NY Times article on Quality & Centaur artist Art Pinajian

[markseifert]

The home of deceased Quality and Centaur artist Art Pinajian was recently sold (he passed in 1999, his sister just recently died, apparently), and the contents of the house included a trove of his artwork and journals.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/14/nyregion/14artist.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=nyregion

 

found via the Beat:

http://pwbeat.publishersweekly.com/blog/2007/03/14/you-cant-take-it-with-you/

 

I hope the comic-relevant material eventually finds its way into the hands of some of our comic historians. Sounds like an interesting time capsule of the man's work.

[sacentaur]

I always liked his work - thnx for the links.

 

STEVE

[Scrooge]

Now, that's a very sad story to me. The guy did tons of work for Centaur then mainly for Quality. There's probably some interesting comic artwork in that collection but it seems no-one including the writer of the article (whose research consisted and stopped at Googling ) has an inkling of the extent of his work in that field.

 

The story has another bitter-sweet taste to me because I recalled immediately that Art's cousin is (was?) Chuck Mazoujian who was still alive when Art died. They must have grown apart / distant over the years since Chuck obviously didn't make any effort to go through Art's estate. The article makes it sound like the house has been vacant for a while. I would hate for the potential comic book pages to get lost or thrown away. Now, I'm sure some dealers will hear of this and rescue the pages. In fact, I hope they do! Would Stephen F. place a call for such obscure an artist's work? If you read this, please do!

 

Here are a couple of words from Chuck Mazoujian about his cousin, Art Pinajian:

 

"He was a very bright, amusing guy, and he was a pretty good writer who could come up with nice ideas. He was a little older than me (Scrooge note: Chuck was born in 1917). We grew up together as kids, and I loved him; he was a marvelous man. Art was good with ideas, but he wasn't a very good draftsman. He used to go to the Art Students League two or three nights a week to study figure drawing. He was very faithful about going, but he could never improve his work very much. He did some interesting, almost abstract drawings that I liked.

 

When we got together, we would talk about painting, art, and the guys whose work we loved: Norman Rockwell, Rembrandt, and the top illustrators of the day. Art loved painting, and that's what he did later in his life. I got word that he had died about a year and a half ago."

 

This would have been a better tribute to Art than the NY Times article!! The interview with Chuck by Jim Amash was published in Alter Ego # 48 in May 2005 and, yes, I still remember reading it!