It was a bright, almost cloudless, morning in the middle of May. The water was warm. Nineteen-year-old Paul Harris was with his buddies. If they had been back home, they might have been fishing or playing horseshoes. But they weren't back home. The warm water was in the Pacific, just offshore of the island of Okinawa. The year was 1945. Paul Harris was a member of the crew aboard the
U.S.S. Ault, a destroyer assigned to help protect the aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Bunker Hill.
Among the crew, Paul was known to be a sketch artist -- drawings on whatever scraps of paper he could find. When it was quiet, he drew portraits of his crew mates, the ship's machinery or whatever caught his artistic attention. In 1944 he won a competition to design a emblem for the ships in his squadron. His winning emblem was a seahorse, and the "prize'' was a somewhat dangerous visit to each ship in the squadron and then paint the seahorse on its main funnel.
The Bunker Hill and its destroyer escorts provided cover and logistical support for the invasion of Okinawa, a crucial step to ending the war in the Pacific. On the morning of May 11, 1945,
the Ault's crew, in the jargon of the Navy, "splashed" one kamikaze, but two others hit the Bunker Hill, setting the carrier on fire, The Ault's crew, including Harris, rescued 29 men from the flaming ocean -- most of them badly burned. Casualties from the carrier were devastating with more than 396 killed and 264 wounded.
During kamikaze attacks on May 13 and 14, the Ault succeeded in splashing three more planes. During one of those attacks, on May 13th, a sailor from the Navaho tribe in New Mexico, named Johnny, manned the gun while Harris fed him the ammunition. The kamikaze was splashed only a few hundred yards from the Ault.
When Harris recalled the event decades later, he could have taken credit for helping avert what would have been a conflagration aboard the Ault. Instead, he expressed only gratitude and admiration for Johnny's calm courage.
Make it stand out.
On September 2, 1945, the Ault was stationed next to the U.S.S. Missouri in Tokyo Bay. There was heavy betting aboard the Ault and the odds were in favor of a trap rather than a surrender ceremony. But the armed forces of the Empire of Japan surrendered to the United States and her allies. Paul Harris was glad to lose his bet. — Christopher Harris
Portraits of Himself
His Mirror’s Changing Reflections
-Michele Corriel, PhD
Over the many decades of Paul Harris’ career as an artist, he occasionally returned to draw a familiar face: his own. In the world of art, the history of self-portraits carries great significance and Paul Harris’ self-portraits enhanced that tradition. Equally important, they help in understanding the artist, and maybe the man, as he presented himself to the world. He shied away from artist statements, and even explaining his work to critics, but a careful examination of his self-portraits may open up the artist’s work to a personal perspective.
The long tradition of the artist’s self-portrait goes back to El Greco and Titian in the 16th Century, to Velazquez’s peek in the mirror view of himself in Las Mininas, up through the myriad of paintings done by Rembrandt and Rubens, Matisse, Frida Kahlo, Frances Bacon, and Chuck Close, among many others. In fact, it would be hard to find an artist that did not paint his or her own face at some point. Rembrandt famously produced over sixty self-portraits, following himself through the years, and leaving the world an incremental trail of the artist as he aged, and with that aging, the evolution of his artistry. In the path that Harris blazed, we can follow his journey from a bold, very young artist to a secure statesman and finally to the man faced with the knowledge of his own mortality. The conscious life and at times the unconscious life of Paul Harris can be deduced from these visual perceptions of himself.
In their paper, Self-Portraits as Presentations of Self, W. Ray Crozier and Paul Greenhalgh look at self-portraits through the lens of social psychology. While their study is not a straight line to the self- portraits by Paul Harris, it is worth examining the theories in general: Self-Awareness, Self-Presentation, and the theory of Social Constructs.1 In addition, there is always the rift between public and private. The fact that Paul Harris’ self-portraits still exist and were kept in the exclusive possession of the artist throughout the decades would put them on the threshold between what is private and what is public. Only a very few have ever been exhibited.
Waterboy (1939, pastel) was drawn by Harris at the age of 13, when he was still in high school in Orlando, Florida. While not obviously a self-portrait, being a water boy was one of his first jobs. During the Great Depression everyone in his family attempted to earn whatever money they could. For Paul Harris, carrying water to farm workers in Florida did not require anything but strength and determination. Even on the brink of becoming a teenager, Harris brought the contours of the young men he observed into his work. Blended pastels give the figure the feeling of motion, while the tilt of his body conveys the weight of the water bucket. The jaunty angle of the cap, hiding a portion of his face, reflects the fashion of the times, and the way boys followed the mannerisms of film stars in their everyday life. It can be seen as a cultural reflection of how young men should present themselves to the world, while also acting as a mirror for Harris, a future glimpse of the man he might become. The use of the hat, while still not cemented into Harris’ subconscious, foreshadows the trope Harris uses time and again in his later self- portraits and in his bronze sculptures.
This portrait Self-Portrait, (1942, pencil and pastel) comes two years after Waterboy. Harris clings to the colored pencils and pastels, perhaps the best tools he has at hand, but probably more than that, as these crayons stayed with him through the decades.
Paul explained his connection to crayons in a radio interview in the 2000s, “I remember in sixth grade the teacher wanted a lot of things made that she would use the next year and the next. I didn’t do much work in her class except make these big drawings. I became very accustomed to crayons, and I’ve never been able to let them go. Crayons are still my best friends in making drawings and I don’t think it will ever end.” Here, in high school, two years from graduation, he reaches for the crayons – as he would throughout his life – to express shape, contour, and emotion.
In 1931, when he was five years old, his mother died. A deep void opened up in Harris, a hidden wound he carried across the span of his artistic life. That loss became etched onto his character and gave the young man emotional depth as he reached into the world of color and composition for solace. In Harris’ crayon drawings, he often turned to flowers, which represented his mother. When she died, he talked of all the flowers surrounding her. This association may also be drawn into this fabric sculptures – often women without faces surrounded in a flower motif.
Five years later in 1936, his father remarried Helga Ebsen (sister of the actor and dancer Buddy Ebsen). Helga and her sister Vilma were also dancers and taught Paul and his sister how to dance. To make a little money, Paul and his sister performed their tap dance routines at venues such as the Orlando Rotary Club. Both of the Ebsen sisters encouraged Paul to follow his creative life as an artist.
The first 1942 Self-Portrait, drawn while he was in high school shortly after the United States entered World War II, the expression emits an aura of expectation. Not quite seventeen years old at the time, the military allowed enlisting at that age if the young man had parental consent. However, he waited until he graduated from Orlando High School in May 1944 to join the Navy. He was assigned to serve on the destroyer, USS Ault, entering the Pacific war zone in December 1944.
In this self-portrait he views himself as a young man bright with the embers of light, sure of his direction, but unsure of his destination. He appears slightly off-center of the page. There is a bit of naivete in the turn of his head, the lift of his brows and a half smile caught in the midst of conversation. Most likely, this was done with a mirror and not a photograph. For sure, it is a quick sketch, but worked on afterward, with the addition of color and texture.
The painting/drawing of a self-portrait requires an inevitable inner journey. The piece is done by a back and forth between the paper and the mirror. As objective as an artist can be, it is his own face, his own eyes, his own depth of knowledge that stares back at him. The inner journey may also be a call and response from the artist to the artist-to-be, as is the case with all of the early Paul Harris pieces.
