WALTER E. BOHL Walter E. Bohl's beginning in art proves the saying about clouds and silver linings. In 1930 he was working for the Illinois Bell Telephone Company in Chicago when he became seriously ill and had to leave his work. During a long convalescence he began making pen-and-ink drawings to pass the time. His natural subjects were birds, animals, and outdoor scenes because ever since his boyhood in Columbus, Wisconsin (where he was born on September 10, 1907) he had loved to hunt and fish, with drawing as a secondary interest. Some of these first pen-and-ink drawings were sold to friends and others were taken to Marshall Field's in Chicago. The manager of the Picture Gallery there was impressed, but because there was no demand for pen-and-ink work then, suggested etchings. For Mr. Bohl, this meant borrowing books on etching from the Chicago Public Library, making a press from a discarded clothes wringer, improvising a graver that was a darning needle set into a fiber handle, and getting his copper from a hardware store and polishing it by hand. His first plate was a small drypoint of a sailboat. Others followed, and later in the same year (1935) his work was reproduced for the first time in American Field to illustrate a story by William C. Hazelton. The next year Mr. Bohl illustrated a book by the same author called Supreme Duck Shooting Stories. In 1934 Mr. Bohl made ten small etchings of interesting scenes at Chicago's Century of Progress. That July he was displaying his etchings at an outdoor show with about 300 other artists, when Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt stopped to see the show and bought the work of two artists of whom one was Mr. Bohl. In October of that year Mr. Bohl and the former Ann Larson of Lake Owen in northern Wisconsin were married and set out in a secondhand Ford coupe packed with camping gear for Stuttgart, Arkansas, a great rice-growing area. They were looking for material for duck etchings and they found thousands of ducks, all willing to model. The following summer the young couple was back in Chicago and again Mr. Bohl had his etchings in an outdoor art show, this time featuring ducks and hunting dogs. One day two men, both strangers to Mr. Bohl, stopped to examine his work and then asked him to bring samples of his work to their office. Not until the next day, when he went to the address the men had given him, did Mr. Bohl realize that this was Esquire magazine that was so interested in his work. The result of that call was a double-page spread in the November 1935 issue of the magazine. They had used some of his pencil drawings in the previous issue, but this was the first national presentation of his etchings. Esquire proclaimed him as one of its proudest discoveries. Already, in a scant five years and with no formal art training, Mr. Bohl had a firmly established reputation as an etcher. His work appeared in several magazines, and Esquire featured it regularly from 1934 to 1943. In 1941 he began doing watercolors and they, too were immediately successful. Esquire published one each month during 1942, in addition to his etchings, and there were newspaper articles about him in various part of the country. Mr. Bohl's paintings and etchings have been shown in many nationally prominent exhibitions and he has had one-man shows in six large galleries. Examples of his work are in many private collections in this country, Mexico, Canada, and Europe. It can be seen in the Bertha Jaques Memorial at the National Gallery in Washington, D. C.; at the Department of Library and Archives, State Capitol, Phoenix, Arizona; in the building housing the Department of Wildlife Ecology, University of Wisconsin; and in many other places. |
Russell Fink Gallery |