Charles Frederick Surendorf, Jr. (1906-1979)

Charles Frederick Surendorf, Jr., was born on November 9, 1906, in Richmond, Indiana. He attended the Art Institute of Chicago, the Art Students League, and Ohio State University. In 1929, he moved to Logansport, Indiana, and from there to California (in 1935), living first in Los Angeles, then in San Francisco. In 1946, he moved to Columbia, California, an old ghost town. Surendorf worked in all of those places as an artist, as well as in Tahiti, New Orleans, and the California desert.

In 1949, Charles Surendorf sent word home to his family in Logansport that he had married Barbara Stoner, a former model, beauty queen, and assistant curator of an art gallery in California. Like her new husband, Mrs. Surendorf was a Hoosier, having come from Goshen. The couple had three children together.

Charles Surendorf was a painter and a printmaker. In his younger days, he drew cartoons for his hometown newspaper. In the 1930s or early 1940s, he painted a mural of the Pottawatomie Indians in the Logansport library. Unfortunately that work was lost when the library burned in 1941. Surendorf won many prizes and accolades and had his work widely exhibited. He was also a member of many art associations and groups.

Surendorf was recognized in his time as one of the foremost woodblock/linoleum block printers in the United States. Charles F. Surendorf, Jr., died on May 28, 1979, in Columbia, California, at age seventy-two.

A self-portrait by Charles Frederick Surendorf, Jr., from 1935. This is an early example of his engraving. Others can be found all over the Internet with a simple search for his name. Good luck and happy viewing.

Text copyright 2016, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Charles E. Barnes (1915-2005)

The men who conquered Fortress Europe and who stormed the beaches of the South Pacific--the men who survived the war and the sixty-eight years since--are in their waning years. We as a nation have honored them with a memorial in Washington, D.C. Our current commander-in-chief has dishonored them by attempting to keep them out, as if a few moveable barriers and a few yards of plastic tape could discourage men who long ago laid waste to world-spanning totalitarian regimes. In support of our veterans, I will write two postings this month, both on artists who drew and painted pictures of military action.

First, Charles E. Barnes, a Brown County artist born three years and a day before the first Armistice Day. Barnes was born in Chicago on November 10, 1915. The 1920 census found him with his family in Chicago. In 1930 and 1940, they were living in Richmond, Indiana. Barnes relocated to Indianapolis, perhaps sometime in the early 1940s. He taught at the Park School (now Park Tudor) in Indianapolis and kept a studio on McLean Place in the city. When war came, he answered his country's call.

In July 1945, after the war in Europe had ended, the Indianapolis Star published three drawings that PFC Charles E. Barnes had made at Monte Cassino the year before. Fighting had raged there throughout early 1944. The Allies bombed the abbey at Monte Cassino in February. One of Barnes' drawings is dated 1944. The other is undated. It's clear, though, that he was there shortly after the Germans finally withdrew in May. In the articles, Barnes was described as "a veteran of the North African and Italian campaigns." He in fact spent four years with the 704th Engineers as a camouflage technician not only in North Africa and Italy but also in Sicily and France.

Charles E. Barnes studied at the Herron School of Art, the Santa Monica School of Design, and the School of Modern Photography. Francis Chapin (1899-1965) was among his instructors. One of his classmates at Herron was also his friend, cartoonist Dick Wingert (1919-1993). In his fine art, executed before and after the war, Barnes was an abstract painter. More than fifty universities and museums, including the Indianapolis Museum of Art, held or hold his works. Barnes was art director at Argo Films in New York City and a charter member of the Creative Film Society in Hollywood. For many years he operated the Modern Art Center, later the Charles E. Barnes Art Center, located across from the north entrance to Brown County State Park in Nashville, Indiana. Brown County is renowned for its fall color, its art colony, and of course as home to Kin Hubbard's wry observer of human folly, Abe Martin.

Barnes had a stroke in his mid sixties. Though paralyzed on his left side and halting in his speech, he continued to create works of art every day. "Well, sure, I have to," he said. Charles Barnes died on March 31, 2005. He was eighty-nine years old.

Drawings made by PFC Charles E. Barnes at Monte Cassino, Italy, 1944, and published in 1945. From the Indianapolis Star, July 15 and 29, 1945.

Indiana artist Charles E. Barnes (1915-2005). From the Indianapolis Star, Oct. 9, 1969.

Updated on July 17, 2020.
Text and captions copyright 2013, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Paul Alexander (b. 1937)

Paul R. Alexander was one of the top science fiction paperback cover artists of the 1970s and '80s. Now retired, Mr. Alexander was born on September 3, 1937, in Richmond, Indiana, and graduated from Wittenberg University in nearby Springfield, Ohio, in 1967. He also studied at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. In his book Infinite Worlds: The Fantastic Visions of Science Fiction Art (1997), Vincent Di Fate includes Mr. Alexander with Dean Ellis, Christopher Foss, and John C. Berkey as "gadget" artists, "adept at painting futuristic hardware." The artist's talents were not limited to enormous spaceships zooming through vast realms of space, though. As the images below show, Mr. Alexander was equally adept at portraying human and not-so-human figures.

Paul Alexander's work was recently on display at the Communication Arts Technologies (CAT) Gallery at Montgomery College in Rockville, Maryland. Those works were part of an exhibit called "Worlds Collide: The Art of Science Fiction." You can view an online gallery at:

http://www.montgomerycollege.edu/~mvaughan/technical_center/index.html

Cover illustration for Robert Silverberg's Those Who Watch (1978).

Another cover for another Robert Silverberg book, To Open the Sky (1978).

Finally, a cover illustration for Jehad by Simon Hawke, aka Nicholas Valentin Yermakov (1984).

Text and captions copyright 2011, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Reed Kinert (1911-1976)

In the early 1900s, airplanes were not just a novelty. They were a marvel, almost a miracle, and flying in one was the dream of every American boy and girl. Hoosiers figured prominently in those pioneering years of aviation. Not least among Indiana pilots of course was Wilbur Wright, born in 1867 near Millville, Indiana. Before the turn of the century, Wilbur and his Ohio-born brother Orville set up a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio. In 1903, they flew an airplane of their own design and manufacture at Kill Devils Hill in North Carolina, thus launching not only their small Flyer, but also the Age of Aviation. The story of the brothers' success and their proximity to Richmond, Indiana, must have been a powerful draw for a young boy growing up there. At age twelve, future pilot and artist Reed Kinert began collecting material on aircraft and aviation, thus beginning a life devoted to things with wings.

Born on August 31, 1911, Reed Charles Kinert attended schools in his hometown before setting off for studies at the College of Los Angeles. In 1932, Kinert learned to fly in Richmond by taking lessons from a barnstorming pilot.  He operated the airport in Richmond and worked as a weather observer at the nearby Centerville Airport before becoming a barnstorming pilot of the 1930s. He also began creating illustrations for collectors and for the Vought and Aeronca aircraft companies. Between 1933 and 1947, Kinert was a flight instructor and test pilot. As an artist, Kinert designed insignia for two Navy bomber squadrons and worked as an illustrator and cartoonist for United Aircraft Corporation of America, and Beechcraft Aircraft. He also served as art director for the Aerospace Division of Librascope, Inc.

Kinert attended nearly every National Air Race beginning in 1929 and put his experiences to good use in his book, American Racing Planes and Historic Air Races (1952). He was an air racer himself for some time. Kinert wrote and illustrated books on aviation for much of his career, including his four-volume Racing Planes and Air Races: A Complete History (1967-1969). Other titles included America’s Fighting Planes in Action (1943), Our Fighting Planes: The Story of U.S. Military Aircraft of World War II (1946), and Little Helicopter (1947). His Early American Steam Locomotives: First Seven Decades, 1830-1900 (1962) was awarded a non-fiction prize by Indiana University in 1963.

In his author's note for Our Fighting Planes, published immediately after World War II, Kinert expressed feelings about flight that justify a long quotation:

Flight is the expression of spiritual achievement, the antithesis of the worn shoe and the weary foot. Flight is the opposite course to the rocky road, the long climb and the dusty plain and is the answer to an ageless human longing to see what is over the hill. In religion, they call it the instinct to immortality. With flight, peoples can battle loneliness and separation and isolation and bigotry and prejudice. With flight, free men will become more free. . . . In these pages I have made no attempt to glorify war, only flight itself, for war is hell.

Reed Kinert died on September 9, 1976, in San Diego, California. This year marks his centennial, observed here if nowhere else.

It's hard to choose just one or two pictures from Reed Kinert's book, Our Fighting Planes (1946), for display here, for there are so many beautifully done pictures among its pages. But I have always liked airplanes with an unusual configuration, so I have chosen Northrop's P-61 Black Widow, America's first airplane designed specifically for nighttime operations. 

From the same book, Boeing's workhorse, the famed B-17 Flying Fortress. The American fighter is the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt, the largest and heaviest single-engine fighter of the war. (The "P" designation by the way is for "pursuit," which gave way to our current "F," for "fighter," after the war.) The airplane going down in flames is the Nazi jet, the Messerschmitt Me 262 Schwalbe. No matter whether Kinert's illustration shows a real or fanciful event, it's still cool. And that's what this book is like. Even though Kinert was in his mid-thirties when Our Fighting Planes was published, his drawings convey all the feeling of a schoolboy's drawings of imagined heroism and adventure against the forces of evil.

Pilot, aviation enthusiast, and artist Reed Kinert of Richmond, Indiana.

Captions and text copyright 2011, 2024 by Terence E. Hanley