BIOGRAPHY & PHOTOS
William A. Parsons
( AKA William Persona )
Born: April 12th, 1903 in West Virginia
Died: April 30th, 1996 in Maui, Hawaii
Born to wander, now he’s fulfilled.
An Interview with William Persona
By BRIAN THORNTON
Staff Writer,
THE MAUI NEWS August 11-1983
William Persona’s had a life filled with experiences.
Now, he’s settling down.
William Persona has had many labels in his lifetime –
artist, circus clown, movie set designer, actor, mask and costume maker,
newspaper reporter-photographer-illustrator and art teacher.
But like a true renaissance man, the 80-year old Kihei resident
doesn’t fit simply into one category. That is, no one job identifies Persona,
who now calls himself just a common retiree.
But after listening to him describe some of his assorted careers
recently, I glimpsed a few of the traits of the grey-haired, stocky man who’s
assumed these many identities.
For one thing he’s clearly industrious.
“I’ve always been willing to work hard” he said during a recent
interview at his rambling one-story home in Maui Meadows.
Oil paintings seemed to be everywhere, stacked in corners and on
tables and hung on walls – proof of only a portion of Persona’s prodigious
productivity.
In total, Persona says he’s probably created about 4,000 oil
paintings – churning them out at an average rate of 200 a year over the last 20
years.
Persona wandered around the
living room as we talked.
When we discussed art, he plucked pictures off tables and chairs
and handed them to me, making a point about the different painting styles he’s
tried, from seascapes to portraits to caricatures.
“I don’t believe you get anything for free,” he said, when I asked
why he’s had so many jobs.
“As a result, I’ve never been too proud to do any kind of work to
make a living,” he said. “Anything to pay the rent. But whatever I did I
thought I was going to be the greatest at it in the whole world.
“ Like I figured I was going to be the world’s best actor. And I’ve
always loved art, so I thought I might be the next Picasso,” he said.
“I’m not proud of all the things I’ve done,” he said. “ But I’m not
going to deny I did them. My wife Josefina tells me not to mention half of
them, like factory worker, Chicago stockyard cleaner, bus boy, waiter, lunch
counter man, sign painter and usher. But these were all facets of my life.”
One of the largest components of that life, Persona admits, has been
his willingness to throw out an established way of living and pursue a new one.
“Change has never scared me. I’ve always been willing to take a
certain amount of risks. I like trying new things,” he said.
Persona said his introduction to change came when he was still a
teenager and was shipped away from his tranquil home in West Virginia to attend
school at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts.
His family wanted only the best training for the budding artist, who
from a very early age loved to paint and draw. But leaving home was still
upsetting.
Three months later Persona’s life was upset again when his father
died and his mother moved suddenly to Hollywood and took Persona along.
Persona then enrolled in the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles.
That lasted only nine months before Persona dropped out of school on an impulse,
got married and began to raise a family – even though he had no idea how he
would earn a living.
Fortunately he was able to land a job as an artist for two
newspapers, the weekly Hollywood Citizen News and daily Long Beach Telegram.
He also worked part-time in a wood mill. There he cut four fingers
off his right hand one day in a mishap with a saw.
But that didn’t really slow him down in his various jobs, he said,
“It just was a bit of a nuisance.” The biggest problem was learning to paint
with his mangled hand – which he did quickly.
Shortly after that, his marriage on the rocks, Persona decided to
see the world and shipped out to Australia on a tramp steamer.
“I’d always been intrigued by the romance of the Pacific,” he said.
“So I took off. I didn’t have a coin on me when I got off the ship. So the
first thing I did was walk up to an employment agency. They asked if I’d ever
been a waiter. I lied and said yes and got a job at a real fancy restaurant.
Of course I got fired right away because I got the orders mixed up.”
Undaunted, Persona said he marched into the offices of The Evening
News, one of Australia’s biggest newspapers, showed off some of his art work and
landed a job as an artist-illustrator.
That lasted several years. During that time Persona got married
again. But once more he moved on, leaving Australia when his second marriage
soured.
He returned to America in the 1930s, settling in Hollywood near his
mother. There he decided to pursue his own painting and art work. But when
painting sales slowed, Persona also worked as a self-described theatrical
sculptor. He said he was lucky to be in Hollywood at a time when the movie
industry was blossoming and a lot of work was available for someone with
artistic notions who could make props.
“I made sets, statues, masks, fancy headdresses, armor, whatever was
needed by all the various little theaters and playhouses as well as some of the
big movie studios,” Persona said. “ I made helmets and wild headgear for Olivia
DeHavilland and costumes for people like Mae West and Mickey Rooney, who was
just starting out in the business. I was very happy to get work in those days.
Times were hard.”
FDR mask
Sketches for Gorilla mask & suit.
Even with his costume making work, times were so hard for Persona
that he took a part-time job as an usher at the Sells Floto Travelling Circus.
From usher, he gradually worker up to clown.
“ Being a clown was pretty rough,” he said. “It was just a step up
from being a roustabout, who were considered the bottom of the barrel.”
“As clowns we slept in berths in sleeping cars, two fellows to a
berth, three berths on one aisle and three on another. That means we had 12
guys jammed into a seven foot long space. That got real bad when it rained and
the roof leaked and everybody’s blankets got wet.”
“The clowns also had to get up at 6am each day to help put up the
tents. In fact, they worked all day, and then we were supposed to perform and
be funny at night.”
Another thing that made the work unattractive was the close
proximity of the circus animals, including horses, lions and elephants, Persona
said.
“Everywhere you went there was the smell.” he said. But it wasn’t
just the smell that bothered Persona. The animals also left droppings in
walkways where the clowns traveled, making it difficult for novice clown Persona
to keep his uniform clean.
The food served under the Big Top was also pretty bad and the wages
very low.
After a year, Persona quit circus work. But he did retain a love of the clown
face and has painted hundreds of pictures of clowns.
He also retained a memory of how to apply clown greasepaint and
regularly slapped it on when he became an art teacher years later and needed a
clown model for his students to draw.
After working unhappily as a circus clown, Persona decided for no
particular reason to try life in the big city of Chicago for a while. He landed
a job as a part-time reporter-legman for the Chicago City News Service.
“We used to have an expense account, a pocket full of nickels,”
Persona said. “With that we were supposed to walk around the city and look for
news and call in every half hour to the rewrite desk. This was the time of Al
Capone.
“One day I went down to the police station in Cicero and asked the
captain if anything was going on. He said all was quiet.”
“I phoned in and told my editor that. He screamed that ‘Every other
paper in town has a story about six guys found shot to death in a car and you
tell me nothing’s going on.’ I realized than that I probably wasn’t cut out to
be a reporter,” Persona said.
Persona decided to go back to Hollywood and reestablish his set
making business full time, only occasionally taking time out to try community
theater acting and directing and sometimes art teaching.
“Hollywood was a wild and glamorous place in those times ( the 1930s
and 40s ) ,” Persona said. “Everything was hushed up about the private lives of
the stars. A lot of them were incredibly talented, like Stan Laurel, who could
bring tears to your eyes, and Charlie Claplin. “I never got to be palsy-walsy
with any of them. But I saw them around the lot. They all treated me like I
was an equal, because that was the secret of getting ahead – it was politics,
you treated everyone like they were great and then they liked you.”
“One time I was working on a set and Joan Blondell came by and waved
at me and said hello like I was her best buddy. I don’t think she could place
my face for the world. But she was very friendly.”
Persona says Hollywood at the time “ was a lot like modern Hawaii.
It was a glamorous and exciting place with a lot of the so-called beautiful
people around, and it was climatically ideal. People were investing money in
land like crazy. You could buy a house for $12,000 and turn around and sell it
a couple years later for double that.”
Eventually Persona said he tired of Hollywood and decided to retire
here ( Maui ) 11 years ago.
“I always loved the tropics, so I came out here to look around and
then decided to stay. I like Maui the best,” he said.
At 80, however, Persona still hasn’t given up his willingness to try
new things.
Although he is officially retired now and living off social
security, he still works hard each day, trying to teach himself how to become a
writer – sitting down with a pencil and paper and laboring hours over his
autobiography.
“I’m really putting some work into this book,” he said. “I don’t
know if it will be any good. But I am going to try and put it together and see
if people will be interested. I’ve always got to have some kind of new project
to work on to be happy.”
Text & photos contributed by: Pam McCollough ( Grand-daughter of William A. Parsons )
Living in Mexico....his early work consisted of Mexican subject matter.
In his Studio with " Red "
Wife Josefina
In 1920, after a short sojourn in the
Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and the Otis Art School
of Los Angeles, a teenage William Persona became a full fledged
family man and artist.
He was the first artist employed by the Hollywood Citizen and the Long
Beach
Telegram. At 21, the marriage dissolved, he went to Australia where he was
a junior
member of the arts staff of several cosmopolitan dailies. Meanwhile he had
married a ballet
dancer and worked at different phases of theatre from scenery to acting.
Back in Hollywood in 1930 he
became a freelance theatrical sculptor making statues, masks,
headdresses, and armor; used by Rooney, Rathbone, de Havilland, Miranda, West
and all. He spent
months with 34 helpers to detail the greatest outdoor set for Max Reinhardt’s
“Faust”.
There followed domestic and job upheavals even to teaching art in Mexican
schools. There he
espoused Liberia Maria Josefina Diaz Pinon Soto, the fifth and most
durable. North of the border in 1950
she went to work and demanded that he turn his back on bastard arts and paint. (
more inside brochure )
WILLIAM PERSONA’S first paintings were Mexican
subjects and sold to Mexicans, including:
The Museo (museum) de Caborea in Sonora,
Liceciado (lawyer) Oswaldo Schen (collector) Mex. City
Lic. Braulio Maldonado, ex-governor of Baja, Calif.
Lic. Gonzales Dupree, head Mex. Tourist Bureau, L.A.
In the professions, doctors have proven to be the most constant purchasers:
Norman E. Mann, DDS
George S. Farras, obstetrician
Lyle S. Powell, eye surgeon
all three of San Diego are noted, each is a
collector of internationally know art.
He has never tried the common
expedient of hanging his prestige on an exalted price.
Some buy their first painting from him and keep coming back until their entire
collection
is from the one artist, true of:
Richard A. Cordle, Downey, CA and
Richard E. Nichols, Mayor of San Gabriel
Persona was with the “ Sells
Floto Circus”and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West as a clown the
1926 season and paints clowns in a color-splashed manner with enough vulgarity
to class them as
Contemporary art. A sad tramp clown tearfully reading the Wall Street Journal
has appealed
to every investment broker that has ever seen it forcing him to repeat
variations on the theme for:
M.H. Deckard Investment, Santa Ana
Gauntlett and Co., Pasadena
Paul White, of Vance, Sanders & Co., L.A.
R.J. Kolkoski of Shearson Hammill, Phoenix
Galleries that have displayed his work:
Desert Art Center, Palm Springs
B-Q Co.,3920 E. 4th St., Long Beach
Saul Wolfe Gallery, 322 N. La Cienega, L.A.
Our Gallery, 11645 Wilshire, L.A.
Buck Saunders, Scottsdale, Arizona
Verhoff Galleries, Washington D.C.
Newman Galleries, Philadelphia
A list of Foreign buyers
would punctuate a map to Timbuktu and beyond, including:
M.E. Hartnett, Manager of Calgary Stampede
Marie Van de Velde, Bruges, Belgium
Fred Stevens, ex-mayor, Aukland, New Zealand.
To view actual
photos of these biographies click here.
Contributed by Brian Newnan
Information on the back
of many of his paintings:
"Persona attended Chicago Academy of Fine Arts & Otis Art
School of Los Angeles.
He was first employed by the Hollywood Citizen and by the Long Beach
Telegram.
He was on the staff of large Sydney dailies and weeklies. He taught art in
Mexico public schools.
Persona had innumerable One Man Shows.
His 4,000+ purchasers include Governors, Museums, Professionals &
Celebrities."
PAST STUDIO ADDRESSES:
Laguna Studio:
950 Glenneyre Street
Laguna Beach, CA 92651
Maui Studio:
3506 Akala Drive
Kihei, Hawaii 96753
** The images displayed within this web site
cannot be used for commercial purposes without the express permission
of the owners of the individual artworks.
