Member Poem

Andy Warhol Remembers Jon Gnagy
(America’s Television Art Teacher)

I learned to draw watching TV.
You, with your cool goatee,
showed how to make, with dazzling self-taught skill,
a mountain setting, old grist mill,
or roads of cobblestones.
With simple strokes and monochromatic tones,

a bronco’s tail, an oak tree’s bough—
it was astounding how   
they came to life in minutes. Plain old chalk
would prance across the pad. You’d talk
about a snowy summit.
Then there it was! My eyes could not move from it.

It seemed innate, yet we all know,
in Nature’s studio,
you strove to learn the craft. A harbor scene,
a liner, goose or wolverine
you rendered with the passion
of a soul in lust, all in your special fashion.

We could draw anything at all
if we could draw a ball,
a cube, a cone, and cylinder. These four
building blocks were drawing’s core
in Caravaggio’s age.
But what was new was TV — all the rage.

It let art’s fundamental ways,
on countless Saturdays,
uncover something irrepressible.
Suddenly accessible,
to countless kids, was art.
Your jaunty smile declared, “It’s time to start.”