A Portrait of the Artist as a Father

For his 67th birthday, I gave my dad six or so sugar pine pinecones. They are big, sometimes reaching over a foot long, with a distinctive smell that today I can’t separate from our childhood summers by Lake Tahoe. Back then my dad would often go about the forest with us, collecting these monstrous pinecones, bringing them back to camp to make huge piles. Sometimes we’d use them to start fires but more often than not we’d just stack them and admire their size. Each year we went up there, he would be transfixed by finding these cones. He would often bring more than a dozen home and they’d sit in the corner of our living room, slowly falling apart in a neat pyramid. 

So, just before his birthday, while on a small trip that led me past Lake Tahoe, I stopped on the side of the road near a patch of sugar pines and gathered as many as I could fit on one arm and stashed them in the back of my old Volvo. 

When I got home (I was living with him at the time), I presented the huge pinecones. His eyes lit up, so ecstatic to see his favorite pinecone. He left them outside in the little brick garden where they sat and dried. The wind would sometimes bring their smell to us as we sat there in the evening, drinking whiskey and sharing a cigarette.

It’s inarticulate, what it is he likes. That’s why he makes pictures. What it is he sees and feels he can’t express well in words. But you see it in him when he looks at things—what hurts him, frustrates him, what makes him feel loved, what brings him peace. And this, he has always had the wild ability to express in pictures. As a working illustrator and artist for his entire adult life, his impulse to always gravitate to what it is he sees as beautiful has been at the heart of what keeps him going. Often that is long and open landscapes, the ocean, well shaped rocks, a good and visceral color, and of course, pinecones. 

His obsession with beauty is deeply ingrained. His vision of proper aesthetics is stubborn to the point of frustration at times. If he doesn't like the look of something there’s no arguing with him. And yes, he does have very good taste likely because of that stubbornness, but damn is it frustrating sometimes. This, combined with his chaotic and spacey way of thinking—getting distracted by some interesting plant, or funny idea and changing the course of a conversation on a whim—doesn’t always make him the easiest to talk with. But that flighty brain of his is what makes us laugh and grumble in turns, what keeps him so youthful on the eve of his 70th birthday.

Much of his life has been about beauty and the creation of that beauty through his eyes. From his early thirties, he was a successful computer illustrator, one of the first to do it. However, after a few heavy hits from a recession in 1990, jobs became harder for him to find. Slowly, as the 2000s moved on and the illustrations became more seldom, he found success making T-shirts for Bay Area sports teams, selling them at markets around the bay. Eventually, sports leagues found out and forced him to stop. But, while that happened, he started to fall in love with plein-air painting, going out to do it often. And now, he’s back at markets, this time with landscapes of Marin and the bay at large, simple paintings with simple beauty.

His love of creation has meant that today, on the eve of his 70th birthday, he has reinvented himself once again. It’s incredible that he could do it even once. 

But that’s my dad, John Hersey. He can’t stop making things. He won’t stop, ever obsessed with the ways in which he can express or share an image with the world. And that obsession has passed onto myself, my love of writing, my quiet hobby of photography and drawing, even my obsession with surfing I owe to him and his singular focused nature when it comes to learning or becoming something new.

This year, my siblings, my dad, and I were going to go backpacking in the eastern Sierra for his birthday, but he got sick so he couldn’t come. What was to be a celebration of him became instead a peaceful time with each other, a nice reprieve from our lives and a moment to feel the fortune of having each other, even though we missed him up in the mountains. We didn’t find him pinecones. We found him a small rock, and I’m sure he’d enjoy it just as much as any good painting.

Happy Birthday Dad. See you tomorrow.

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Check out my dad’s art @johnherseyart here! I think it’s pretty good.