BECOMING A PAINTER: ANDY POYNER

Andy Poyner knew at a young age.

"When I first picked up a pencil or crayon I knew exactly what I was. Before any cultural influences or constraints were put on me. This was always what I was going to do."

In high school, he built himself a studio with a pot-bellied stove. It was on the other side of the barn on the family farm outside Joplin. Then Poyner was on to the Kansas City Art Institute and a peripatetic career as a commercial artist and illustrator.

His work took him to Boston, where he was a scientific illustrator at MIT, and to Austin, where he made posters for the famous bar called Armadillo World Headquarters. He spent time in Ireland, and in London he worked for Rolling Stone magazine. In California, he had a show with Zap Comics artists.

But it wasn't until he moved to Cape Girardeau more than a decade ago to be near his retired parents that Poyner decided to become a painter.

How does one become a painter? To begin with, Poyner learned the art of living with little money. And he immersed himself in the lives of the masters, so much so that he now quotes them effortlessly.

He began painting studies of artists he admired, mostly Spaniards such as Picasso and Goya and the Italian Caravaggio. Jimi Hendrix mastered the blues form "before he ventured off to Mars," Poyner says.

He had a flirtation with airbrushing, but says, "When I started doing oil paintings it started unfolding...

"Oil seems to me to be alive almost," he says. "It has a presence I've never found in anything else. And the great paintings I loved were in oil."

He painted, painted and painted.

"The more I did the more I realized the more I had to do," he said.

He views painting as a process he is part of. "Brahms took 10 years to write his first symphony. There are technical problems. It takes time to learn."

A Poyner still life may employ some techniques of the masters but they service his unique sensibility. His painting "Neighbors," for example, also could be titled "Cherries with lizard."

"Trio for 17th Century Artists" envisions Rembrandt on sax, Velasquez on violin and barefoot Caravaggio playing the piano in a trio.

After his father passed away, Poyner and his dog Hanna moved in with his mother Dale. The entire basement of the house is now his art studio. Most of the walls in the basement and the house are covered with his paintings. More are stacked along the walls, enough to fill a gallery.

Yet Poyner's paintings rarely have been seen.

Last year, he had his first Cape Girardeau show at Barnes & Noble. The event, which spotlighted his painter studies, was a watershed for him. "I thought, I have reached one level," he said. "It was a closure."

He is wary of commercialism, noting that popular culture flattens all different levels of talent into something that can be marketed. Paintings critics once praised are hardly noticed now.

"If the work is not any good it can crumble before your eyes," Poyner says.

So he is content to wait, to let his stock build.

Right now, he's more concerned about flooding. Under construction in the back yard is an unusual retaining wall. Poyner is molding faces into the surface, some with little smiles on them.

More concrete faces will be buried in the ground here and there, and still more faces sit atop small concrete spires. Like his paintings, all of this is hidden from public view.

"It will be my secret garden," he jokes.

He subscribes to Edgar Degas's view of painting: "One works for two or three friends who are alive and for others who are dead or unknown."

Poyner says Titian wrote letter in 90s saying he thought he was just getting the hang of it.

"I don't feel fully developed yet," Poyner says. "I don't think I ever will."