Three Men and a Navy On a recent morning, Charly Jupiter Hamilton, Peter Massing and Mark Tobin Moore got together at Taylor Books in Charleston. All are successful visual artists, but their artworks could hardly be more dissimilar. So why the backslapping and laughter? It might have been the reunion of long-lost brothers. In a way, it was. These three men share something as deep as their commitment to art: the United States Navy. And all three confirm that their military experiences influenced their art and careers. Charly Jupiter Hamilton: A Teeming Spectacle A farm boy from Troutman, N.C., his early artistic endeavors included explicit drawings of a would-be girlfriend in his French class. The story’s complex and hilarious; in the end, the girl’s father confiscates the drawings and threatens to give them to the county sheriff if Hamilton ever goes near his daughter again. “My first collector,” Hamilton quips. Hamilton served in the Navy from 1966 to 1970. “I was a gunner’s mate. They called it a glorified deckhand.” His first ship, a rescue and salvage ship, had a crew of about 80. “It was pretty small, a working ship. It had racks, five high, that you slept on. You put them up during the day. It was cocoon-like. You could hear everything, smell everything, smell everyone. Being in the Navy was good practice for being an artist: it was kind of grubby, you didn’t have any money, and when you got some you blew it all.” “The Navy gave me a lot of imagery,” Hamilton continues. “I was a farm kid, and everything was exotic.” He sent cartoons of his surroundings and adventures to friends. “The Navy was a place of storytelling. There you were, out at sea. Storytelling was a way of communicating. My pictures still have stories in them.” Military service took him to Hawaii, Japan, Korea, the Philippines and Vietnam. In Hawaii, he met and married a woman who encouraged his interest in art. Taking a long shot, he applied to the University of North Carolina (UNC). “I got the letter of acceptance while I was on my last cruise with the Seventh Fleet.” At UNC, Hamilton encountered another major influence, painter Marvin Saltzman. In addition to mentoring the student painter, “he let me pursue the dream of becoming an artist and not an art teacher,” Hamilton says. “As long as I’m doing art, I feel I’ll be taken care of. The Navy was like that. I felt that as long as I didn’t fall off the ship, I’d be taken care of, and have some adventures.” Mark Tobin Moore: Commentary and Connections His color palette and painting techniques range broadly, but his paintings are always richly textured. They sometimes contain text and often carry social commentary. Moore says, “I respond to what’s happening in the world, and I need to say something with my work.” Like Hamilton and Massing, Moore has exhibited widely and won a number of awards for his art. In addition to making art, he has been a teacher, a curator and a museum exhibit designer. He holds a bachelor’s degree in painting from the University of Charleston, degree in painting from West Virginia University. The son of an Air Force master sergeant, Moore grew up “all over the place.” In Scotland, as a child, he attended the Scotus Academy for three years. “They took art seriously,” he says. “We’d go to castles and monasteries, look at sculptures and illuminated manuscripts.” The family eventually settled in Virginia, where Moore visited many Civil War battlefields. Even play involved things military: “My brother and I had every set of toy soldiers, every rifle, helmet and machine gun. Every Christmas, Mattel came out with a new war game. We had them all.” “Burned out on school,” Moore enlisted in the Navy in 1972, after high school. He was assigned to the USS Sierra, a destroyer tender based in Norfolk, Va., and Charleston, S.C. “We weren’t out at sea very much, so I had an apartment off-base. We didn’t want to go to Vietnam—nobody in their right mind wants to be in a real war—but if we had to go, we would, and the politics wouldn’t be as important as taking care of each other.” As a personnel specialist, Moore identified sailors’ aptitudes and helped them get further education and job placements within the military. He discovered his own destiny when he accepted a post at a Naval Reserve Center in Charleston, W.Va. “I was working full-time at the Reserve Center and going to school at Morris Harvey [now the University of Charleston]. That’s where I met Hank Keeling. I took an art class, and I knew that was it. “Keeling was one of several Charleston artists with New York City connections. He had studied with Hans Hofmann. June Kilgore was a student of George McNeil’s. Grace Martin Taylor and Katherine Burnside studied at Hofmann’s summer school in Provincetown. They, in turn, influenced another tier of artists. Most people don’t appreciate what a solid art community there is here in West Virginia. I feel really fortunate to have landed here. I was destined to come to West Virginia.” Peter Massing: A Fine Line Massing’s prints show a penchant for detail and a devotion to the draftsman’s art. He says, “I focus on printmaking, and it’s a pleasure, because I like to draw.” Words matter, too. “Words evoke images,” he explains. “Even if they don’t make sense.” His artworks are visual sonnets: compact, carefully composed and bearing many nuances. After printing, he may recycle scored and carved wood in a decorative birdhouse. “I collect and gather. Just as an anthropologist would put bones together, artists collect and gather cultural artifacts and assemble them. "Sometimes the pieces don’t fit; but then that leads you somewhere.” Massing’s journey toward his vocation was haphazard. The oldest boy among five siblings, he says, “I was the troublemaker, so often my dad would take me with him, to keep an eye on me.” His father loved art, so they went to museums. “I’d be off in a corner with a crayon, or I’d just wander. I got an art education from museum guards." As a teenager, he and his friends produced homemade comic books. But Massing describes his younger self as privileged and undisciplined: “I got kicked out of college in the first year, in 1975.” To mollify his family, he joined the Navy. “I was the last person you’d expect to join the military. But it was the best thing I could have done.” He was assigned to the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D.Eisenhower, and soon became a cox swain, a driver of smaller boats. “I drove utility boats, Liberty boats and barges,” says Massing. “In my free time, I did artwork. When you’re at sea, you have a lot of time. When we were in port, I’d seek out museums.” His drawing ability attracted notice. “A chief in the mess hall asked me to paint some murals,” he recalls. During an official review of the ship, President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn saw Massing’s own interpretation of “The Last Supper,” and invited the artist to have lunch with them. “It was a big thrill,” Massing says. “He was the coming-of-age president for me, and is still one of my heroes. “Soon, officers were pulling me away from my duties, wheeling and dealing for my time,” Massing continues. His superiors encouraged him to get more schooling during a six-month stateside stay, and he became a Navy draftsman. Along with technical skills, Massing says, the Navy taught him habits of discipline and a code of honor that stills affects his life and work. “You never betray your mates. That’s the military culture. Once a shipmate, always a shipmate.” Sailors and Storytellers Massing was a cox-swain - stearing a boat is drawing a line - and his later art reflects the same precision. In the Navy, Moore made connections and created oppurtunities. Now, his art is full of found objects and fortuitous connections. And Hamilton? He says it himself, with a wicked grin: "I was a gunner's mate. I blew things up."
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