The War is Over: The Separation of Art and Politics

I've been working as a professional aviation artist for about eight years now, and besides my wife, painting historical aircraft is the love of my life. I would not trade this job for anything in the world.

Many years ago I was doing something entirely different. Many years ago everything I did revolved around politics. Within that arena I was ferociously partisan, idealistic, and uncompromising. My beliefs were forged of steel in those days, and I brought those weapons into everything I ever did; everywhere I ever went. It was a somewhat dark time of right versus wrong, and do or die trying; the slightly vainglorious struggle of a patriot fighting for what he believed in.

I cannot live like that anymore. I was miserable, and the cost of passion was too great. Politically, I've become a bit jaded out of necessity. I know how emotional I'd get if I dwelt upon such things too much. I have a family now who depends upon me. I live a peaceful life with my loving wife and our son. I stood up for things worth fighting for in the past, but I don't feel that I need to wear that identity upon my sleeve anymore.

When it comes to something as personal to me as my artwork, it reflects who I am today. My work is deliberately apolitical. Whereas some aviation artists focus their compositions upon the dramatic - guns blazing, men and machines burning, enemies falling to earth - I prefer to focus upon the sentimental. I emphasize other things: grace, a certain mood, and courage in a more subtle way. I don't mean to suggest that my work is highbrow over brutal; it's just a matter of my personal will to celebrate something differently. In short: I do not ever want my work to overly-glorify the wrong images of war, and more importantly I do not want my work to ever take sides. The wars I portray in my work are long over now. Thank God.

I'm frankly stunned and humbled by the near-universal support and acclaim I've received for my artwork among people from many different countries - many of whom were once at war with each other. It's personally uplifting to me that I manage to create a composition that can strike a positive chord with an American, a Japanese, and a German, or anyone else, all at the same time. While I don't think that I ever specifically designed a style with that goal in mind, I can see how my refusal to be partisan in my work certainly facilitates it. One way or another it's one of the things that I'm most proud of.

But there are a few people who take issue with this. Sometimes they do make a sincere effort to be polite about it, and other times they are openly hostile. Between the lines of both forms of complaint the core message is the same: 'I am an American. The Japanese and Germans killed Americans. Anything that stops short of portraying the Japanese as violent beasts or Germans as sadistic Nazis is an affront to the Americans who fought in WWII.' I can only assume that these folks were reacting to a particular painting of a Japanese or German airplane, and not any of the innumerable American airplanes I've painted over the years. My reactions to these criticisms have ranged from being genuinely puzzled - such as when my detractors seem driven by a genuine patriotism - to outrage in the face of blatant and hateful racism coming from a few of my fellow Americans.

In keeping with my professed attitude of tolerance I would normally never take to the Internet about any of this. I would politely respond to each individual person and move on. But I suspect that for every person who complains to me, while they are but a tiny minority overall, there are probably others who simply get offended and write me off as un-American. As a guy who still possesses a great deal of pride in the patriotic values I've stood up for in the past, I have to respond to these unfair characterizations by pointing out - reverting to my once steely and uncompromising sense of justice - that what I do with my art is my attempt to follow a noble example.

As a kid I happened to have a father of like mind who not only obliged my then-unusual desire to meet every veteran of WWII that I could, but actually encouraged it. When kids my age were focused on playing Little League, I was at conventions in far away cities meeting Major Greg 'Pappy' Boyington, the US Marine Corp fighter 'Ace', or Generalleutant Adolf Galland, Hitler's general of the Luftwaffe, and I wasn't much older when I shook the hand of Saburo Sakai, the then-highest scoring Japanese WWII fighter 'Ace' still alive. While those childhood experiences are not responsible for my determination to keep politics out of my work, getting to know those men from all sides has made that a lot easier. They were all gentleman. They each fought for a cause that they believed in, and anyone with any real familiarity with why soldiers fight knows: those causes have everything to do with fighting for the guy in your foxhole - and typically have nothing to do with politics, or even patriotism. They displayed no anger, nor racism, nor any bitterness in the wake of their war experiences. They had each been to innumerable veteran's reunions all over the world and had met their former enemies with smiles, firm handshakes, and even tearful hugs of joy. When American and Japanese veterans of Pearl Harbor have gotten together (see photo above), they have done so as friends; as former soldiers who are not only capable of seeing beyond the politics and racism among governments of 70 years ago, but as men who expect it of each other in the name of honor.

I confess that I do not quite understand how a few people, none of whom experienced the war for themselves, succumb to self-righteous or racist anger, while the men they claim to admire typically have not. Sometimes it's the amateur historian who has taken the wrong message away from the books they've read, about the inevitable atrocities of war, who perhaps lament the fact that they were not alive to fight WWII, and perversely want to drag people like me into their own imaginary trench (Luftwaffe 'Ace' Franz Stigler once told me, "Many people come to me saying that they wish they'd lived my life, but I tell them, it was not glorious. They are lucky to have avoided it").  But when the soldiers themselves live to meet one another, it is love and tolerance and honor that rises to the surface to seemingly overwhelm any residual wartime negativity. As it should always be!

To the extent that I attempt to glorify anything or anyone in my aviation artwork - I will continue to do so without prejudice and without injecting politics into any of it. Over forty million people died during the brief few years of WWII. It's audacious of anyone to base part of their career on those terrible events, but that is essentially what I do through my artwork when I'm depicting the subject. I try to focus on the positive: on the men, the machines, and the greater good that I believe came out of that cauldron of universal human suffering. It's not easy to do and I'm not always perfect in my execution - but if anyone expects me to throw my abilities and my heart into re-fighting that war with the aim of magnifying one side at the expense of the other, be it in the interests of patriotism or racism - they'll have to commission another artist. That's me learning from my own past experiences as a patriot to some extent, but mostly it is me trying to follow the example of the Greatest Generation.      


- Ron Cole

Visit Ron Cole's aviation art web store: Cole's Aircraft

 

Selling Japanese Zero Parts

Sometimes you have to do things that hurt like the pulling of teeth, especially when you run a business based upon the buying and selling of World War II airplane parts - at least when such things are also your personal passion and have been since childhood. A couple of years ago I purchased an original Me 109 K-4 instrument panel from Austria. Waiting for it to arrive in the mail in its big box was like awaiting the best Christmas in your life. It hung on my living room wall on a custom bracket for a few months, and it was the centerpiece at the shows I worked. It was at one of those shows when it happened: the necessity of running my business ambushed me. A certain CEO of a big Japanese model kit company asked me what I wanted for the panel, I told him, sure that my price was too sky high - but he said, "I buy". Now I have some random golf painting over the couch to cover the bracket holes, but that's life when you sell what you love for a living.

Most recently I entered into a glorious symbiotic relationship with Legend Flyers of Everett, Washington (they are the genius craftsman behind the Fw 190 and Me 262 rebuilds). The deal was typical for me: I'll paint the aircraft and you'll give me parts of the real thing in trade. I've done that for years. But in this case the trade was for a Japanese A6M3 Model 32 Zero, which was my favorite aircraft of all time. That, as we used to shout in the '80s, was wicked awesome!

For sure there were some parts that were intended for me to keep, and I certainly will, but, as the header photo shows, there are a lot of parts in total. Me being me, I don't want to sell any of them. But that's my business, so I've been busying myself with researching, cleaning, and sorting them out - the effort occasionally broken by a low and forlorn sigh.

So now I am ready to start offering some of these incredibly rare pieces of Pacific War history to collectors. Some of my pricing might make a few folks blanch, but they're due to the honest market value - not me subconsciously conniving to never sell them. Honest!


HISTORY:

Though I reveal the history of this A6M3 Zero in previous Blog posts, I'll touch on the highlights again: It is a very rare Model 32 version, the rarest of all the production Zero fighters. Only 343 were ever built. This machine, serial number 3148, was constructed by Mitsubishi in September 1942 - and both the Mitsubishi 'diamond' and 'Showa 17' date stamps are on a few of these parts. The aircraft was a rare sponsored machine: paid for by the Manchurian Middle Schools, and a tribute to that effect was painted on this aircraft's fuselage in Japanese. Deployed to the tiny strip of Taroa in the Marshall Islands, it was assigned to the 252nd Kokutai and given the tail code 'S-112'. It was "almost certainly", in the words of the 'Ace' himself, flown by Isamu Miyazaki in combat, and it likely participated in the interception of Lt. Louis Zamperini's B-24D - the latter action made famous in the best selling book, Unbroken.

In 1988 my old friend John Sterling brought this A6M3, and several others, out of Taroa and into a storage building associated with his cement business. These aircraft were eventually purchased by Evergreen International with the intent to have one restored aircraft rebuilt from out of their parts. They sat in Loveland, Colorado for a few years, before being sent to Legend Flyers in Everett. Since then number 3148 has taken on new life and is standing upon its own legs for the first time in many decades:

 


THE PARTS:

I've tried to put together a diverse grouping of Zero parts that reflect different areas of the aircraft and possess either original paint, die stamps, or both:

DISPLAY ONE: 25 x 37 inches.  Giclee on metallic paper.  Wing rib.  PRICE: $1500.00  (SOLD)

A very rare and complete component, this wing rib - from near the Type 99 20mm cannon, port wing - is die stamped with the Mitsubishi logo, 'S-D-C-H' manufacture stamp (denoting the process used in fabrication), as well as the part number 4-4085.

 DISPLAY TWO: 25 x 37 inches.  Giclee on metallic paper.  Wing rib.  PRICE: $1300.00

Another rare wing rib in good condition. No manufacturer's stamps, but several part numbers.

DISPLAY THREE: 25 x 37 inches.  Giclee on metallic paper.  Wing rib.  PRICE: $1300.00

The only mid-section wing rib I have. Complete, with some pitting from corrosion. Die stamped with part numbers.

DISPLAY FOUR: 20 x 30 inches.  Giclee on metallic paper.  Wing panel.  PRICE: $300.00

Panel fragment from the underside of the port wing, includes internal braces and some aotake blue/green primer paint. Exterior has no paint but is clean in good condition.

Above: Size of 20 x 30 inch displays.

DISPLAY FIVE: 19 x 9.5 inches.  Giclee on matte paper.  Cockpit part.  PRICE: $270.00

Very rare cockpit part with good interior green paint, aotake, and rare die stamps for Mitsubishi, and Showa 17 (1942).

DISPLAY SIX: 19 x 9.5 inches.  Giclee on matte paper.  Wheel well part.  PRICE: $270.00 

Rare example of two-sided part with excellent aotake on one side and rare exterior brown/gray on the other. Also has what appears top be a very rare WWII period bullet hole, roughly consistent with a .30 round.

DISPLAY SEVEN: 19 x 9.5 inches.  Giclee on matte paper.  Wing panel fragment.  PRICE: $270.00 

This section of panel was part of the lower port wing. Incredibly well preserved early war gray paint that retains much of its original gloss. Backside retains some aotake and portions of two 'S-D-C-R' ink stamps.

DISPLAY EIGHT: 17 x 9 inches.  Giclee on matte paper.  Internal wing brace.  PRICE: $260.00 

Very rare part that retains most of its original aotake paint and is die stamped with the Mitsubishi logo and Showa 17 (1942) as well as the 'S-D-C-H' manufacturer's mark.

DISPLAY NINE: 13 x 10 inches.  Giclee on matte paper.  1 inch square fragment with near-perfectly preserved early war Japanese Navy gray on one side - aotake on the other.  PRICE: $100.00 

CONTACT INFORMATION:

If interested in these and other related displays and parts, please contact me through this Blog, via my email at Cole's Aircraft or call: 330-883-2493 24/7.

All the best,

Ron Cole

Cole's Aircraft

Japanese WWII Aircraft Aotake Primer Coatings

Contrary to Western misconceptions during the 1930s and 1940s, the Japanese were ahead of many other nations within certain fields of innovation and technology.  Some people are aware of the vastly superior Japanese oxygen 'long lance' torpedoes, superior optics, long ranging submarines, and the venerable Zero fighter that out-maneuvered everything in the sky in 1941.  But few know about aotake.  This strikingly bright coating was developed as a corrosion preventative in the early 1930s for use in the aeronautical industry, and it is technically one of a family of zabon enamel coatings. Surrounded by salt water and employing the world's largest aircraft carrier fleet, the Japanese were keenly aware of the importance of corrosion resistance.  The Japanese also possessed a somewhat unique attitude with respect to the design and construction of their aircraft.  Unlike other airplanes built for the air forces of other countries, Japanese aircraft were built to last.  Disadvantaged as Japan was in terms of industrial output, the Japanese Army and Navy were expected to make do with the machines they were given for several years - as opposed to several months in the cases of other air forces.  Japanese aircraft were built by hand, like Swiss watches.  While these standards were compromised as greater demands were placed upon the industry after the Pacific War started in earnest, the application of the aotake primer coatings continued until almost the end of the war.  Nothing preserved metal better in those days.

Aotake remains an unsung hero; superior to the American zinc chromate primers.  Studies were conducted during and after the war in the United States that confirmed this, and aircraft archaeologists since the war have often remarked on the far greater longevity of Japanese aircraft abandoned in the jungles of the South Pacific.  Charles Darby, the famous Australian wreck hunter, once said, "If you happened upon an aircraft in the bush that at once appeared amazingly intact, chances were that it was Japanese."

But it remains mysterious stuff.  There are few examples of it still around to study.  In spite of its longevity, 70 years or more has been long enough to virtually erase it from the remaining Pacific wrecks that remain unsalvaged.  Most Japanese aircraft that were restored for museums and private collections after the war were stripped and rebuilt in such a way that this original material was destroyed in the process (ironically, some of these aircraft today are internally coated with something akin to the inferior zinc chromate).  It's unfortunate, because few paints of wartime heritage could ever be described as genuinely 'pretty'.  Aotake is an exception.  In modern terms this coating might best be described as a candy coat.  It was a translucent clear coating that was tinted in the interests of making it visible for uniform application.  It possessed a high gloss, and due to its application over bright aluminum components it took on the appearance of a metallic-like bright blue or green that would look perfectly appropriate on the exterior of an American hot rod. Until the 1980s, aotake remained virtually unknown, like most details concerning Japanese WWII aircraft colors. But it is greatly misunderstood even today.

The coloring that was added to aotake did not have a specific standardized formula. While it could most often be described generally as 'blue/green' in appearance, it was very often more green than blue, more blue than green, yellow/green, and everything in between.  Furthermore, all of these shades could be encountered within the framework of the same individual aircraft; often adjacent or overlapping each other. Aotake was applied to individual pieces - large and small, panels and braces - both before they were assembled and after assembly. Aotake was applied throughout the fabrication and assembly process and thus the same piece of metal might receive anywhere from one coat to multiple coats of aotake - each coat not necessarily the same shade. Various components were coated by various subcontractors (the Japanese aviation industry was highly decentralized long before aerial bombing made it even more so), and even within subcontractors, different batches of aotake were of different shades.  When these thousands of parts were assembled, the end result was very much a patchwork of subtly different colors.

The following examples of applied aotake originated from the same aircraft - A6M3 Model 32 Zero, serial number 3148, built by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in September 1942:

      

After an aircraft was constructed, including its exterior sheet aluminum, the Japanese commonly over-sprayed the bright aotake with dull black paint.  But this was very much a hit and miss application. Obviously, much of the aircraft structure was difficult to access, and the black coating was very unevenly applied.  When surviving examples of these parts are studied today, bright areas of aotake that were protected and covered by other components during construction can be seen adjacent to areas of dull black:

  

The history and technical application of aotake might not be seen as especially critical archaeology, but when historians falsely attribute pieces of aircraft that were shot down over Pearl Harbor as originating from different machines due to different shades of aotake, for example, it's important to know the truth regarding the application of this material.  It's also important for those intending to rebuild a Japanese aircraft that is potentially invaluable, and it certainly offers scale modelers with yet another tool in their arsenals to create a uniquely accurate model.  Last but not least, we should give credit where credit is due: the Japanese got this one right!

- Ron Cole


  

Mission Impossible: Turning Dusk to Day in Eleven Hours

by Ron Cole


When I worked in LA as an industrial designer for Mattel, one of their art directors told me once that a model I'd spent days making was perfect except that it needed to be about 5% smaller.  Those of us accustomed to that sort of work and dealing with professional clients have all had similar experiences at one time or another.  Such deflating and anti-climactic 'reveals' after hours and hours of labor can be a blow leading to a domino effect of other delayed projects, marathons in the workshop (I worked 26 hours straight once), and cancelled recreational plans.  But they can also present thrilling challenges that provide a bit of spice to one's life, and a real sense of accomplishment when something that seemed impossible is successfully completed.

Case in point:  When So and So Aviation Magazine (that's not their real name) contacted me to do their cover art for their January/February 2014 edition, I was pretty excited.  With a circulation of over 400,000, the business marketing side of me saw how that kind of exposure would be fantastic for my business.  Of course with that came the added pressure of feeling like I had to do something particularly spectacular, but with almost two months of lead time I wasn't too worried about it.  My previous experience as a designer - where people say that it's not enough to be the best, you have to also be the fastest - had made me a very efficient artist.  All speed ahead.  I completed the painting in about three weeks:

They liked it when they received it, and in fact I'd shared numerous 'in progress' images of the piece as it evolved to make sure that the composition fit the page and that my overall direction was what they were looking for.  I sent them the high resolution file, felt proud, and moved onto other commissions.

At about the time I was eagerly expecting to see the magazine released, I received a call from one of their art people.  The head art director liked the painting, but felt that the color palate was all wrong for a magazine cover.  It wouldn't 'pop' enough on the shelf.  (Ironically, I knew exactly what he was talking about.  I'd constructed a prototype scale motorcycle for a company once, painted it dark metallic orange, and while they loved it in almost every way - they rejected it because of the color.)  I was thinking, Okay, I'll tweak the colors; maybe brighten it a bit.

No.

They asked me if I could produce a 'daylight version' of the same painting - and they needed it in three days. In my head, I heard Stewie Griffin cry, "Say whaaaaaat???" But by the end of the phone call my somewhat sheepish assurances that I could do it had become more resolute.  I was trying to work out in my head how it could be done while we spoke.  I could do it - almost certainly.

Of course what remained entirely uncertain was how good the results would be.  Changing the light source in a finished painting is demanding enough all by itself.  This would be a whole new color palate and an entirely different background.  I thought I'd been so slick when I made the aircraft in my composition sport a high gloss reflective finish, and now that finish would have to reflect a completely different environment.  This was hardly going to be the 'particularly spectacular' cover I'd spent three weeks painting in the first place.

Thank God for my weird artistic process.  Having been an old-school acrylic on canvas painter in my youth, and a digital painter who produced architectural work for develops later in life, I'd combobulated a way to play to the strengths of both media.  One side effect of the process is that all of my work exists as high resolution .psd files with most elements in each composition saved on separate layers.

While hardly representative of the way I normally paint a painting, I think that the process through which I accomplished this drastic and last minute revision is worth describing.  

Step One: The background would be a total loss, no avoiding that.  It depicted a set sun located roughly behind the aircraft carrier Bunker Hill.  Any daylight composition would have to put the sun somewhere out of frame above everything, or behind the viewer.  All of the layers that related to the sky and clouds were deleted.  The ocean surface ultimately reflected the sky and its color palate - so all of its layers were deleted. So much for all of those hours spent, so sad.

Step Two:  Say 'goodbye' to all of the remaining color.  In the digital realm it's usually easy to change colors, but you can't just press a button and get what you want.  In this case I spent a good hour trying to see if I could manipulate the original color palate of the aircraft and other elements bit by bit, but it was obvious that this method would be more trouble than it was worth.  Somewhat reluctantly, I flattened all of the remaining layers (minus the sky and water) and turned them black and white:

  
Talk about a regression!  At this point I was essentially dealing with a very complicated colorization project, the likes of which I've done with old Civil War and WWII period photographs - except with a lot of new painting inevitably involved.

Step Three:  Paint a new sky and ocean surface.  I cheated here - sort of.  I seldom have any reason to be thankful for the fact that I leave many painting projects unfinished and languishing about for years.  In this case it was a blessing, as I was lucky enough to find a mostly completed sky with a light source appropriate for my needs.  The sun was just out of frame to the upper left, which was perfect.  It would justify a somewhat back-lit aircraft, and the sun's partial obstruction by thin clouds would diffuse the light and eliminate the need to paint hard shadows over everything.  Wonderful!  All I had to do from scratch was paint a new ocean surface, and slip the whole canvas behind all of the foreground elements:

  
Welcome to our new color palate!  But it was not now just a matter of re-introducing these colors to all of the things that had been previously orange.  The digital realm allows me to do that, insofar I can mask off areas of pixels or choose pixels of similar value and color them - but the end results never look realistic; they look like a colorized old picture.  The reason for this effect is because in the real world there are frequencies of light bouncing off of everything from all sorts of primary and secondary light sources, and in that process those frequencies of light - those combinations of colors - become separated.  What our human eyes seem to interpret as a specific shade of blue, for example, is in reality a hundred slightly different hues.  Digital colorization does not replicate that (the third aircraft from the top reveals what it looks like to apply simple colorization techniques):

  
Step Four:  The only thing left to do was to paint, keeping in mind the inherent attributes of the different surfaces being rendered.  Glossy blue will exchange a potion of its color value with the color value of what's being reflected off of it, while the values of non-reflective surfaces will still be changed by ambient light, though not in the same way . . . all things that I believe are best learned by simply observing the real world. But the painting at this point more resembled a complex paint-by-numbers exercise; employing semi-opaque color so as not to obliterate the original forms.  Some additional changes were made.  The soft shadows left behind from the previous light source were painted over.  The clouds that were previously reflected in the aircraft were changed to match the new background.  The lights of the aircraft were turned off.  Details, like the pilot, that had been cast in darkness from being more directly back-lit were brightened.  Lights were turned off and the bright exhaust flames were painted to look more subdued.  I moved some things around.

The end result, eleven hours later, looked pretty good:

Overall I'm very happy with the result - somewhat to my surprise and very much to my relief.  I was able to pull off an unprecedented last minute revision with essentially two days to spare.  What I have to thank for it, primarily, besides finding a good background that saved quite a bit of time, was the use of digital media.  As an old-school artist who once hated the so-called 'subversion' of all that was 'genuine' about the art of painting, I used to fear what I did not then understand.  Today I cannot imagine doing what I do for a living without it, because while I still believe that there is great value in the works of chemical pigments and animal hair brushes, the industry that we work in today is far more demanding than any paint on canvas alone can adapt to.

If I'd painted this painting originally on a stretched piece of canvas - I would have, without any question, lost this magazine cover.  Period.


- Ron Cole

The Ruthlessness of Airplane Art

by Ron Cole

It was in the first minute of the first class of the first day of college.  My Business professor, before he even introduced himself, virtually shouted the following declaration that has stuck with me for all of these years:

"Business is war!"

After that class I was thankful that my career path would probably never put me into the position of being an entrepreneur.  I didn't think I'd have it in me.  It wasn't that I thought that I lacked the smarts or skills for it, but it was never in my nature to live my life like that; in a state of perpetual warfare with equally ruthless competitors; conjuring the sort of Devil within that was evidently a primary ingredient to success in modern free market capitalism.  I look for the best in people, not for a way to run them over.  I did not want to do anything with my life where that would be regarded as a weakness.

My career post-college was as an industrial designer, mostly in the toy industry.  If you bought anything 'Hot Wheels' or 'Barbie, My Scenes' between 2001 and 2007, then you are familiar with my work.  My favorite part of that period of my career was that I focused on helping people have fun.  Of course the business end of it was always there.  Mattell, the company I worked with most regularly, was more conscious of secrecy than IBM had been when my father worked there.  I was clearly in a business that was on guard against the ruthless warfare inherent within it; always going to every conceivable extreme to make sure they never surrendered an advantage to the enemy - their competition.

But I was happily working apart from that realm.  A rear echelon guy.

To help keep my wife in school we both started a small eBay business selling designer shoes.  I kind of happened upon the idea by accident, and to make a long story short we found ourselves a great secondary source of income.  After a while its profits vastly exceeded my regular income, and we discovered that we were among the most successful eBayers then selling online.

And that's when it happened.  That's when we became big enough to become a target.  One of the shoe designers, who's daughter actually went to the same private school as our own son, contacted eBay and falsely claimed that the shoes we were selling were counterfeit.  EBay took her word for it and de-listed everything that we were selling of her brand.  Every time we provided evidence to the contrary, and eBay then allowed us to resume selling them, she'd do it again and the process kept repeating itself.  The disruptions caused our sales to drop almost 15% for several months, and the effort and anxiety expended to combat it all was sometimes overwhelming.  Surely she knew what she was doing.  She was fighting her war.

Aviation Art: Just Another Battlefield? 

I more or less fell backward into being a professional aviation artist.  I had a jumble of experiences and some talent that collided with my life-long interest in historical aviation and military history.  I used to build scale model aircraft.  When we left Los Angeles to facilitate my wife's higher education and her career, I was left adrift to find a new means of income that didn't rely on living next to Mattell's corporate offices or access to designer shoe trunk sales - all of which stayed in LA.  I'd already discovered that I could run a profitable small business.  From out of this potpourri of ingredients fell my new career as an aviation artist.  My business grew quickly.

And that's when it happened.

I might have expected to be attacked by our old relentless nemesis from the designer shoe world (she was that driven by spite, in my opinion).  At the risk of sounding naive, I simply didn't think that the genre' of aviation art - made up in large part by professional and semi-professional gentleman (and some very talented ladies, too) who almost always treat each other as respected peers, if not friends - would give birth to the ruthlessness of the business war.

As had happened in the shoe business, the attack came from a surprisingly successful and well known person; the kind of individual you'd think would be above resorting to dirty tactics to subvert their competition.

They contacted one of my clients and business partners, a non-profit aviation museum in England. This fellow artist advised them, with feigned but apparently genuine-sounding concern, that I was a fraud who stole all of my 'so-called artwork' from other artists and sold it as my own.  No evidence was provided.  The museum contacted me and told me all about it, except that they didn't reveal his name to me. While they clearly did not take him or his accusations seriously, they also did not want to be in the middle of a fight.  All I could do was take measures through my own marketing channels and online to indirectly combat the accusation.  I revealed 'snap shots' of my works in progress that proved the accusations false, and I fumed and brooded and worried endlessly that some mysterious person was trying to hurt me in the most insidious and back-handed way possible.  In addition to being concerned for my own business, I also wondered who else this unscrupulous aviation artist was trying to maliciously undermine.

There are several very troubling aspects to this form of attack.  It's extremely hard to detect.  An artist relies exclusively upon his client or partner to bring it to his attention.  Very often the artist/client relationship is fleeting by nature and isn't based upon a long social history.  In today's cynical world any hint of potential scandal can scare off otherwise fair and objective businesses and individuals before any explanation is even sought.  Even when a relationship weathers the storm, even when your partner sticks by you and your work -  does there still remain a seed of doubt that effects the relationship?  How many clients, or potential clients, have aviation artists lost due to back door attacks of this nature?

If you're an aviation artist and this guy regards you as competition, you might already be a victim and not even know it.

After a long period of hearing nothing, another client of mine was contacted - not once but twice - over the course of the Christmas holidays of 2013.

This time I was lucky, because my client also happened to be a good friend of mine who knew me very well. I received this person's communications filled with completely invented accusations.  He claimed that I was a fraud, again, this time insisting that I stole copyrighted photographs, mirrored them, added a 'simple' Photoshop effect, and sold them as 'art'.  In his second communication, after he'd failed to receive a response to the first, he went so far as to try and intimidate my client by suggesting they could be held civilly liable for doing business with me.  Most important of all, however: I got his real name.

And I was shocked.

I did send him a long letter that I hope appealed to his sense of decency.  I explained that I respected his work, which remains true.  I congratulated him on a new commission that he'd just had published.  I warned him in the strongest possible terms that if he ever tried to spread false rumors, or subvert my business by contacting my clients with invented accusations again - I would sue him for Business Defamation and refuse any settlement on principle.

It should never have to come to that.

It is because I refuse to fight this 'war' like a vengeful combatant that I refrain from revealing his identity at this point.  I thought long and hard about that, though, because the only thing more shocking than who he is, is the fact that I do not know him. That makes it all even more disturbing to me, and the temptation to reveal his identity and sound an alarm within our community was great.  This article is the end result of a compromise that I think strikes a fair balance.

I write this as an appeal to the aviation art community.  We can choose what our genre' will tolerate.  We can establish the rules of war for ourselves, and let it be known that, even in some instance when an accusation might have some kind of merit - there is a right way and a wrong way of doing things in the aviation art world.  As for me, I'm going to continue to do what I love to do more than anything I've done with my life so far - I'm going to keep painting pretty airplanes for a living.

- RC