Pan American Airlines in Art, by Ron Cole

My first Pan American Airlines painting was back in 2011. In those days I was cranking out World War II aircraft compositions during the early phase of my professional artist career. World War II was becoming a hugely popular genre rivaling the popularity of the American Civil War among collectors and my work sold very well. But I was commissioned to paint the Boeing 314 clipper in the livery of Pan American Airlines by an avid airline enthusiast. The subject matter gave me an excuse to focus upon the nostalgic qualities of the aircraft and its period setting - something that sometimes is less evident in a painting that depicts harrowing air-to-air combat. The result, to my surprise, became my best selling limited edition print of my career to date. The composition has since gone on to be described by some authorities as one of the best aviation art pieces of all time.

The downside of enjoying a success such as my 314 was the inevitability of trying to outdo it in later work, which I've yet to do in spite of my best efforts time and again (at least if sales are my only measure). But the 314 opened a lot of doors for me professionally, including a book cover, a puzzle, other Pan Am-based commissions, and most recently a 2016 wall calendar published by the Pan Am Historical Foundation (PAHF).

The PAHF is not a club founded by Pan Am fans - it is the last remaining official entity in the world that is of the original Pan American Airlines; founded and run by ex-Pan Am executives, to serve its membership of ex-Pan Am employees from all parts of the once glorious global corporation. Pan Am as an airline ceased to exist in December of 1991, but had been in operation since 1927; becoming one of the great icons of the golden age of aviation. When they contacted me early in 2015 to be the sole contributor to their calendar project, to consist of twelve of my original paintings, I was certainly honored. After discussions it was decided to use only three of my existent compositions, including the 314, and I would paint no fewer than nine all-new pieces for the project. To my knowledge nothing exactly like it had been done before: one artist creating that much all-new original work, dedicated to a single theme, within a calendar. Most artists don't create that much new work in a year. Needless to say, it was a huge endeavor for me, at a time when I had another large project on my table (two huge paintings for Japanese CEO Nobuo Harada). From April to September I juggled work around and learned the true meaning of multitasking. I completed the last painting two days before deadline.

The theme of the calendar was the history of Pan Am aviation, starting in 1927. Technically the first operational aircraft in the Pan Am fleet was the Fokker F-10, but since it closely resembled the later Ford Trimotor, we opted to cover the latter at the expense of the former - the Trimotor being a much more iconic aircraft. I depicted it on the grounds of Miami's commercial airport at the time.

The Sikorsky S-42 was next. I already had painted the S-42 in two other compositions, neither of which I regarded as my best work. Ron Marasco, who once served as Pan Am's Vice President of Maintenance and Engineering and who was the PAHF's force behind the calendar project, suggested depicting the S-42 flying over the Golden Gate bridge at it appeared under construction. Several period photos showed similar compositions. I opted to depict the scene at sunset with the Japanese steamship Hikawa Maru below.

Besides the Boeing 314, the next aircraft in line was the Douglas DC-6. Ron wanted to depict historic locations around the world in each composition, and for the DC-6 I opted to show Berlin. I spent a good deal of time on this concept: showing the American DC-6 over the Brandenburg Gate at a time the latter was still being reconstructed after World War II.

I chose San Francisco at night for the Boeing 377. Based upon the B-50 strategic bomber, I loved the looks of the Stratocruiser. I loved even more any excuse to depict lights at night! This 377 was the only new painting for the calendar that I was permitted to release in advance of the calendar itself. So far its popularity and sales have been second only to my 314.

I dodged a location-specific environment for the Lockheed Constellation. It didn't start out that way, but as the composition evolved I felt that landmark structures in the background would take away from the shape of the aircraft - which was of course classically elegant. With so many full-aircraft compositions I wanted to break up what might otherwise have been a collective monotony, so the Connie was cropped with a slightly exaggerated frontal view. I love rain, but only in paint form. It helped create a mood in this piece.  

Looking for the best landmark in Asia to represent that part of the world, I had to pick Mount Fuji in Japan as the backdrop for the Boeing 707. When I was a kid I flew coach in one of these en route to Germany from New York. Not exactly a wide body airplane by modern standards!

     
The original Jumbo Jet: Ron placed a great deal of personal emphasis on the 747-100, as he literally wrote the book about the aircraft. In this case I was provided with the original photo that he used for the cover of his book. "Paint that," he said. People might think that painting from a photo is easier than not painting from a photo, but that's seldom true. In this case lens distortion caused by the photographer's telephoto drove me nuts. The tail was huge; the nose oddly truncated - all of which had to be corrected without straying from the photo's perspective. Maintaining the original lighting made for a very 'photographic' result - but a pretty one that I like.

 
The Boeing 727 was actually the ninth and final painting I completed for the project. As such it was the one I had to rush the most and the one I feared might look the most rushed. Perhaps because of that, and with only five days before deadline, I chose the most complicated background yet among the series: Berlin Tempelhof International Airport at night. The shape of the terminal provided a unique instrument to create depth and balance (Thank you, Albert Speer). Completed in just about four long and busy days, it turned out to one of my favorites.

In terms of its placement within Pan Am's historic timeline, the 747 SP rounded out the entire collection. Ron had very specific plans for its composition, as well. A somewhat general painting similar to my creation once hung in the Pan Am Building in New York. When the company folded, it found its way into the private collection of a former executive. No one seems to know who painted it, but the piece became something of a nostalgic memento. While I went out of my way to copy nothing from it but the basic 'feel' and color palate, high over Rio at sunset was the perfect setting for Pan Am's last great aircraft.

Thank you, Ron Marasco, Pete and Sudhir for the opportunity that you and the Pan Am Historical Foundation gave me. It was my pleasure, and unprecedented career challenge, for me to donate three of my original compositions and paint nine new compositions for you. I think that the results accumulate into something greater than a new 'official' Pan American Airlines product, or an aviation art calendar, or an accumulation of my best work. I hope we sell a million!

Ron Cole
October 2015

The Pan Am Historical Foundation's 2016 wall calendar, and all of these painting as limited edition prints, may be purchased directly from Cole's Aircraft at: PAA Artwork by Ron Cole

Visit the Pan Am Historical Foundation's web page: http://panam.org

Going Nuts With Polished Metal Finishes

Polished metal is one of the hardest things for an artist to paint. There are several good reasons for this: the reflective surface immediately multiplies the complexity of a composition by revealing its otherwise out-of-frame environment, it changes the rules of light and shadow, and it makes otherwise invisible variations in a surface key characteristics of its visible properties. In short, a 100 hour project instantly becomes a 400 hour project if it has to be painted to portray convincing polished metal.

As I use both by-hand and digital painting tools to create most of my work, I've used both to experiment with painting this tricky surface. One thing that I confirmed right away was that digital painting (to be set apart from digital rendering, which is something created by software as opposed to being painted by hand using digital tools) was a terrible way to create a convincing polished metal effect. The reason: digital tools that lay down color are too uniform and precise. A digital tool will paint a perfect circle or a line without 'error'. Good for some things, but looking at the nose of Amelia Earhart's Lockheed Electra (above) there are no perfect circles or perfect lines in evidence. While not as organic as a tree, it's still very random and free from most patterns. A brush in one's hand is the perfect tool for what's organic, as the innumerable variations that come into play as its color is laid down create their own pleasantly imperfect character. Two brush painted rivets will not be alike, and a distorted reflection in a metal panel created by those two rivets will likewise not take on an undesirable pattern. But while digital tools are bad at organics, hand tools are bad at the very thing that digital tools are good at - precision. Brushes leave brush strokes, and a convincing polished metal surface has a very fluid appearance which brush strokes tend to ruin.

     
 

My answer, as with most painting challenges I take on, has been to blend the two media together, playing to the unique strengths of both digital tools and hand tools. The polished aluminum skin of this YP-37 (above) reflects very contrasting colors. Everything you see was first put down by brush. During that process I regulated the 'shake' of my hand to break up lines and form (the human brain, like a computer's, wants to create patterns - which we have to consciously suppress as artists). Dimples around a line of flush rivets are unavoidably unique thanks to my hand's imprecision, as they would be on the actual aircraft. But the end result is not fluid. Of course it looks painted. I can see where brush strokes start and stop, and those are all bad attributes when realism is the objective.

But then I do something weird by traditional art standards: I import my brush painted work into the digital realm. Once there my painting exists within a different world that doesn't know the limiting characteristics of acrylic paint (like drying times) or the obnoxious qualities of paper (like becoming overworked). My surface is essentially a liquid that I can distort and blend at will with custom tools that I've created. A flick of the wrist with one tool blurs away brush strokes, while a careful shimmy along a line between two contrasting colors will cause that line to blend with precise control. A reflection near a rivet may have a vary sharp quality, while the reflection's characteristics may soften as it traverses the flatter surface area towards the next rivet. I can also grab some 'sky' and use a digital brush the add it atop a rivet in a 'red' area, then 'fuzz it out' as the hemispherical rivet contorts the reflection of the sky across its surface.

I think you get the idea.

Sometimes it's fun, within the digital realm, to imagine a tool dropped by some 1930s-era aircraft mechanic onto the aluminum skin of a wing fillet. I can use a tool to 'squish' that reflection to portray a vague dent. Also, I can mask off a particular panel and imagine that, for whatever reason, the alloy there had taken on a very light degree of surface corrosion - just enough to desaturate the colors in the reflection and blur its lines in relation to panels around it. Markings painted atop the natural metal might have been matte, satin, or gloss. The YP-37 sported gloss marking in its day with their own reflection's distinctive qualities from the surrounding polished metal. High gloss red, for example, will surrender some of its saturation when reflecting a deep blue sky.

 

I can't say that I've quite mastered these techniques, but I'm progressing with each new composition. Besides the processes that I've described, I will say that 70% of all art is actually observation. It almost drives me crazy now, as it's impossible for me to stand in front of a meticulous P-51 Mustang in the bright sun and appreciate it as a whole. Instead my eye is drawn immediately to its details: how flush rivets interact with the skin as opposed to raised rivets; how some raised rivets have tiny indentations in their middles while others don't; how heat effects different alloys; how skin thickness changes the way it is distorted near its edges. But, it does pay off when it comes to duplicating such things with paint - be that paint of a chemical or digital nature, or both.

- Ron Cole

Something Completely Different: Steve McQueen's XKSS

I paint airplanes. Lots and lots of airplanes. That's not something that I was pigeonholed into, as is sometimes the case with artists who find themselves stuck in a genre', but a subject that has fascinated me since I was a child. Demand for new aviation work and new aviation commissions, however, leaves me with little time to explore new territory. As a professional artist I'm motivated to be accepted elsewhere. I love classic cars. I love surrealism. I love portraits.

I had to make something different!

Classic Americana. History. Hollywood and heroes. I searched old photographs to help me come up with an idea and rough composition that would encompass the most among those elements. I found it with Steve McQueen and his Jaguar XKSS in a Hollywood movie studio back lot. That car! I adore the European sports cars of the 1950s and 1960s. It's no accident that my Maserati GranTourismo by Pininfarina is a car designed after Ferrari's 275 GTB/4 by the same designer. The XKSS, though a British car, was built for the same tracks and with the same graceful flair. And Steve McQueen? I know he was a guy who was difficult to work with and famously stated, "If I hadn't made it in Hollywood, I think I would have become a hood," but nowhere has their been a greater uniquely American icon - in my opinion.  

My painting adhered relatively closely to a famous photograph of McQueen, which I wanted to do. I depicted him a few years older, and changed the atmosphere of the studio lot that reflected his movies and its location in California. I added the reflection of his famous (though much later) 'Bullitt' custom Mustang in the fender of the Jag. I adorned Steve with his uniquely designed wedding ring and Occhiali Persol sunglasses.

I've released this composition as limited edition prints in all of my regular sizes on various papers and canvas:  http://coles-aircraft.myshopify.com/collections/automotive-gallery-ron-cole-aviation-art-cars-classic/products/steve-mcqueen-jaguar-xkss-ron-cole-aviation-automotive-art  

I did go overboard with detail, as that's part of my style.

Maybe a Ferrari next?

- Ron Cole

Yamamoto's Aircraft Wreck: History, Art, and Relics by Ron Cole

Like Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, in the United States he was a universally hated emblem of the Axis. This was the man who had supposedly boasted that his nation would one day take America's surrender in the White House. Isoroku Yamamoto was Japan's top Admiral, commander of its Combined Fleet, and the force of will that lay behind his country's attack upon Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. There was scarcely an American who would not celebrate the man's death. 

As is often the case in times of war, however, Yamamoto was a misunderstood enemy. No one in Japan could have opposed the war more vigorously than Admiral Yamamoto and avoid being assassinated - which was an accepted risk in politics in Japan at the time. In fact he was a political Admiral who was given command of the fleet in part to get him out of Tokyo; to save his life. His remarks about surrender in the White House were taken far out of context. The rant was actually uttered as a means of illustrating, to Japan's war proponents, the absurd lengths that his country would have to go if it ever hoped to defeat the United States - an aim Yamamoto believed was impossible. Not unlike Robert E. Lee, he took his forces into a war he'd hoped to avoid out of a sense of duty. "I will throw everything into the fight," the Admiral said on the eve of war, then added, "I expect to die in battle." 

And he did.

It was called, with no will to be subtle about it, Operation Vengeance. Due to the secret Allied ability to read Japanese Naval codes, it had been determined that Isoroku Yamamoto was scheduled to fly into Balalae in the Solomons on April 18, 1943 on an inspection tour of the front. It was a risky mission in many respects: the Japanese might determine that their codes had been compromised, Balalae was barely within range of long range fighters (P-38 Lightnings), and after the Japanese debacle at Midway there was concern among American strategists that someone more capable than Yamamoto might take his place. But all of these concerns were overwhelmed by the sentiment expressed in the name of the operation. The President himself weighed in on the decision by simply saying, "Get Yamamoto!"  

Two Japanese fast transports (converted G4M1 bombers) and six escorting Zero fighters left Rabaul on the morning of the 18th. Eighteen P-38s of the 339th Fighter Squadron left Guadalcanal to intercept. Thanks to retrofitted Naval compasses, extra large drop tanks, near miraculous navigation and sheer luck on the part of the Americans, the two flights met each other over the island of Bougainville. The action was swift. One G4M1 transport went down in the water. The other, carrying Yamamoto and marked with the tail code 'T1-323', went down in the jungle. The latter was marked by a thick plume of smoke. 

In the trees and amid the fire, there was only one survivor of the crash. It is believed that the aircraft's copilot, though severely injured and with only a few more minutes to live, took it upon himself to pose his Admiral's body in a position of dignity: sitting upright in his chair with his sword in his hand. He was discovered in that position by a Japanese Army search team. For the United States the operation was a much needed moment of justice, and for its air forces a triumph of operational planning on every level. For many Japanese, Yamamoto's death foretold an inevitable end that the Admiral had himself predicted. For one pilot, Kenji Yanagiya, who flew one of the escorting Zeros that day, the shame and agony never abated. Sixty years later he accompanied Japanese 'Ace' Saburo Sakai to Texas for a reunion of pilots from both sides of the action. When he was asked to autograph a painting of Yamamoto being shot down in flames, he pulled Sakai aside with tears in his eyes and said, "I cannot bear to sign the most shameful failure of my life." He did, nevertheless, respect all present by adding his signature. Photos from the reunion reveal that old hatreds, misunderstandings, and the most brutal war in a century may be healed among great men of honor - no matter who they'd fought for. 

Throughout all of these years the wreck of Isoroku Yamamoto's aircraft has remained where it fell, in the dense jungle of Bougainville. It is likely the most historically significant World War II aircraft wreck in the world, and in more recent years it has been coveted and protected as such. Visitations to the now cleared and guarded site are regular and help support the local economy. Taking a piece of the aircraft away from the site is akin to trying to steal a piece of the pyramids of Giza. But in the 1960s, while similar wartime aircraft were still being cut up for scrap in the area, the times were very different. Remote areas in the South Pacific were being surveyed by geological companies and explored in the hopes of finding valuable natural resources. One such Australian firm had its crew on Bougainville in 1968, and during its down time heard about the 'famous' wreck of an Admiral's plane. For a small fee, natives led the crew to the site. There were bits and pieces everywhere, and many were taken away. 

That's how I obtained pieces of Yamamoto's aircraft forty years later.

I was commissioned by a wealthy collector of sports memorabilia to paint the moment that Yamamoto's aircraft was shot down. He'd obtained a piece of the aircraft and thought a painting of it would make for a valuable investment when displayed together. Of course the action had already been painted by many artists, so I sought to depict it in a different and hopefully more dramatic way. 

My opportunity to acquire pieces of the aircraft myself occurred later, after I'd released the painting as a limited edition. The promotion of the print actually acted like a net among people all over the world who'd acquired pieces from the wreck at one time or another and wanted the print as a companion to them. One person had a control wheel, another a piece that he claimed was part of the bomb sight, others simple little pieces of metal. All extremely rare. When an Aussie offered up a couple of aluminum panels in exchange for a print, I happily agreed! He shared his story of their acquisition in 1968. Upon study they were found to be consistent with panels from the undersurface of the wing: Japanese transparent 'Aotake' green on one side, faint traces of light gray over iron oxide red primer on the other. In 2013 I began offering my print and pieces of these panels in my 13 x 19 inch framed displays through Cole's Aircraft. To me, it's a great source of pride that I can disseminate this kind of tangible history to others who can appreciate it.  

Invest in a limited edition Yamamoto relic display via either of my two online stores: http://www.roncole.net

- Ron Cole

The Lockheed Electra of Amelia Earhart

It's hard to paint a tragedy. As a general rule I don't even paint wartime aviation compositions in which anyone is being shot down. It's just not part of the story that I wish to emphasize, and I've found that the veterans themselves have greatly appreciated that fact. When the idea of a composition based upon the last moments of Amelia Earhart's Lockheed Electra was proposed to me, however, I admit that I liked the idea. It hadn't been done. With the continuing search for her aircraft in the news recently, it was timely. Thus I grappled with how I could depict the event in a way that would convey the least amount of tragedy.

There are many theories that purport to explain the disappearance of Earhart and Fred Noonan in July of 1937. The only one I feel qualified to weigh in on is the idea that their Electra was shot down by the Japanese. The Japanese Naval aviation community in those days was a very small and closely knit cadre of elite pilots, and I've known many of them that survived World War II. I've heard stories about all sorts of controversial pre-war incidents, including the bombing of the USS Panay, but not a thing about any involvement with Earhart's aircraft. It wasn't a secret that could have been kept at the time, and it certainly could not have been kept over the ensuing decades. The remaining theories have Earhart either crashing into the middle of the ocean, or ditching near one of a few possible Pacific islands where she and Noonan might have survived for some time. One story even has them conceiving a child at some point, and much later passing away. In all honesty, and in keeping with the principle of Occam's razor, I think they probably went down far at sea. But I just couldn't bring myself to celebrate that end in a painting. I wanted there to be hope in my rendition of the story.

I suspect that if land had been sighted that day in 1937, Earhart would have stayed aloft as long as possible in order to use her altitude for better radio range. She'd been transmitting all morning but had not been able to receive. She had no way of knowing if anyone could hear her or not, but giving the world every opportunity to get a bearing on her location was her best hope of eventual rescue. One engine would have run out of fuel before the other, and she likely would have stayed aloft until the other quit. In my painting I've depicted her aircraft mere seconds before it hit the water - but with the green and hopeful reflection of an island straight ahead of her.

I'd like to think that my painting reflects reality; that the ditching of Amelia Earhart's Electra only meant the closing of one particular chapter in her life and the opening of another. It is still possible that she and her navigator lived out an existence of significance on some remote Pacific atoll. Maybe they even did have a family and knew new pleasures together. That's the hope I opted to try and capture in my homage to Amelia and Fred. I think it came out nicely.

- Ron Cole