Ohrvel Carlson, Sketched Horrors Of War From Trenches, 95
DGH
Ohrvel Carlson, who was also a sculptor, a professional jazz and
classical violinist, a composer, and a poet, died August 22, 2006, of
prostate cancer at Addison Gilbert Hospital in Gloucester,
Massachusetts, at the age of 95.
"On the troop ship, en route to Omaha beach, I saw bodies floating in
the water. The beach was littered with wreckage and there was confusion
and traffic jams were inevitable as trucks and artillery rolled off the
assault boats. I sat on a truck and did a few sketches with my artist's
fountain pen."
So wrote Rockport artist Sven Ohrvel Carlson in "Odyssey," a memoir of
his service in the Army infantry during World War II.
Sketchbook and pen in hand, crouched in his bunk or at rest in bivouac,
he captured battle scenes and the faces of soldiers during his 3 1/2
years in the 28th Infantry Division. A collection of 100 sketches was
published in a book last year.
"No matter where I went, I did that which comes naturally to me, which
meant 'to draw,'" Mr. Carlson wrote on the title page of "World War II
Soldier-Artist Sketch Book."
Six months ago, the Library of Congress wrote to Mr. Carlson requesting
his original sketchbooks for its archives, said Carol (Dickinson), Mr.
Carlson's wife of 52 years, and he granted the request in his will. A
copy of his book is also in the collection of The National World War II
Museum in New Orleans.
Besides battle scenes, his sketches show sites in France and England,
service clubs, London pubs, and Army hospitals -- where Mr. Carlson had
spent two months himself recovering from shrapnel wounds.
"Ohrvel was a Renaissance man," his wife said.
He was a "phenomenal man" and an ``inspiration to us all," said Trudy
Allen of Gloucester, former gallery director of the North Shore Art
Association.
"Ohrvel's artwork was all-encompassing, different mediums, different
types, representational and abstract," she said. "He was right in the
trenches when he did his sketchbooks."
Ann Fisk of Rockport, former director of the Rockport Art Association,
described Mr. Carlson's sketchbook as ``a firsthand report through the
eyes of an artist of the horrors of war."
"In his sketchbook, he was able to put into just a few lines the body
language of individuals -- a soldier leaning at a bar, a medic
attending a wounded man," she said. "He got that feel in a simple line
and every part of that line is right."
He was "wonderful and imaginative," she said, "especially when he
painted to music."
Mr. Carlson often played music -- sometimes Mahler's compositions --
and interpreted on canvas how the music made him feel, she said. A
semi-abstract of a cathedral interior was one result, she said
Mr. Carlson, who preferred to be known by his middle name, was born in
West Orange, N.J., where his father worked for the Thomas A. Edison
factory.
"When I was 5," he wrote in his unpublished memoirs, "dad bought a
small watercolor set and one night at the kitchen table . . . he
painted a small picture of trees along the side of a pond with light,
shadow and reflections . . . on the water. To me, it was a miracle."
He also wrote of traveling the world as a young man, often on
freighters, sometimes stowing away and becoming a deckhand, sketching
and painting scenes and people to earn his keep.
Mr. Carlson graduated from West Orange High School the year the stock
market crashed, and made his first sea journey as a deckhand to the
Panama Canal.
"As a deckhand," he wrote, "I chipped paint and repainted rusty areas
of the ship. I also performed standing lookout on the bow of the ship
at night and reporting any lights I saw and their position by yelling
to the mate on the bridge."
After graduating from the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art, Mr.
Carlson worked for the Edison plant, designing waffle irons, sandwich
grills, and percolators, he said.
In the 1930s, when he was in his late teens, he returned to sea
"because there was no work for an inexperienced artist" he wrote, and
traveled to the Philippines, the Mediterranean, the Far East, and
Scandinavia.
>From 1935 to 1939, he worked for the Depression-era Works Project
Administration, doing murals on public buildings, and he studied at the
Art Students League of New York.
He joined the Army in 1942 and marched in the liberation of Paris
parade down the Champs-Elysees in 1944.
Back home from the war, Mr. Carlson set up a studio and started
teaching at colleges and privately. Around this time, he met his future
wife, who was one of his students. His work appeared in various
magazines, she said, and for several summers he ran an art school in
Lake Placid, New York.
In 1967, he moved his family to Rockport, where he taught, exhibited
widely, and played violin with the Cape Ann Symphony and with jazz
musicians.
He continued to paint and play his violin and walked six blocks every
day -- even on crutches -- until recently, his wife said.
And his interest in community and world affairs, often expressed in
letters to the editor of newspapers, was unabated.
One of his letters appeared in The Gloucester Times the day after his
death. "Monica Lewinsky, with Clinton's participation, put Bush in the
White House. God is tired of blessing us," it says.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Carlson leaves a daughter, Laurie of
Rockport, Massachusetts; a son, Scott of Sedona, Arizona, and two
grandchildren.
Boston Globe -- Gloria Negri