by jon bosworth jaxvillain@yahoo.com
"I had this friend that made entire comic strips out of his head. There was no market for it, there was no reason, he just did it. So I just started doing things. I thought that when you turned fifty you were supposed to be depressed, my father said that when a man turns fifty he should be taken outside and shot…I read there is a formula for happiness. There is your pre-disposition, good fortune, and voluntary activity. Not work, work isn't voluntary, it can be, but not usually. It's better to come back from a depressing weekend with stuff to show."
This sort of manic shift in thought is not only part and parcel when speaking with artist, writer, illustrator, and graphic designer Oscar Senn, his frenetic pacing starts to make sense after talking with him for a moment, and you may even feel that you are getting smarter. Oscar has published several books, is an impressive painter, and is currently doing freelance design work for CitiGroup's website, all this is not to mention his movie script in the works and the line of sarcastic plush dolls that he created.
"The writing I do is pictures in my head that I describe, so it impacts me visually as well as through the language. The best thing I can do is have an easel in one room and a computer in the other so that when I get bored with one I can go to the other."
I met with Oscar at Taj, an Indian restaurant on Southside, but they were closing down the place before we were done talking, so we met again later at his Arlington home. The walls of his office are a small gallery, not of his incredibly detailed oil paintings, but of awards for his fiction and poetry, a letter from Ray Bradbury, and several more trophies of his success as a writer.
"I haven't read much Steven King because I'm jealous of him. He's a mediocre talent that has made it ridiculously big."
And yet there is a French copy of Steven King's The Talisman (Le Talisman des Territoires) that features a painting of his son on the slip cover framed on the wall. There is also a letter from an eight year old fan that enjoyed his children's books ("Have you been writing books your whole life? Do you have any other job?") and a reply from a hero. When Oscar's first book was published, he sent a copy to Ray Bradbury, who replied in a handwritten letter (that Oscar insists was penned by an assistant) that read: "I just read the first chapter! A fine beginning and a lovely style."
Oscar wrote his first novel during his junior year in high school. It was a science fiction spy novel that he likened to Ian Flemming, only from the perspective of a sixteen year old. During gym class he would sneak off to write while his classmates played football. He entered his writing into a Doubleday contest and lost to Piers Anthony, but he also got a letter from the Doubleday editor that said he had a narrative talent.
"The pictures tell a story too. They are narrative. My favorite artist is N.C. Wyeth. His illustration work was glorious, but he always felt he wasn't appreciated as a fine artist. Later in his career he did these pieces that were stiffer. They were still good, but the pieces he did under deadline had a swash to them. Essentially, even fine art is illustration, because it has a story to it."
Oscar was sorting through some books in the employee library at the Times-Union while employed there as a copy writer and he came across a book titled 'Lizard Music' by Daniel Pinkwater.
"It knocked me out because it was so much fun. It was a kid's book, but it was funny. I wrote to him and we wrote back and forth. Then he introduced me to his publisher."
After that experience, when he was seeking out a different opportunity, he set out to send manuscripts to a listing of publishers. He was going alphabetically and he got a positive reply from Atheneum Publishers. They published the hardcover story In The Castle of the Bear.
"Working with this editor was such an interminable process. After a year of trying to rewrite this to suit the editor, I told her that I must not be a good writer or she wasn't a good editor. That's when she sent me a contract."
Hanna Barbara also did an animated Fozbek based on his story the Double Disappearance of Walter Fozbek, a story about a young boy that wakes up in a world where everyone else is suddenly a dinosaur.
"It sucked, but it was still cool that they made it."
Oscar recently returned from California where he was working on a project called "Pet Peeves," which are plush dolls that portray annoyances. They would make great gag gifts for the people around the office. There is the Cellaphant, the tag reads: "Yakking away in their own private world, they annoy you in restaurants and movies, and run you off the road." The Ignorilla: "Outwardly very pleasant, these creatures pay no attention while pretending to listen." These clever gag gifts are another remarkable extension of Oscar's ability to multi-task on a grander level. Something he refers to as his ADD.
And that isn't all he has in the cooker. A children's book that he wrote for fun, because he thought it had no commercial value, has recently been purchased by a Hollywood producer and is being pitched as a viable children's film. All of this is not even to mention his artwork.
Although it is difficult to find some of his work (he currently has some pieces on display at Fogle Fine Arts & Accessories), his knack with a brush is phenomenal. He paints meticulously detailed oil paintings of everyday scenes. Only these scenes also contain floating turtles or a dinosaur standing in the background. Not exactly surrealism, if Salvadore Dali is surrealism, the concept is more like subjective realism, because they portray a reality that exists to a child, but not to most adults.
"They inhabit a real world that we don't see. So I like to show adults what it looks like. Things are possible to children that aren't possible to us."
He never made tons of money at writing, art, or toys, he just worked hard.
"America doesn't reward art. When that dawns for you, it puts a pall on things. But in Portugal or Spain, the guy in town that makes pots is the king guy. He makes something valuable. It has nothing to do with economics."
Cursed with a "horrible love for beauty," he doesn't paint or write to shock or offend, though he often wishes he could, but he creates images of have harmony.
"I don't want to shock, I want to lull people."
"The funny thing about writing is that I can be minimal in writing, I can cut back and be understated. That's what is exciting about writing to me. Bad writing identifies the sad part by having the character cry. You want the writing to set a tone that breaks your heart. Writing is frequently about what is not happening, and my paintings are frequently about that as well. I notice things, as the all-seeing narrative eye, my omniscient narrator, so that you don't have to."
Oscar Senn lives and works in Jacksonville, Florida. This unmitigated talent shops at your Publix or is at the table next to you at The Loop. Go to originalsenn.com to see more of Oscar's paintings, illustrations, and design work, or email him from there asking for excerpts from his recently completed novel, which he is currently calling The Sycamore Testament.
"It's had many titles."
He describes the theme of this book as "Growing up is about learning to forgive yourself." However the actual story is about a man in his fifties trying to piece together the fragmented memories of his past to uncover some secrets that will help him live. After speaking to Oscar for a few hours, I can assure you that the book will be more bizarre than that brief description presents. For the rest of this interview, go to eujacksonville.com. I will end this article with the first words Oscar said to me during this interview:
"When you look at progenitors, people that influence you, you know Faulkner or Hemmingway, my progenitor is God. What does he do? He creates. That's what I do. We have that in common."
EU: Where does your fascination with Dinosaurs come from?
OS: Fantasia. The fact of the dinosaurs, lets get to the meat of the matter, the fact of the dinosaurs. Lizards; highly evolved, thinking lizards, twenty-feet tall, existed right here. That is real and kids see a world we don't. What 3 year old hasn't walked through a forest and thought there are dinosaurs here. They inhabit a real world that we don't see. So I like to show adults what it looks like. Things are possible to children that aren't possible to us.
EU: Did you consider yourself a visual artist or a writer first?
OS: Yes. It's funny because you don't consider yourself one or the other. I went to art school because you didn't need math. That's the profession I went into so I've made a living at that. My first love is writing, but I haven't made a living at that.
I was only getting a thousand or two thousand for a book. I was never going to be Judy Blume, but the bright side is that some kids thought those books were the best things ever. I got a letter from a designer that my Fozbek book inspired him to get into art. I didn't want to be famous, but I wanted it to be able to do more writing.
EU: How would an art critic categorize your paintings? Surrealism?
OS: They don't really know how. They call it surrealism because of the strangeness and because I've dealt with a lot of childhood images and old amateur photography, people refer to it as nostalgia, but its not. I just capture this really alien moment. I don't really understand art critics or the things they talk about.
EU: When did you stop writing children's fiction and decide to take on a grownup story?
OS: I didn't decide to quit, I decided to watch TV instead of writing for six months for a thousand bucks, I still have children's stories I want to write. I wrote this kid's book called A Captive Angel that was really good, but my agent finally retired it, he was embarrassed to keep pushing it.
I always wrote adult stuff. Lynn [Harlin, his editor] challenged me because I had this grand idea when I was younger that I wanted to do something with. There is this group of stories, the protagonist is a kid, but just because the protaganist is a kid doesn't mean it's a kids book. But it wasn't chronological, the stories just went all over the place. Lynn asked "what do you want to do?" You should never tell Lynn what you want to do because she'll jump on your back and make you do it. That started hell. She made me write about these ideas.
We had this "experiment" that she wanted me to do, it wasn't supposed to be in the book, and she told me to write about things from my age-perspective and put a dead character back in the story. Then she went on to tell me to make a scene happen on a houseboat. It made me mad that she was trying to tell me what to write down to the location. I was so angry. I was fueled by it. I wrote for four or five hours about this character that wasn't even in my book and it became the beginning of the adult story.
It was about doing something I didn't want to do. I made myself do it and it was great. She is like a shaman. A Don Juan. I don't know if it's real or if someone's tricking me.
EU: What were you doing in California recently? Is there some sort of movie in the works?
OS: My friend Cheryl LaBute, she's a producer from Jacksonville that worked at Dreamworks and Disney. She bought the rights to my retired manuscript and flew me out for a month or two hammering out the script. A Captive Angel is the title.
It is about a genie that had committed this big faux paux at Ramidan. It had all this Moslim stuff, so I thought it would never get published.
Hollywood is a strange place. I'm happy to have her deal with all of that.
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