings together and sent them to the U.S. Postal Service. About a month later, I got a call from Stevan Dohanos, a marvelous illustrator from Norman Rockwell’s era who was then the stamp coordinator. He said, “Hi, I’m Stevan Dohanos. We got your work, and we love it. It reminds us of Paul Calle.”

Dan Doriani: Oh, yes.

Ron Adair: And Dohanos wrote the foreword to this book. So my work wasn’t a copy of Calle’s, but the way I like to build the form and work the pencil echoes him enough that Stevan Dohanos picked it up. I think Calle is the best pencil artist who ever lived.

Faces, Presidents, and History [10:50]

Dan Doriani: Well, you’re pretty good yourself. Can I ask you to pick up one more: George Bush. I don’t even know how somebody captures someone’s face in two dimensions with nothing but a pencil. It’s astonishing.

Ron Adair: This was the last of three I did that the RNC used to help build its donor base, which is the purpose of all these political pieces. A marketing firm was helping them, and when the RNC said what they thought they wanted, the firm said, “We’ve got a guy.” That’s how I came to do these. The Bush faces are interesting. Every face is unique and has special challenges.

I’m doing a drawing now. You always get the whole thing laid in, and you work it, but after you get the values established—

Dan Doriani: What do you mean by “values established”?

Ron Adair: Value is just dark to light. But you’ve got to go for the bull’s-eye, because a good nose won’t save it if the eyes don’t look good. You’ve got to make the eyes really work, because they’re the window of the soul. Once you get that, it encourages you to get into things like the hair, which drives me crazy to do.

Dan Doriani: It’s really good hair, I have to say.

Ron Adair: Kind of wiry. It drove me nuts. I needed counseling after I did that for a while.

Dan Doriani: Now, lest we sound overly political, you also did John F. Kennedy, if I recall correctly.

Ron Adair: That was a different thing. The Kennedy was one of six historical pieces. The city of Los Alamos, New Mexico, wanted something reflecting the history of the Los Alamos lab, where, of course, the atomic bomb was made in the ’40s. So I did six montage illustrations, one for each decade of the lab’s history. In the ’60s, JFK visited the lab in a high-profile visit. I wasn’t there for it, but they wanted me to illustrate it, so that’s why JFK is in that montage. It was fun; I got to learn history. You get projects that both force and motivate you to learn about history, which is a good thing.

Baseball [12:55]

Dan Doriani: But you don’t just do history. You also do baseball.

Ron Adair: God’s sport, yes.

Dan Doriani: That’s how I found out who you are. I used an illustration about Albert Pujols in a sermon, and we have a couple of Pujols pieces here. We’ll declare that Albert Pujols was a St. Louis Cardinals star, though he also played for the Los Angeles Angels. After I used Pujols as an illustration, Ron came up to me and said, “Hey, you might be interested…”

Ron Adair: When you mentioned him in a sermon, I thought, “There’s something going on here. This is good.”

Dan Doriani: Pujols had a very unusual stance. It was extremely wide, and he didn’t step into the ball. When I saw this piece, I called it enhanced realism. It’s very realistic, and yet somehow a little more colorful. You captured the coiled body at the instant before the swing starts—

Ron Adair: And he held the bat up really high.

Dan Doriani: Really high. And of course, this is his face—you may make him look a tiny bit more handsome than in real life; I don’t know. Here’s another one that’s more congenial, we might say: him putting on a batting glove. This one would be a baseball card. You did a lot with baseball and also some other sports—NFL, some NBA.

Ron Adair: Mostly baseball. I did probably 225 oil paintings for Upper Deck, Donruss, and a few for Leaf. I enjoyed it because I like sports, and baseball especially—Hall of Famers, of course. Ken Griffey Jr.—

Dan Doriani: A marvelous portrait of him.

Ron Adair: There are a few players I love to follow, and I got to have some fun painting them. These are oil paintings, so it takes a while to do one well, and I did over 200 of them.

Deadlines and the Image of God [15:05]

Dan Doriani: Let me talk about your career for a moment more. Once you got going, you started doing higher-level work for Coca-Cola and other large commercial organizations—more demanding, more public. You’d launched out on your own and were working with your brother, and the commissions rolled in enough. When you talk to artists, they’ll say it’s too much, or it’s too little—

Ron Adair: That’s right.

Dan Doriani: —like actors, who always wonder when they’ll get another chance to be on TV or radio or do voice work.

Ron Adair: Right. There were times when you thought deadlines are deadly—they tend to kill you. Sometimes the deadlines beat you like a piñata, and other times you wished you had more of them. It oscillated; it wasn’t a flat line. There were times I wanted to be busier than I was, and times I thought, “How in the world am I going to meet this deadline?”

But just briefly, on faces: faces are all different. They’re unique because we bear God’s image. People who paint rocks and trees and plants and rivers—I think that’s great, and I want to learn to do that better, because I’m not that good at it. But there’s something special about painting people, who reflect some of who God is.

I’ve done John Wayne many times. My first portrait of Wayne was when I was twelve. We had gone to his movie set in 1960, and I did my first oil painting. It was a lot of fun. I used black paint in the nostrils, which you never do, but as a twelve-year-old—whatever.

Dan Doriani: You didn’t know any better.

Ron Adair: I’ve done him so many times that I know his face better than my own. I could do a nice drawing of him without looking at any reference. But that knowledge occasionally tried to morph its way into other artwork. If I’m doing a portrait of a little girl, Mom and Dad don’t want Susie looking like John Wayne. They want her to look like Susie. So I had to work at keeping that Wayne look out.

Later I worked with Colt Industries and Michael Wayne on artwork that was gold-etched into a commemorative collector’s edition of the .45 he carried. So that’s artwork not for painting but etched into metal. Your work shows up in different ways.

Twin Brothers and Postage Stamps [17:45]

Dan Doriani: That’s interesting. And you and your brother had the distinctive privilege of being the only brothers to both have stamps printed by the government. It’s a great honor to have your work appear for the U.S. Postal Service.

Ron Adair: They’ve had fathers and sons, and husbands and wives. But in ’86, with Don’s first stamp, we became the only two brothers, before or since, who have both done stamp designs. So that’s kind of fun. I was so thrilled for him. George Bush showed up for the first day of issue and offered Don a ride back to Dallas on Air Force Two. They had asked both of us to submit designs, and he beat me fair and square, and I’m thrilled about that.

Dan Doriani: But you had your turn.

Ron Adair: I had done a few before he got his first, and then he did that one and another. It was just great to see. He was a better designer than I’ll ever be. Don had such a knack. In fact, this pen is a metallic version of his Republic of Texas commemorative.

Dan Doriani: Identical twins, but with slightly different gifts and capacities as artists, is what you’re saying.

Ron Adair: Yes.

Art for Everyone [18:45]

Dan Doriani: Let me go to a very different topic in a way. So many people are artists when they’re four, five, six, and seven. I brought something that’s not quite as impressive as the work you’ve seen so far, but I’m going to hold it up anyway. This is a portrait of my wife and me by my four-year-old granddaughter. If you look carefully, you can see a microphone, because little children are fascinated by microphones. Then of course we’ve got rainbows, not necessarily in their usual form. And it says, “I love you, Mom and Dad and Cleo”—that’s her sister. And the third piece: she loves music, and somehow she saw notes on a staff and wanted to draw them.

Ron Adair: Wow.

Dan Doriani: It reminds me that my parents briefly thought I was going to be an artist, because when I was three, four, five, and six, I drew endlessly. It disappears for most adults, as play does. Wouldn’t it be great if adults kept some of their artistic sensibility, even if they aren’t especially gifted? We play games at parties where you have to draw things. Some people are pretty good, some are terrible and communicate with stick figures, and others try to draw it perfectly and take up all the time for the game. Would it be good if we were artists all through life?

Ron Adair: I think so. First of all, good drawing demands a lot; you can’t approach it casually. But whatever level of gifting God has graciously given people for the arts, wherever that ceiling is, just enjoy working within that realm, knowing that you’re putting a smile on God’s face if you just have fun and do your best. People get busy, life takes over, you become a parent, and the things of life push that aside. But if people would take a deep breath, settle in, and pull out a piece of paper and maybe some watercolors, they can have some fun—even if it’s just you working with the pigment to capture that nice plant on the shelf, or your child asleep on the couch. There’s something really neat about that. I’m not sure what would change the trajectory of people losing that love, but I think there’s something in it for people. It doesn’t have to be great to be really fun and good and God-honoring.

Dan Doriani: It’s like adults being afraid to dance at weddings because they’re afraid of looking bad—

Ron Adair: Well, I am.

Dan Doriani: I am, too. And they’re afraid to draw something because it’ll be bad. But I think it would be good if we were more aesthetic, more full-bodied, and unafraid to play and try living—not that we’ll reach your level, of course.

Ron Adair: Well, there are people who can dance around me artistically. I do my bit, but there’s always somebody better than you, and other people who are trying to get there. We’re always somewhere in the middle.

The Dart and the Potter [21:55]

Dan Doriani: That’s so true. Now, your faith shapes the way you handle the highs. You don’t get too excited if you get a bunch of commissions and think you’re the best artist of all time. That’s clear.

Ron Adair: No, I never played that game.

Dan Doriani: And you don’t despair, because you know God loves you. You’re a child of God. You’re redeemed, and your worth is independent of whether your business dips a little. I believe every occupation can teach us lessons we wouldn’t otherwise learn. For example, parents learn about unconditional love when they have a baby, because you just give and give and don’t get anything back. You told me once about a moment when something you did with a drawing of Karl Malden instructed you about the nature of God. Would you be willing to share that?

Ron Adair: Yes, though the context is important.

Dan Doriani: By all means.

Ron Adair: In my freshman year at Washington University, one assignment was to do a modest drawing—not a full-fledged rendering—of someone recognizable, because you can’t really tell whether you’ve captured a likeness unless people know the person and can say, “Yep, that looks like him.”

Dan Doriani: “I know who you’re drawing.”

Ron Adair: Right. I chose Karl Malden, an actor who was busy in movies and TV at the time, because I thought he had an interesting face—and a prominent nose. I did the drawing; it was graded and came back, and I put it on the wall. My roommate, Larry, had a dartboard, and I grabbed one of his darts and decided, stupidly, unwisely, capriciously, to use that original drawing as a target. I let the dart go, and it found Karl’s nose. It went through the drawing and into the Sheetrock behind it. It was a great shot. My roommate said, “Why in the world would you destroy a piece of artwork like that?” And I said, “I haven’t the slightest idea.” It was capricious and not wise, but I felt like doing it, so I did. I said, “Larry, I can’t give you a rationale, but I wanted to use it as a target at that moment. And since I did the drawing—you wouldn’t have the right to throw a dart at it, but I did.”

Dan Doriani: So you had the right to do something foolish, we might say—

Ron Adair: —because I created it. At the time I was churchy—a Christian in a cultural, dos-and-don’ts kind of way—but I don’t know that my heart was regenerated. So in that moment it didn’t become an object lesson for me. But later, after I became a believer, I thought about it. It’s a little bit of a Romans 9 situation, with the potter.

Another time, in high school, I made a sculpture—a bust of my brother Don—that won first place in a competition. But I decided I didn’t like it, so Don and I took it out into the desert and shot it to pieces with two .22s. My mother wasn’t happy about that. Again, it’s not a good thing to do, but I did it. And the point is that we do foolish things capriciously when we have the authority to do so.

Dan Doriani: That’s right. God has authority to do what he wills with what he makes. He’s the potter; we’re the clay. But God, blessedly, is not capricious. He doesn’t commit random acts of destruction. But for you—and for me when you told me—it became an illustration that when we make something, we have authority over it. God has authority over his creation, and it’s good for us to remember that at all points. It’s a partial analogy: we don’t create as God does, but derivatively, from material that already exists, whereas he creates out of nothing. And we act arbitrarily and foolishly, and God doesn’t. But it’s still an illustration of God’s power and authority.

Ron Adair: In a sense I had sovereignty over that artwork in a derived sense, and I exercised that sovereignty in a really ridiculous way. I wish I hadn’t. I’d kind of like to have the drawing, for historical—or hysterical—reasons. But through it all, God has been merciful, gracious, and faithful to provide. His providence in the way he has brought projects along is inscrutable. It’s just amazing.

Advice to a Young Artist [26:35]

Dan Doriani: You have thirty seconds. Somebody grabs you on the way to your car. What do you say to a young, aspiring artist? What’s your first big idea?

Ron Adair: To a young, aspiring artist: draw often, and draw what you like. Stay away from teachers until you’re about twelve, because they’ll put up guardrails based on their biases. Parents need to let children run free and draw what pleases them. When you’re old enough to look at sources and want to become more exacting, work that in. But don’t worry about it on the front end.

Dan Doriani: Good. I love it. If you could name one book somebody should use, is it that book?

Ron Adair: For pencil, Paul Calle’s book. And The Artist’s Handbook by Mayer—M-A-Y-E-R, I think. It’s a big, thick thing; you don’t want to drop it on your foot, because it would put you in the ER. But it’s a comprehensive book on art that touches every area. It’s fantastic. For pencil, though, this man right here is hard to beat.

Dan Doriani: Ron, thanks for being with us. I’m deeply grateful for your time, your skill, and your service to God and your neighbor.

Ron Adair: I’ve been delighted to be here. Thank you for this time to chat.

Working with Dan Doriani is a production of the Center for Faith and Work St. Louis. We seek to promote faithfulness in the workplace, in education, in discipleship, and in the stories of believers who’ve applied their faith at work. If you want to put your faith to work and change your corner of the world, visit faithandworkstl.org. We’ll help you start a cohort with like-minded believers who also want to practice their faith at work. This podcast is donor-supported; to keep us going, please donate on our website. Maybe more importantly, you can support us by listening, subscribing, sharing, and posting about us on your favorite platform—or go old school and tell a friend.