My Buddy, my pal

If you haven't checked out my brother, Gary's, website, you should. It's http://www.simmonsart.com/. All my life I've watched him draw. It was just what he did, all the time and anywhere. He drew on church bulletins, napkins, scraps of paper, any surface that would hold an image. When he was a teenager I wanted a clown painted on my bedroom wall and Mom let him do it. My friend Roger saw my clown and wanted Dennis the Menace on his wall. His Mom let Buddy, my nickname for Gary, do that for him. When it was time to repaint our bedrooms our Moms taped around the clown and Dennis and didn't paint over them. Buddy painted a naked mermaid mural over the toilet in the bathroom when the rest of the family was gone one weekend. Imagine Jessica Rabbit with a shiny green mermaid tail and naked boobs under the sea with seahorses and tropical fish and bubbles. This will be a theme that repeats itself as he evolves from fledgling artist to the real deal. We left Cahokia in 1961 and I've often wondered how much primer it took for the next residents to cover our family art.

Sometime in the 1950s Dad bought a Jeep-like vehicle similar to our modern SUVs. Buddy was a teenager and he dubbed it the Kidney Buster because it rode rough. By then I guess he'd developed a passion for roadrunners because he painted them all over it. We all loved the roadrunner cartoons and thought riding around in the Kidney Buster was a blast. He even carried the roadrunner theme over to our club house on the lake in southern Illinois. I think there was at least one roadrunner on every pane of glass in the building, inside and out.

So many of my childhood memories are linked to Buddy's drawing. He had a small statue of the Venus de Milo that he used for a model for years. He drew pieces of her over and over, rarely drawing the entire figure. He drew her hands, her eyes, her feet, her breast, the drape, all the while explaining to me who she was, why she was important, where she came from. In 1983 I went to Paris and I visited the Louvre. I walked into the room where the actual Venus de Milo stood and had a melt down. I cried and cried and scared the Japanese tourists who were trying to take her picture. She was so beautiful and I felt so connected to her because Buddy and I had studied her, bit by bit, when I was a little kid.

I'm amazed and delighted on a regular basis by what new and wonderful works are created by his pen or brush, or in many instances, both at once. His style is unique and easily recognizable. He has a fan base and is a local celebrity, respected in the art world. I tease him sometimes about how far he's come from roadrunners and clowns, and how much his mermaid renderings have improved. But the truth is, I am so proud of him. If given the chance to pick a big brother from all the brothers on the planet I'd pick him.